Privacy Notice

Last updated 23 October 2026.

zetoask.com is in early preview. This notice describes what the software does today. Where a feature is not switched on, we say so, and we will update this notice (and ask you to accept it again) before we start using your data in a new way.

In short

You can browse the directory and use the chat without an account. An account (sign-in with an emailed one-time code) is needed to send an enquiry, report a listing or list a business.
We store your email address only as a keyed one-way hash. The sign-in code email is sent once through an email provider (Resend); we do not keep a readable copy of your address.
Chat messages go to an AI model provider. To understand your request and write a reply, the text you type in the chat is sent to Groq, an AI model provider, over an OpenAI-compatible API. Please do not type sensitive personal details into the chat. What is sent and what is not.
We do not run advertising or third-party tracking, and we do not sell your data.
You can download your data, withdraw consent, raise a grievance and ask for erasure from Your account, or by writing to hostwhale@gmail.com.
This notice is written to follow India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act). It has not been certified or audited by anyone.

Who is responsible

zetoask.com (the website, the chat assistant and the business directory) decides why and how your personal data is processed, so it acts as the "Data Fiduciary" under the DPDP Act.

Operator legal name: to be added by the site owner

Contact and grievance email: hostwhale@gmail.com. We do not publish a telephone number or postal address on this page.

Notice version: 2026-10-v4. Everything in this notice applies to the pages linked from the footer of zetoask.com.

What we collect and why

We collect only what is needed for the purpose shown. "Until you erase" means until you ask us to erase your account (see Your rights).

Personal data, purpose and retention
Data	Why	Kept for
Email address you sign in with. After sign-in it is stored only as a keyed one-way hash.	Signing you in and keeping your account secure	Until you erase
One-time sign-in codes (stored as hashes) and sign-in session records	Security of your account	Codes: deleted 24 hours after they are created. Sessions: deleted 30 days after they expire (a session lasts 7 days).
Your consent records: which purpose, which notice version, granted or withdrawn, and when	Showing that you agreed, and honouring withdrawal	Kept as a record of consent (ids and times only, no other personal details)
Enquiries you send to a business, and the one reply contact (a phone number or an email address) you type into that enquiry. These are stored as plain text in our database, not encrypted at field level. They are shown only to that business. Your sign-in email is never shown to the business.	Passing your enquiry to the business you chose so it can reply	Until you erase
Reports you file about a listing	Keeping the directory trustworthy	Until you erase
Chat messages to the assistant. We keep only a short structured summary (such as place, dates and number of guests) for the current conversation. The message text is not stored by zetoask.com, but it is sent to our AI model provider (Groq) to produce the answer; see Who receives your data.	Answering you in the moment	About 30 minutes (pending actions about 10 minutes)
Business owners only: business details, public contact channels, and verification documents if document upload is available	Listing and verifying your business	Business details until you erase. Verification documents: deleted 90 days after the verification decision. Document upload is switched off at present, so none are held.
Anonymous usage counts: which public step was reached (for example a business page or enquiry form was opened, an enquiry was sent, a listing was published), the day, and which business it concerned. These are first-party counts. We do not store your IP address, browser or device details, account, name, email, phone, messages, sign-in codes or payment details with them, and we cannot tell whether two counts came from the same person. Requests that send Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track, and automated crawlers, are not counted.	Knowing whether the directory works, and fixing it where it does not	Up to 400 days (see the note under the table)
Searches that found no listing (demand counters): the day, a normalised place name (lower-cased letters only, at most 3 words, anything else is dropped), the listing category if one was chosen, and the kind of search (directory search or chat stay search). They are counters only. We do not store your IP address, browser or device details, account, session, or the text of your search or message with them, and we cannot tell whether two counts came from the same person. Requests that send Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track, and automated crawlers, are not counted.	Seeing which places and categories people look for that the directory does not cover yet	Up to 400 days, then deleted by the scheduled retention job
Abuse-protection counters, keyed by a short one-way hash of your network address (not the address itself)	Limiting spam and automated abuse	Short-lived counters (minutes to hours). They are not tied to your account.
Audit and security logs (ids and actions, no personal details)	Security, fraud prevention and legal compliance	Kept; our design target is 3 years, but automatic deletion is not built yet
Booking and payment records, once billing exists (it is not active today)	Legal and tax obligations	Our design target is 8 financial years; automatic deletion is not built yet. After erasure they keep no guest details.

We do not store card numbers, and no payment is taken on zetoask.com today. Optional marketing messages are off unless you turn them on in your account; zetoask.com does not send any today.

Honest note on automatic deletion. Deleting old codes, sessions, chat state, analytics counts, documents and erased accounts is done by a scheduled retention job in the software. That job is registered to run on the live deployment: it is triggered every 5 minutes and does its work at most once an hour. It was first observed running on 23 October 2026. It does not cover audit logs, consent records or financial records, and automatic deletion for those is not built yet (see the table above). If the job fails or the site is misconfigured, expired data can stay longer than the periods above until a later run succeeds.

Cookies and browser storage

Sign-in cookie nx_session: set only after you sign in. It is HttpOnly (page scripts cannot read it), Secure, SameSite=Strict, and lasts 7 days or until you sign out. It is needed for sign-in, so it cannot be switched off while you are signed in.
Chat history in sessionStorage: your recent chat titles are kept in your browser tab only and disappear when the tab is closed. They are not sent to us.
Install hint in localStorage: if you dismiss the "add to home screen" hint, a flag named zetoask.installHint.dismissed is stored on your device so we do not show it again. No personal data is in it.
Service worker cache: when you use the installable web app, your browser keeps copies of the public site shell (the home page, its styles and scripts, the offline page and the icon) so the app opens quickly and can show an offline page. Directory data, sign-in, account, owner and admin pages and API responses are never cached.
There are no advertising cookies, no third-party analytics scripts and no social-media tracking pixels.

Notice and consent. Before an account is created or you are signed in, you must tick the box confirming that you have read this notice. We record the notice version you accepted. Without it, sign-in does not complete.
Purposes. There are two: concierge service (required to use zetoask.com with an account) and marketing (optional; off by default; nothing is sent today).
Withdrawing consent. In Your account you can withdraw a consent at any time. Withdrawing the concierge-service consent signs you out everywhere and you are asked again at your next sign-in. Withdrawal does not undo processing already done, and stopping the required consent means you cannot use features that need an account.
New versions. If this notice changes in a way that matters, its version changes and you are asked to accept it again at your next sign-in. This version replaces the earlier draft (2026-10-v1).

Who receives your data

The business you enquire with receives only what you put in your enquiry and the reply contact you chose.
Cloudflare hosts zetoask.com, delivers its pages and stores its database. It processes data on our behalf and sees technical request information (such as your IP address) in order to deliver and protect the service. We have not restricted storage or processing to India, so data may be handled on Cloudflare's network outside India.
An AI model provider (Groq). The chat assistant sends your chat message to Groq, through its OpenAI-compatible API, so a language model can work out what you are asking and write a short reply. For each chat turn this is: the text you typed, the place, dates, number of guests and preferences the assistant has understood so far in this conversation, today's date, and, when it writes the reply, the matching listings' public details (business name, indicative price and its source, verification status, facilities and description). It is not sent your sign-in email address, your account or session identifiers, your IP address, or your enquiry or booking contact details. Chat does not need an account, and nothing you type in an enquiry form goes to the AI provider. Anything you type in the chat message itself is sent, so do not put personal or sensitive details in it. The AI provider processes it under its own terms and privacy policy, which we do not control, and we have not restricted that processing to India. zetoask.com does not store the message text, and the assistant's answer can be wrong (see the Disclaimer).
An email delivery provider (Resend) is used only to send you the sign-in code. For that one email, the address you sign in with is passed to Resend, together with the code message. zetoask.com does not use it to send enquiry notices or marketing. Sign-in email delivery is still being set up, so a sign-in code may not reach you yet.
Authorities. We may disclose data where the law requires it.
Not in use today: no payment provider, WhatsApp service or analytics vendor is active. If we connect any of them, we will name it here and ask you to accept the new version before it touches your data.
We do not sell your data and we do not share it for advertising.

How long we keep it

The table above shows the period for each kind of data. What the software enforces when the retention job runs: sign-in codes 24 hours after creation; sessions 30 days after expiry; chat state when it expires (about 30 or 10 minutes); verification documents 90 days after the decision; analytics counts and demand counters after 400 days; erased accounts after the waiting period described below. Audit logs, consent records and financial records are not deleted automatically yet; they hold identifiers rather than your contact details. See the note under the table about the scheduled job and what it does not cover.

Your rights

Under the DPDP Act you can ask us to:

Access and export: see and download the data we hold about you (account, consents, requests, enquiries you sent, reports you filed, businesses you own) from Your account.
Correct or update your data, or raise a grievance, from Your account or by email.
Withdraw consent, as described above.
Erase your account. Erasure starts a 7-day waiting period in which you can cancel. After that your personal data is removed from our systems, except records the law requires us to keep, which are kept without your personal details. Erasure is blocked for administrator accounts and for owners of a business with a live paid subscription until that is resolved.
Nominate another person to exercise your rights if you die or become unable to: there is no self-service form yet; write to us at hostwhale@gmail.com.

We aim to respond to requests within 30 days (our internal target; we have not yet had a lawyer confirm the legal period). We may need to check that a request really comes from you.

Children

zetoask.com is meant for people aged 18 or over. It has no verified parental-consent process, so please do not create an account if you are under 18. If you believe a child has signed in, write to us and we will erase the account.

Security

Pages and the API are served over HTTPS. Email addresses are stored as keyed hashes, sign-in codes as hashes, and the sign-in cookie is HttpOnly. Access to other users' data is restricted by account. No system is perfectly secure. If a personal data breach affects you, we will tell you and the authorities as the law requires. Enquiry text and reply contacts are stored unencrypted at field level, as stated above.

Grievance officer and complaints

To raise a privacy concern, exercise a right or complain, write to hostwhale@gmail.com with the subject "Grievance". The Grievance Officer's name will be added with the operator's legal name (see Who is responsible); until then this address reaches the operator directly. We aim to reply within 30 days. If we have not resolved your complaint you may complain to the Data Protection Board of India as the law provides.

IT Act intermediary notice

The business directory contains information supplied by businesses and enquiry and report text supplied by users. zetoask.com acts as an intermediary under the Information Technology Act, 2000 for that content. We do not create it, and we act on it when we are told of a problem. To report unlawful, misleading or infringing content, or a listing you believe is false, use the report option on the listing if it is shown, or email hostwhale@gmail.com with the page address and what is wrong. We review reports and may unpublish or suspend a listing. See also the Terms of Use and the Disclaimer.

Listings created from open data. Some listings are created by zetoask.com staff from licensed open data (OpenStreetMap, under the Open Database Licence) rather than by the business. They show only what the source gives about the business, they are labelled "Unverified – the owner hasn't claimed this listing", they credit the source, and a business owner can ask to claim or correct the listing. Phone numbers, email addresses and websites from such sources are stored but not shown publicly. zetoask.com does not contact those businesses automatically, and an enquiry cannot be sent to an unclaimed listing. The AI does not write listing facts.

Changes to this notice

When the notice changes in a way that matters, the version number and the "last updated" date change and you are asked to accept it again at your next sign-in. Version 2026-10-v4 (23 October 2026) replaces 2026-10-v3 of the same day. It says that chat messages are now sent to an AI model provider (Groq) and what is sent; that Resend is the email provider for sign-in codes; that searches that find nothing are counted as anonymous demand counters kept up to 400 days; and that some listings are created from licensed open data and labelled unclaimed. It keeps saying that automatic deletion of audit and financial records is not built. Version 2026-10-v3 said the retention job is registered on the live deployment. Version 2026-10-v2 had replaced the earlier draft and removed its placeholders.