Privacy Policy
Chai Pe Date — what we keep, and who sees it. This is the whole of it. If something is not on this page, we do not do it.
Last updated 10 October 2026.
Signing in
Two ways, and you choose. Email: you type your address and we send a six-digit code that lasts ten minutes. We keep the address and a one-way hash of the code while it is valid — never the code itself, and never a password, because there is none. Google: Google gives us your email address, your first name and your profile photo. Nothing else — no contacts, no calendar, no access to your account.
The name and the photo arrive in the profile form already filled in, where you can change either or take the photo off before you press Done. Nothing is kept until you do. A Google account is keyed on Google's internal identifier, not on the address, so changing your address does not fork you into two people and does not let anybody inherit your account later.
We keep two running numbers about the email door — codes sent and codes used — with no addresses attached, so we can tell whether the mail is arriving.
What you tell us
A first name, your age, a line about yourself if you want one, what you would talk about, your area if you know it, and — from your device's location — your city. That is the profile. We do not ask for a social profile, a phone number or an address.
If you use the Android app, an older version may still offer boxes for an Instagram, LinkedIn or Facebook profile. Anything you put there is optional, is shown only to the people at your table, and can be emptied at any time.
Who sees what
- Anybody browsing the board sees your first name and your initials. Not your age, not your photo, not your line about yourself.
- The people at a table with you see your photo, your first name, the line you wrote and what you would talk about — one tap on your face, at the table. Your age is on your own profile and nowhere else.
- Anybody with a link to a table — including anybody who sees it posted in a group chat — sees the area, the day, the time, how many seats are left and what the table is about. Never a name, never a face, and never the exact landmark. Those need a sign-in.
- Nobody else. We do not sell anything, we run no advertising, and there is no third-party analytics script on this site.
Photographs
Two kinds. Your own, which came from Google and which you can remove from your profile at any time — removing it deletes the bytes rather than hiding them. And photographs of tea stalls, added by members and by our staff, which are pictures of a shopfront on a public street.
Both are served from our own servers, never from Google's. That is deliberate: an image loaded from somebody else's host tells that host which of our members is looking at which table.
Conversations
A table's conversation exists for that table and is destroyed 24 hours after the table ends. There is no inbox, no way to message somebody outside a table you both hold a seat at, and no thread that outlives its table. That absence is the design, not an omission — it is what stops this becoming a channel to somebody who has stopped wanting one.
You can block anybody you have shared a table with. A block is silent: the other person is never told, and you simply stop seeing each other's tables. You can report a message in a thread; somebody on our side reads it, and the table is not told who reported it.
Where your location goes
Chai Pe Date shows you the tables in the city you are in, so it needs to know which city that is. When you open the app or the site with location allowed, your device sends an approximate position — rounded to about 5 km — and our server turns it into a city name. Only the city is kept; the position itself is not stored or logged. With location off, you see the city you joined in. The app refuses a position from a fake-location app, because the city decides which tables you can see.
If you use Use where I am when adding a place, the single point you then submit is attached to that tea stall or neighbourhood — and to nothing about you. We do not track where you go, and we keep no history of where you have been: only the city you are in now.
If you paste a Google Maps link instead, our server follows it once to find the coordinates. Google sees our server's address, not yours.
Notifications
If you turn notifications on, we keep a token for that device so we can send them. On the Android app that token comes from Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging, which delivers the notification to your phone; in a browser it comes from the browser's own push service. Each one is about a table you are part of — nothing else is ever pushed. Turning them off, or deleting the account, removes the token.
Counting visits
To know whether anybody is finding the site, the server counts how many people open its pages each day and which site sent them (Google, Instagram, typed in, and so on). Only daily totals are kept. To count a person once a day it briefly combines your network address and browser with a random key that is thrown away every night, and never stores either. No cookies, no tracking scripts, nothing shared with anyone.
How long we keep things
- Conversations — 24 hours after the table ends.
- Sign-in codes — ten minutes, hashed.
- Your profile and your history of tables — for as long as you have an account.
- Sign-in sessions — until they expire or you sign out.
- Staff actions — every administrative act is logged with a reason, and that log is kept. It records what a member of staff did, not what you read.
Deleting your account
You can do it yourself, and it happens straight away. In the app: Account → Delete your account. On this site: the account menu at the top right. Either way you are shown exactly what it will do to your account — counted, not in general terms — before anything happens. The whole of what goes and what stays.
Any table you are hosting is cancelled and the people holding a seat are told. Your profile, your photograph, your interests, your history and everything you have written in a thread are deleted, along with your sign-in and every device you are signed in on. There is no waiting period, and there is no way to undo it.
Three things are kept, and here is each one.
- Photographs you added of tea stalls, and any tapri or area you added. They are about a place, not about you, and the place is still there. The note of who added it becomes the word “deleted”.
- The record of decisions our staff made. If somebody on our side suspended an account, the note of what they did is kept. It is a safety record and it is about them as much as about you.
- If your account was suspended, a one-way fingerprint of the sign-in it used — not your email, not your name, and not anything we can read back into either. It exists for one reason: so that deleting an account and signing up again cannot be used to shed a suspension. An account in good standing leaves nothing at all.
If you have lost the account you joined with and cannot sign in, write to [email protected] and we will do it for you and confirm when it is done.
Where this is
Chai Pe Date runs on servers in India. Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 you may ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, and ask us to delete it. The address above is the one to use.
Changes
If this page changes in a way that matters, we will say so in the product rather than quietly editing it here.
Last updated 21 September 2026.