Why We Don't Ask for Your Gender, Your Selfie, or Your Contacts

Sign-up forms accumulate fields the way drawers accumulate cables. Someone once needed the data for something, the field went in, the something was forgotten, and the field stayed. Years later nobody remembers why it's there, but nobody dares remove it either.

When we built Sanora One's registration, we started from the other direction: every field had to justify itself. If we couldn't name the exact feature that needed it, it went. This is what happened.

Gender: removed

Almost every app asks. Almost none can tell you why. When we asked ourselves, the honest answers were "for analytics" and "advertisers like it". Neither is a reason to make a person declare something about themselves before they've even seen the product.

There is no feature on Sanora One that behaves differently based on gender. So we don't ask. If a specific feature ever needs it — say, a women-only mentoring circle that a community wants to run — that feature will ask, explain why, and the answer will stay within that feature.

Selfie at sign-up: removed

Some platforms want a live face photo at registration, ostensibly to prevent fake accounts. In practice it prevents very few fake accounts (photos are easy to obtain) and it puts a biometric image of every real user in a database that will eventually leak.

We ask for an identity selfie in exactly one place: when you're about to withdraw money. At that moment, matching a face to a government ID is a proportionate step — it protects your money and satisfies the law. Before that moment, we have no business holding your face.

Contacts: never by default

The "find your friends" button that uploads your entire address book is one of the most quietly invasive things an app can do. It doesn't just share your data — it shares the phone numbers of everyone you know, none of whom agreed to anything.

Sanora One does not request contact access at sign-up or as a general permission. If a specific feature would benefit from it — for example, inviting a batchmate to an alumni group — that feature asks at that moment, explains exactly what it will do with the data, and processes only the entries you select. We do not store the rest.

SMS and call logs: never

There is no legitimate reason for a platform like ours to read your messages or call history. Some apps request it for "OTP auto-fill". We use the operating system's built-in OTP mechanism, which shows you the code without giving us access to anything else.

Background location: off unless you opt in

We ask for approximate location only when you use a feature that needs it — finding a local event, say — and only while you're using that feature. We do not run location tracking in the background, and we don't build a history of where you've been.

What we kept, and why

Name and email. To create an account and reach you if something goes wrong.

Phone number. For login OTPs and payout verification. Indian payment regulations require a verified mobile number for transfers.

Date of birth. Sanora One is 18+. We need to check. We store the date, not a copy of any document, and we don't display your age anywhere.

Password, hashed. We store a scrambled version that cannot be reversed. Even we can't read your password.

Device and crash data. So we can fix bugs. It's tied to a device, not to your identity, and it's deleted after 90 days.

The trade-off we're making

Collecting less data has costs. We know less about our users than a typical platform. Our analytics are coarser. Advertisers who want detailed demographic targeting will find us less appealing.

We think that's the right trade. A platform where people learn, earn, and sell needs trust more than it needs targeting. And every field we don't collect is a field that can't leak, can't be subpoenaed, and can't be misused by a future version of us that has forgotten why it was collected.

What you can check

Everything above is written into our Privacy Policy, which is public. The permissions our apps request are visible on the Play Store and App Store listings. If you find a discrepancy between what we say and what the app asks for, email Info@sanoraindia.com — we'd want to know.