Privacy Policy

PowerCut does not require account registration, and we never ask for your name, email address, or phone number to use any feature. What we collect depends on what you do:

• Outage reports — the PIN code you enter, plus any optional area/locality text and description you choose to add.
• Neighborhood comments — the message you write and an optional display name you make up yourself; no identity verification is performed or possible.
• Basic technical data — your IP address is processed transiently by our server and hosting infrastructure to serve requests and prevent abuse, as described in Section 5.

We do not intentionally collect sensitive personal data, and there is nothing in the Service that requests it.

We use the information above to:

• Display outage reports, status pages, statistics, and the live outage map.
• Calculate derived figures like Area Power Scores and 90-day outage trends.
• Rate-limit repeat submissions from the same device to reduce spam.
• Detect abuse or misuse of the reporting and comment features.
• Maintain the security and reliability of the Service.

PowerCut does not request or use your device's GPS location. Map positions are derived entirely from the PIN code you search or report — we geocode a pincode's approximate coordinates server-side using a public geocoding service, never your device's actual location.

Map tiles themselves are loaded directly by your browser from OpenStreetMap's tile servers, which means your IP address is visible to OpenStreetMap when a map is displayed, under OpenStreetMap Foundation's own privacy policy, not ours.

We do not use tracking cookies, and there is no analytics or advertising script running on this site. The only thing we store in your browser is a text-size preference (if you use the accessibility toolbar's A-/A/A+ control), saved via your browser's local storage. It never leaves your device and is not readable by us.

When you submit a report or comment, it is published immediately and visible to anyone browsing that pincode's page — please don't include information you don't want public. To prevent spam, we store a one-way cryptographic hash (SHA-256) of the submitting device's IP address alongside each report, used solely to enforce a 10-minute rate limit per pincode. This hash cannot be reversed to recover the original IP address. Comments are rate-limited the same way, but no IP hash is permanently stored against a comment — only a temporary, in-memory counter that clears automatically.

We do not sell personal data, and we do not share individual reports or comments with advertisers. We do rely on infrastructure providers to run the Service (see Section 11), and we may disclose information if required by law or to protect the security of the Service, its users, or the public.

Reports and comments are retained indefinitely, since historical data is what powers each area's Area Power Score and 90-day outage trend. Because reports aren't tied to any account or identity, there's no personal profile to delete — the retained data is the report content itself (pincode, area, description, timestamps), not information that identifies who submitted it.

We use reasonable technical safeguards — including rate limiting, input validation, and hashed IP storage — to protect the Service. However, no method of transmission over the internet or electronic storage is completely secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security.

Because reporting and commenting don't require an account or collect identifying information, there is no personal profile for us to show, correct, or delete on request — the report content itself isn't linked back to you in any way we can reverse. You can still control what you submit: don't include anything in an area, description, or comment that you don't want public, and you can clear your saved text-size preference at any time by clearing your browser's local storage.

PowerCut is not directed at children and is not designed to collect personal information from anyone. Since no account or identifying data is required to use the Service, we do not knowingly collect personal data from children.

The Service relies on the following third-party infrastructure to operate:

• MongoDB Atlas — hosts the database of reports and comments.
• India Post's public PIN code API — used to look up locality names for a PIN code; no personal data is sent to it.
• OpenStreetMap / Nominatim — used for map tiles and pincode-to-coordinate geocoding, as described in Section 3.

These providers process data under their own privacy policies, which we encourage you to review separately.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we'll revise the effective date above. Continued use of the Service after a change means you accept the updated policy.

Questions, concerns, or requests related to this Privacy Policy or our data practices can be sent through the Contact page. Since the Service doesn't use accounts, there's no personal profile to look up — an email address is only needed if you'd like a reply. The FAQ page also answers most common questions about how the Service works.