Privacy & Terms

ZeroPix (“ZeroPix”, “we”, “us”) runs the photography social network at zeropix.in (the “Service”). We operate from India.

Depending on where you live, we act as the “data controller” under the EU and UK GDPR, the “Data Fiduciary” under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (the “DPDP Act”), and the “business” under the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended (CCPA/CPRA) and similar US state laws.

For any privacy question or request, write to privacy@zeropix.in. Other ways to reach us are in How to reach us.

We collect information you give us, information created as you use the Service, and basic technical information from your device and browser.

What we don’t collect

• Your device’s location. The location on posts and profiles is text you type; we don’t read GPS from your device or from your photos.
• Your contacts or address book, or access to your camera roll beyond the photos you choose to upload.
• Face-recognition or other biometric data, government ID numbers, or payment details.

Photos can reveal sensitive things about the people in them. Please only post images you’re entitled to share, and see the Community rules.

We use personal information only for the purposes below. Where the GDPR or UK GDPR applies, the legal basis is shown alongside.

Under the DPDP Act, we process personal data based on your consent, given when you create an account and provide information, and for the “legitimate uses” the Act recognises, such as complying with the law.

What we don’t do

• We don’t sell your personal information or use it for advertising.
• We don’t use your photos or messages to train machine-learning models.
• We don’t build interest profiles about you or rank your feed by engagement.
• We don’t combine your information with data bought from third parties.

Public

Your profile (username, display name, profile photo, bio, location, website, verified status, and your followers and following) and everything you post (photos, captions, alt text, location text, camera details, hashtags, collaborators, comments and likes) are public. Anyone can see them, including people without an account.

Because public content is open to the web, it can be found by search engines and copied by others. Deleting something from ZeroPix doesn’t remove copies people or search engines have already made.

Private to you

Your email, phone number, date of birth and gender; your saved posts; hidden posts; blocks and mutes; notification and privacy settings; saved logins; and your insights are visible only to you (and to staff where needed to operate the Service, as described below).

Messages

Messages are visible to the people in the conversation. They are not end-to-end encrypted: they are stored on our servers in readable form. Our staff do not browse conversations. A conversation may be opened only by senior staff when it has been reported, or where needed to investigate serious abuse or comply with law, and each such access is recorded in an audit log.

You can delete a message for everyone within 30 minutes of sending it. Deleting a chat later removes it from your view only; the other person keeps their copy unless they delete it too.

We don’t sell personal information and we don’t “share” it for cross-context behavioural advertising (as those terms are used in California law). We disclose information only in these situations:

• Publicly and to other users, as described above — for example people you mention or tag will see that post.
• Service providers who help us run the Service under contract: our hosting and infrastructure provider, and our mail server for service emails. Your browser also loads fonts from Google Fonts and icons from the jsDelivr network; those providers receive your IP address and browser details when your browser makes the request.
• Legal and safety reasons. Where required by law or valid legal process (for example under India’s Information Technology Act, 2000 and rules made under it), to report child sexual abuse material to the authorities, or to protect the rights, safety and property of our users, the public or ourselves. Where permitted, we’ll tell you first.
• Business changes. If ZeroPix is merged, acquired or sold, information may transfer to the successor, which must honour this policy or give you notice and a choice.
• With your direction or consent.

We may also publish or share aggregated, de-identified statistics that can’t reasonably identify you.

We use a small number of cookies and browser storage items. All are essential to the Service or to a preference you set.

We don’t use advertising, analytics or cross-site tracking cookies, so there is nothing to opt out of and we don’t show a cookie banner. If that ever changes, we’ll ask for your consent first where the law requires it. You can block or delete cookies in your browser, but the Service won’t work without the session cookie.

ZeroPix is operated from India, and your information is processed on servers we or our hosting provider control. If you use the Service from another country, your information will be transferred to and processed in India and other countries where our providers operate, which may have different data-protection laws from yours.

Where the law requires a transfer mechanism — for example for information leaving the EEA or UK — we use an approved one, such as the Standard Contractual Clauses, or rely on your explicit consent. The DPDP Act permits transfers outside India except to countries the Government of India has restricted.

We may keep information longer where we’re legally required to, or where it’s needed for a pending legal claim or investigation.

Tools in the app

You can do much of this yourself. In Settings you can edit your profile and contact details, decide who can mention, tag or message you, manage blocked accounts and saved logins, and deactivate your account. You can delete your own posts, comments, messages and chats, download a copy of any chat you’re in, and export the insights for your posts.

Rights we extend to everyone

Whatever your location, you can ask us to: access the personal information we hold about you and get a copy; correct or complete it; delete it; restrict or object to certain uses; withdraw consent you gave (this doesn’t affect what we did before); and receive your information in a portable format.

European Economic Area and United Kingdom

You have the rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and objection under the GDPR/UK GDPR, the right to withdraw consent, and the right not to be subject to decisions based solely on automated processing that significantly affect you (we don’t make any). You may complain to your local supervisory authority, such as the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK.

India

Under the DPDP Act you may obtain a summary of the personal data we process and to whom it’s disclosed, ask us to correct, complete, update or erase it, use our grievance process, and nominate another person to exercise these rights if you die or become unable to. If you’re unsatisfied after using our grievance process, you may complain to the Data Protection Board of India.

California and other US states

You may ask to know, access, correct or delete your personal information, and to have it in a portable format. We don’t sell or share personal information (as defined by the CCPA/CPRA), so there is no opt-out to exercise, and we don’t use or disclose sensitive personal information to infer characteristics about you. We won’t discriminate against you for exercising your rights. In the past 12 months we collected identifiers, account and profile information, user-generated content (including photos), internet and network activity, and location only as text you typed yourself. You can use an authorised agent, and if we refuse a request you may appeal by replying to our decision.

Elsewhere

If your local law (for example Brazil’s LGPD, Canada’s PIPEDA or Australia’s Privacy Act) gives you further rights, we’ll honour them.

How to make a request

Email privacy@zeropix.in from the address on your account, or use the tools above. We may ask you to confirm it’s you — for example by replying from your registered email — and won’t ask for more than we need to do that. We reply within 30 days. If a request is complex we may extend that as the law allows, and we’ll tell you why. There’s no charge unless a request is clearly unfounded or excessive.

Account deletion: you can deactivate your account yourself, and can ask us to delete it permanently at the address above. We remove your profile, posts, photo files, comments and other content from our live systems, subject to the retention notes above.

ZeroPix is for people aged 13 and over. We don’t knowingly collect personal information from anyone younger than 13. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, tell us at privacy@zeropix.in and we’ll delete it.

Some countries set a higher age. Where the age of digital consent in your country is above 13 (for example 16 in parts of the EU), or where you’re under 18 (India’s DPDP Act treats anyone under 18 as a child), you may use the Service only with the permission of a parent or legal guardian, who is bound by these documents on your behalf. We don’t show advertising, track children’s behaviour for advertising, or build profiles of them.

Parents and guardians can contact us at privacy@zeropix.in to review, correct or delete a child’s information.

We use measures suited to the risks, including:

• Encryption in transit (HTTPS with HTTP Strict Transport Security) and Secure, HttpOnly, SameSite session cookies.
• Salted one-way password hashing, and hashed one-time codes and saved-login secrets.
• Protection against cross-site request forgery, and sign-in rate limiting with temporary lockouts.
• Role-based staff access, re-authentication for sensitive administrative actions, and audit logs of staff actions.
• Restrictions on what uploaded files can be and how they’re served, plus hardened response headers.

No online service is perfectly secure. Use a strong, unique password, and sign out on shared devices.

If something goes wrong. If a personal-data breach is likely to put you at risk, we’ll notify you and the regulators within the time limits that apply — for example, EU/UK supervisory authorities within 72 hours where the GDPR applies, and CERT-In and the Data Protection Board of India where Indian law requires.

Some things are decided automatically, and none of them has a legal or similarly significant effect on you on its own:

• Content filters. When you post or set a name, we check the text against rules for disallowed language, sexual content, illegal activity and spam. If something is blocked, you’ll be told. If you think it was a mistake, contact us.
• Flood and duplicate limits slow down accounts that post or message in bursts.
• Feed and suggestions. Your home feed is the posts of people you follow, newest first, with some discovery posts mixed in. Discovery, Explore and “suggested” people are chosen from recent, sufficiently high-quality posts and recently active accounts, excluding accounts you follow, block or mute and posts you’ve hidden or already viewed. They are not chosen by profiling your interests.

Decisions to suspend or remove an account are made by people.

The Service can link to other websites and shows previews of links people share. We don’t control those sites, and this policy doesn’t cover them. To build a preview, our server requests the linked page, so the site you link to may see a request from our server — not from you. Please read the privacy policy of any site you visit.

We may update this policy. We’ll change the “last updated” date and version above and record the change in the version history. For material changes, we’ll give you notice in advance, by email or in the app, and where the law requires it we’ll ask for your consent again.

To use the Service you must:

• be at least 13 years old, or older if the law where you live sets a higher minimum age for using online services without a parent’s consent;
• if you are under 18 (or the age of majority where you live), have a parent or legal guardian’s permission, and they must agree to these documents on your behalf;
• be able to form a binding contract with us, and not be barred from using the Service under any applicable law; and
• not have been permanently removed from the Service previously, unless we’ve told you in writing that you may return.

• You create an account with a valid email address that you can access. Give accurate information and keep your contact details up to date.
• You are responsible for your password and for everything done through your account. Tell us promptly at legal@zeropix.in if you think it’s been misused.
• Your username must not impersonate another person or organisation, or mislead people about who you are. We may change or reclaim usernames that do.
• You may save several accounts on one browser, but you may not use extra accounts to get around a suspension, a block, or any other action we’ve taken.
• Don’t sell, rent or transfer your account.

You own your content. Your photos, captions, comments and messages (“Your Content”) remain yours, including the copyright in your photographs. Viewing a photo on ZeroPix gives nobody else a licence to copy or reuse it — they need your permission.

What you give us. To run the Service, you give us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, resize and re-encode (for example to create thumbnails), display and distribute Your Content through the Service — including showing public posts to people who aren’t signed in, surfacing them in Explore, hashtag pages and suggestions, and delivering messages to the people you send them to. We may sublicense this only to providers who help us run the Service, and only for that purpose.

What we promise not to do. We won’t sell Your Content, license it to third parties, use it in advertising, or use it to train machine-learning models.

When the licence ends. It ends when you delete the content or your account, except for copies in backups until they’re overwritten, information we must keep for legal or safety reasons, and content that other people have already received (for example a message delivered to someone who hasn’t deleted it).

Your responsibility. You confirm that you own Your Content or have every permission you need to post it — including from people who appear in it and owners of anything it shows where required — and that it doesn’t infringe anyone’s rights or break the law. Only tag people as collaborators if they actually collaborated; tagged people can remove themselves. Because posts are public, you also accept that others may view them and take screenshots, which we can’t prevent.

Feedback. If you send us ideas or suggestions, we may use them without owing you anything.

ZeroPix is a community for photographers of all ages. When you use it, you agree not to:

• Post nudity or sexual content. This applies to posts, comments, profiles and messages. We have zero tolerance for any sexual content involving minors; we remove it, and report it to the authorities.
• Post violent or dangerous content, including graphic violence, threats, or content that promotes or instructs harm to people or animals.
• Harass or hate. No bullying, stalking, doxxing, or repeated unwanted contact, and no attacks on people because of race, ethnicity, nationality, caste, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability or similar characteristics.
• Promote self-harm or suicide. If you or someone else is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services.
• Deceive. No impersonation, fake identities, or fabricated or manipulated images used to mislead people about real people or events, and no fake engagement.
• Spam or scam. No unsolicited bulk messages, phishing, pyramid or fraudulent schemes, or repetitive promotion. You may share your own photography and business, but not flood people with it.
• Infringe rights. Only post what you have the right to post. Don’t copy other people’s work.
• Violate privacy. Don’t share other people’s private information or intimate images without their consent. We take reports about photos of identifiable people seriously and may remove content that harms someone’s privacy, safety or dignity.
• Break the law or promote illegal goods, services or activities.
• Misuse the Service. No hacking, probing or bypassing security or limits; no malware; no accessing accounts or data that aren’t yours; no scraping, crawling or automated collection without our written permission; no overloading our systems. If you find a security problem, please tell us at legal@zeropix.in before disclosing it.
• Abuse verification. Don’t buy, sell, fake or imitate a blue tick.

Anyone can report a post, profile or message from the app, and follow the report’s status under Reports. Reports are reviewed by our moderators. Some content is also blocked automatically when you try to post it (see Automated systems).

If content or conduct breaks these Terms or the law, we may, at our discretion and depending on severity and history: remove content; limit features; suspend an account for a set time (1, 3, 7 or 30 days) or until we lift it; or terminate it. A suspended account is hidden from other users, and the reason we give is shown when the person tries to sign in. We may act without warning for illegal content, safety risks, or where the law or a legal order requires.

Appeals. If you think we got it wrong, email legal@zeropix.in within 30 days with your username and an explanation. Where practical, someone who wasn’t involved in the original decision will review it.

Annual reminder. At least once a year we’ll remind you of these rules and that breaking them may lead to content being removed or your access being suspended or ended.

We respect intellectual-property rights and expect our users to. Our process follows the notice-and-takedown approach used under India’s Copyright Act, 1957 and comparable laws such as the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. You can start a complaint with the “Intellectual property” option when you report a post, or by emailing legal@zeropix.in with:

1. your name and contact details, and the rights owner’s name if you’re acting for them;
2. a description of the work you say has been infringed;
3. the web address of the content on ZeroPix;
4. a statement that you believe in good faith the use isn’t authorised by the owner, its agent or the law;
5. a statement that the information in your notice is accurate and that you’re the owner or authorised to act for them; and
6. your physical or electronic signature.

We’ll act on complete notices promptly and tell the person who posted the content. They may send a counter-notice explaining why they believe the removal was a mistake, which we’ll pass to you. We may restore the content unless you tell us you’ve begun legal action. We’ll end the accounts of people who repeatedly infringe. Knowingly making a false claim can have legal consequences.

The blue tick shows that our team has reviewed an account and considers it the genuine profile of the photographer, creator, brand or public figure it represents. It is free and can’t be bought.

• Eligibility requirements (such as account age, number of posts and followers, and profile completeness) are shown in Settings, and we may change them.
• Meeting them doesn’t guarantee approval. Reviews are discretionary. If an application is declined you’ll be told why and can re-apply after a waiting period.
• A blue tick isn’t an endorsement of the person or their content, and doesn’t exempt anyone from these Terms.
• Changing your display name or username removes the tick, because it vouches for a specific identity. We may remove it at any time if it was given in error or is misused.

Messages let you talk to other members. You control who can message you in Settings, and messages from people you don’t follow may arrive as requests you can accept or decline. You can block or mute anyone.

The rules in Community rules apply to messages. Messages are private to the participants, but they aren’t end-to-end encrypted, recipients can copy or share them, and we may access a reported conversation as described in the Privacy Policy. Don’t send anything through the Service that you need to keep strictly confidential.

The Service is free to use today. If we introduce paid features, we’ll explain the price and terms before you’re charged anything.

We work to keep ZeroPix available, but we don’t promise it will always be uninterrupted or error-free. We may change, add, limit or remove features, set or adjust limits (such as file sizes, photos per post, message length or usage rates), perform maintenance, or discontinue all or part of the Service. Where a change materially reduces what you can do, we’ll give reasonable notice unless it isn’t practical.

The Service may link to or preview third-party websites and services. We don’t control or endorse them and aren’t responsible for their content, availability or practices. Your dealings with them are governed by their own terms.

The Service — its software, design, text, graphics, logo and the name “ZeroPix” — belongs to us or our licensors and is protected by law. It doesn’t include Your Content or other users’ content. We give you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use the Service as intended, under these Terms. Don’t copy, modify, reverse engineer or resell it, and don’t use our name or logo without permission, except to refer to us accurately.

You can leave any time. Deactivate your account in Settings (signing in again reactivates it), or email privacy@zeropix.in to ask for permanent deletion. See the retention section for what happens to your information.

We may suspend or end your access if you breach these Terms or the law, if we must to comply with legal requirements, if your use creates risk or harm for others or for us, or if we discontinue the Service. We’ll normally tell you why, unless the law or safety prevents it.

When your access ends, your licence to use the Service ends. Sections that by their nature should survive will survive, including those on Your Content, disclaimers, liability, indemnity and governing law.

To the extent the law allows, you’ll compensate us for losses, damages and reasonable costs from third-party claims arising from Your Content, your breach of these Terms, or your violation of another person’s rights or the law. This doesn’t apply where the law doesn’t permit it, and we’ll act reasonably in asking.

These Terms are governed by the laws of India, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. If you have a dispute with us, please first write to legal@zeropix.in and give us 30 days to resolve it. If it isn’t resolved, the courts located in West Bengal, India have exclusive jurisdiction.

If you use the Service as a consumer in the EU, the UK or another place with mandatory consumer-protection rules, those rules still apply to you, and you keep the right to bring proceedings in the courts of the country where you live.

We may update these Terms, for example to reflect new features or legal requirements. We’ll change the version and date above and record it in the version history. For material changes, we’ll notify you at least 14 days in advance by email or in the app, unless a change is needed sooner for legal or safety reasons. If you keep using the Service after the changes take effect, you accept them. If you don’t agree, stop using the Service and deactivate your account.

• Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between you and us about the Service.
• Severability. If a provision is unenforceable, the rest stays in effect.
• No waiver. If we don’t enforce something straight away, we haven’t given up the right to.
• Assignment. You may not transfer your rights under these Terms. We may transfer ours, for example in a merger or sale, and will tell you if we do.
• Events beyond our control. We aren’t liable for delays or failures caused by events we can’t reasonably control.
• Notices. We may give notice by email, in the app, or by posting on this page.
• Language. The English version governs if translations differ.
• Electronic record. These Terms are an electronic record under the Information Technology Act, 2000 and don’t need a physical or digital signature.