Privacy Policy

1. Information we collect

• Location data. When you visit, we ask your browser for your location (with your permission) to route you to your city's leaderboard. If you decline or it's unavailable, we fall back to an approximate location derived from your IP address. If both fail, you can search for or type your city manually.
• IP address. Used for the IP-based location fallback above, and standard web server logging.
• Listing information you submit. If you list a business (free or paid), we store the link you provide, the category you choose, and — fetched automatically from that link's own public page — its title and icon, so your listing displays correctly.
• Payment information. Paid bids are processed entirely by Razorpay. We never see or store your card, UPI, or bank details — only a payment reference ID once Razorpay confirms your payment.
• Usage data. We keep aggregate counters — page visits per city per day, and views/clicks per listing — to show live stats on the site. These are counts, not individual visitor profiles.
• Session cookies. A session cookie keeps the site working correctly (e.g. security tokens, one-time success/error messages). We don't use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

2. How we use this information

• To route you to the right city and show its leaderboard.
• To rank listings by bid amount and payment time, as advertised.
• To process payments securely through Razorpay and confirm your rank.
• To display honest, live statistics (visits, listings, clicks) on the site.
• To detect and prevent abuse of the free-listing and bidding system.

3. Third parties we rely on

We use a small number of third-party services to operate the site:

• Razorpay — payment processing (India and international cards).
• OpenStreetMap Nominatim — converts your coordinates into a city name.
• ip-api.com — approximate location from IP address, used only as a fallback.
• Google Fonts and Google's favicon service — used to render text and listing icons.

When you submit a listing link, our server fetches that page's public title and icon to populate your listing — this is a one-time automated request, not ongoing tracking of that site.

4. Data retention

Listing and payment-reference data is kept for as long as your listing remains on the platform, or as required for accounting and fraud-prevention purposes. Aggregate visit/click counters are kept indefinitely as they don't identify individual visitors.

5. Your rights

You can ask us to remove a listing you submitted, or to tell you what data we hold about it, by contacting us at the email below. If you're in a jurisdiction with statutory data rights (such as India's DPDP Act, or the EU/UK GDPR), we'll honor applicable access, correction, and deletion requests.

6. Children's privacy

This site is not directed at children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect their data.

7. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the product evolves. Material changes will be reflected by updating the "Last updated" date above.

8. Contact

Questions about this policy, or requests about your data, can be sent to privacy@thebestin.city.