Privacy

We collect very little, and we would rather keep it that way.

This covers this website, the Kodava Takk translator and dictionary, and the arivāme app. It is written to be read, not to be survived.

The short version

You can use the translator, the dictionary and almost all of arivāme without an account, and without telling us who you are.
We sell nothing, and we share nothing with advertisers. There is no advertising network anywhere in any of this.
This website sets no cookies and runs no analytics or tracking scripts of any kind.
If you do sign in, it is Google sign-in, and what we keep is your name, email address and profile picture.
You can delete your account and everything attached to it from inside the app, without writing to us first.

The rest of this page is the same thing said precisely.

This website

kodavame.com barely knows you were here.

This site is a set of static pages. It has no database, no user accounts and no login. It sets no cookies of its own, and it loads no analytics, advertising or tracking scripts — not Google Analytics, not a pixel, not a heatmap. Nothing on it is trying to work out who you are.

Server logs

The site is hosted on Vercel, which records ordinary web-server information when a page is requested: IP address, time, the page asked for, and browser user-agent. This is standard hosting infrastructure, is used to serve and secure the site, and is handled under Vercel’s own privacy terms. We do not build profiles from it and we do not connect it to anything else.

The contact form

If you write to us through the form on the contact page, it is delivered to us by a third-party form service, and we receive your name, email address, chosen topic and message. We use it to reply to you and for nothing else. Emailing info.kodavame@gmail.com directly reaches the same inbox and skips the form service entirely.

The apps

Kodava Takk, and arivāme.

Most of what these do happens without an account. Signing in is for the parts where your name has to be attached to something.

Using them signed out

Translating, searching the dictionary, reading the heritage library and browsing Creator’s Corner all work without an account. Text you translate is processed to return a translation and is not tied to an identity. Your settings and reading position are kept on your own device, not on our servers.

If you sign in

Sign-in is through Google, and Google passes us your name, email address and profile picture. We do not receive your Google password and we have no access to your Google account beyond those details.

If you post something

Creator’s Corner submissions, comments and likes are stored with your account so they can be shown with your name on them and so you can edit or remove them later. Submissions are reviewed before anyone else can see them. If you block someone, we store that too — it is the only way the block can be enforced in both directions.

Microphone and speech

The Speak feature records only while you hold the button, and spoken output is produced by your device’s own text-to-speech. We do not retain recordings.

Children

These are not products for young children and we do not knowingly collect anything from a child. If you believe a child has created an account, write to us and we will remove it.

Your data

Getting it back, or getting rid of it.

You can delete your account from inside arivāme — Menu → Profile → Delete my account. It removes your account and the content attached to it, and it does not require you to ask us first or wait for us to act. What that deletes, and what it does not, is set out in full.

You can also ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, by writing to info.kodavame@gmail.com. We will need to be reasonably sure you are who you say you are before we act on a request about someone’s account.

Two things survive a deletion, and we would rather say so than let you discover it: backups take a short while to rotate out, and where a moderation record has to be kept for the safety of someone else — a block, a report — it is kept in a form that no longer identifies you.

Who else touches it

We do not sell personal data and we do not share it for advertising. It is handled by the services that make the thing work — hosting and database providers, Google for sign-in, the form service for the contact page — and by nobody else, except where the law requires it of us.

Where it is handled

Most of the people using this are in India or the Kodava diaspora, and the services that run it are operated from the United States on infrastructure that may sit in either place or elsewhere. Using Kodavāme means your information may be processed outside the country you are in. We apply this policy to it wherever it is.

Contact

This policy is published by the Kodavāme project. Questions, complaints, or anything on this page that reads as untrue of what we actually do: write to info.kodavame@gmail.com and we will fix it or explain it.