Privacy Policy

This is a long, detailed document because we want you to actually understand what happens to your data — not just check a box. AnkaadiX ("AnkaadiX", "we", "us", or "our") provides a multi-business management platform used by supermarkets, grocery stores, pharmacies, clinics, mobile phone shops, showrooms, and similar small businesses to run point-of-sale checkout, inventory, invoicing, customer credit/loan tracking, staff access, and reporting — through the AnkaadiX Android application, the AnkaadiX admin dashboard, and this website (together, the "Service"). This Privacy Policy explains, in detail, what information we collect, why we collect it, how it is used and shared, how long we keep it, how we secure it, and what choices and rights you have over it.

By creating an account, installing the app, or otherwise using the Service, you agree to the collection, use, and disclosure of information as described in this policy. If you do not agree with any part of this policy, please do not use the Service. If you are an Employee using the Service under a Customer's Business, some choices described here (such as account deletion) are exercised through that Customer rather than directly by you — this is explained in section 12.

2. Who this policy covers

The Service is built around four kinds of people, and this policy applies to the data we collect about all of them, though the specifics differ:

• Customers — the business owner who registers on AnkaadiX, owns one or more Businesses, and manages staff, inventory, invoicing, and settings for those Businesses. A Customer can either self-register (with email verification) or be onboarded directly by an AnkaadiX platform administrator.
• Employees — staff a Customer (or, on the Customer's behalf, an AnkaadiX platform administrator) adds to help run one or more of that Customer's Businesses. Employees sign in on the Android app and see only the screens and actions the Customer has granted them permission for.
• Platform administrators — AnkaadiX's own staff, who use a separate, internal admin dashboard to onboard Customers, activate and manage Businesses, manage the taxonomy of business types and access levels, and provide support. Platform administrators have their own accounts, governed by internal access controls, and are themselves subject to confidentiality obligations regarding any Customer or Business data they can see.
• End customers of your Business — the people your Business sells to. We do not have a direct relationship with them and they do not have an AnkaadiX account; however, if you record a sale as a loan/credit sale, we store the phone number (and, optionally, name) you provide for that person, on your Business's behalf. Section 3.3 explains this in more detail, including your own responsibilities around that data.

Throughout the rest of this policy, we generally use "you" to refer to Customers and Employees together, except where a section is clearly specific to one role, to a platform administrator, or to an end customer of your Business.

3. Information we collect

We collect information in three broad ways: information you give us directly, information you and your staff generate by using the Service to run your business, and a small amount of information collected automatically to make the Service work reliably and securely. We go through each below in detail, including the exact device permissions the Android app requests and why.

3.1 Information you provide directly

• Customer account registration. When a Customer signs up, we collect their full name, email address, phone number, and a password. We verify the email address with a one-time code sent to it before the account can be used, and the account remains "inactive" until that verification is complete. If a Customer account is instead created directly by an AnkaadiX platform administrator (a common onboarding path for businesses that are set up with our help), we collect the same fields at that time.
• Employee accounts. When a Customer, or an AnkaadiX platform administrator acting on that Customer's behalf, adds an Employee, we collect that Employee's name, email address, and a password chosen for them or set by them. Employees do not self-register.
• Business profile. When a Customer creates a Business, we collect the business name, its business type (for example Supermarket, Grocery, Pharmacy, Clinic, Mobile Shop, or Showroom — this determines which app features and staff-permission categories are available for that Business), its address, its phone number, and an optional business registration number.
• Passwords and credentials. Passwords are never stored in plain text. We store only a one-way cryptographic hash of your password (using bcrypt), which cannot be reversed to reveal the original password — not even by us. When you sign in, the password you enter is hashed and compared to the stored hash; the plain-text password itself is never persisted anywhere in our systems.
• Support and correspondence. If you contact us by email or phone (see section 20), we collect whatever information you choose to include in that communication, such as your name, contact details, and the content of your message, so we can respond to you.

3.2 Business operational data you and your staff create

Running a Business on AnkaadiX naturally means entering data about that Business's own day-to-day operations. This is the largest category of information the Service handles, and it belongs to your Business — we process it on your behalf, as described throughout this policy. It includes:

• Inventory records. Product names, unit prices, quantities on hand, and whether an item is active or discontinued.
• Invoices and sales records. Line items sold, quantities, unit prices, discount type and amount, tax type and amount, subtotal and total, the invoice number, the date and time of sale, which staff member created it, and — only if you choose to enter it — the buyer's name and phone number.
• Customer credit/loan records. If you mark an invoice as a loan (a credit sale where the buyer will pay later), we store the buyer's phone number, the invoice(s) linked to that phone number, and any repayments later recorded against the balance, so your Business can see at a glance who owes what. See section 3.3 for more on this category specifically.
• Staff and permission records. Which Employees exist under a Customer, which of that Customer's Businesses each Employee is assigned to, and which specific permissions (such as Invoice, Inventory, Business, Account, or Notification access) each Employee has been granted, plus a configurable limit on how many Employees may be assigned to a given Business at once.
• Reports and summaries. The Service generates reports (such as daily sales summaries) from your invoice and inventory data. These reports are derived data — we do not collect anything new to produce them, we simply calculate and present what is already stored.
• Printer and app settings. Configuration you save for a receipt printer (its name and Bluetooth or Wi‑Fi connection details) so the app can reconnect to it automatically the next time you print a receipt.
• Business activation history. A record of when a Business was activated or deactivated, for what duration, and by which platform administrator — used to enforce activation periods and provide an audit trail.

3.3 Information about your Business's end customers

When you record a customer's name and/or phone number against an invoice or a loan, you are entering personal data about a third party — someone who does not have an AnkaadiX account and has not agreed to our terms. We store this information solely as your Business's operational record (to track who owes a credit balance and how much), and we treat it with the same technical protections as the rest of your Business data. However, you, not AnkaadiX, are the one collecting this information from your customer, and you are responsible for having any legal basis, consent, or notice required under applicable law before recording it — AnkaadiX acts as a data processor for this category of information, carrying it out on your instructions, rather than as the party that decides to collect it in the first place. Section 6 of our Terms & Conditions covers this in more detail.

3.4 Information collected automatically

• Push-notification token. The Android app registers a device token with Firebase Cloud Messaging (a Google service) so the Service can deliver push notifications — for example, a low-stock alert, a business-activation status change, or an account-status update. This token identifies your device's notification "inbox" with Google's messaging infrastructure; it does not, by itself, identify you personally to us beyond your own account.
• Authentication and session data. When you sign in, the Service issues a short-lived access token (used for roughly 15 minutes at a time) and a longer-lived refresh token (used for up to about 30 days) so you can stay signed in without re-entering your password constantly. For security, an account can only have one active session at a time — signing in on a new device will either be blocked while another session is active, or will end the other session, depending on which one signs in or out first (see section 11 for more on this).
• Technical and diagnostic data. App version, general device platform information, and standard server request logs (timestamp, the API endpoint called, and the response status) that we use to keep the Service reliable, diagnose errors, and monitor for suspicious activity. These logs are operational in nature — we do not use them to build advertising profiles, and we do not share them with advertisers.
• Network connectivity status. The app checks whether the device currently has a network connection, purely to decide whether to queue a sale locally for later sync or send it immediately (see section 17).

3.5 Device permissions, explained one by one

The Android app requests a small, deliberately limited set of device permissions. Here is exactly what each one is used for, and nothing more:

• Camera. Used only to scan a product's barcode when adding it to an invoice or to inventory, through the in-app scanner. The camera feed is processed live, on the device, purely to detect a barcode pattern — we do not record, store, or upload any camera image or video. The scanner can be closed at any time, and every product can also be added or searched for manually without ever using the camera, so granting this permission is optional.
• Bluetooth (including Bluetooth Connect / Bluetooth Admin on older Android versions). Used only to discover, pair with, and send receipt data to a Bluetooth receipt printer that you explicitly choose in Printer Settings. We do not use Bluetooth to determine your location, and we do not scan for or connect to devices you have not chosen.
• Notifications (POST_NOTIFICATIONS). Used to display the push notifications described in section 3.4. You can disable notifications for the app at any time from your device's system settings.
• Internet and network state. Required for the app to communicate with our servers at all, and to detect whether a connection is currently available so it can decide whether to sync immediately or queue offline (section 17).

The app does not request, and cannot access, your device's precise or approximate location, your contacts list, your photo library or other media, your microphone, or your call or SMS history. When you use the app's "share by WhatsApp", "share by SMS", or generic "share" buttons on a receipt, the app simply opens your device's own WhatsApp, messaging, or share sheet with the receipt text pre-filled — it does not read your existing conversations or contacts, and it does not send anything without you completing the action yourself in that other app.

4. Where information comes from

Depending on the category, information comes from one of the following sources:

• Directly from you — account registration, business profile details, and anything you type into the app or dashboard.
• From a Customer, about their Employees — Employee accounts and the permissions granted to them are entered by the Customer (or by AnkaadiX on the Customer's behalf), not by the Employee.
• From your own use of the Service — inventory, invoices, and loan/repayment records are generated as a natural by-product of using the point-of-sale, inventory, and loan-tracking features.
• Automatically, from your device — push-notification tokens, authentication tokens, and basic technical/diagnostic data, as described in section 3.4.
• From AnkaadiX platform administrators — business-activation history and any account status changes made through the admin dashboard.

We do not purchase personal information about you from third-party data brokers.

5. How we use information

We use the information described above for the following purposes:

• To provide the Service. Creating and authenticating accounts; keeping every Business's data isolated so it is never visible to another Business or Customer; operating point-of-sale checkout, inventory, invoicing, customer/loan tracking, staff permissions, printer connectivity, and the built-in reports.
• To keep offline sales working. Allowing a sale made without an internet connection to be queued on the device and automatically uploaded once connectivity returns, without creating duplicate invoices or double-counting stock (see section 17).
• To communicate with you. Sending push notifications you would reasonably expect from the Service (such as stock or business-status alerts), and responding when you contact us for support.
• To secure the Service. Detecting, investigating, and preventing fraud, abuse, unauthorized access, or account takeover — for example, by enforcing single-device sign-in and rejecting a login attempt for an account that already has an active session elsewhere, and by tracking basic request logs to spot unusual activity.
• To maintain and improve the Service. Diagnosing and fixing bugs, understanding how the Service performs technically, and planning improvements to reliability and features.
• To comply with legal obligations. Such as responding to a lawful request from a court or regulator, or enforcing our Terms & Conditions.

We do not use your data, or your Business's data, to serve you or anyone else advertisements, and we do not sell, rent, lease, or trade your personal information or your Business's data to data brokers, advertisers, or any other third party for their own marketing purposes.

6. Legal bases for processing

For readers in jurisdictions that require us to state a legal basis for processing personal data (such as under the EU/UK General Data Protection Regulation), we rely on the following:

• Performance of a contract — processing your account and Business data is necessary to provide the Service you have signed up for and to perform our Terms & Conditions with you.
• Legitimate interests — for security monitoring, fraud prevention, service reliability, and improving the Service, balanced against your rights and interests.
• Legal obligation — where we must retain or disclose information to comply with applicable law.
• Consent — where we ask for it specifically (for example, before sending any communication that is not necessary to operate the Service, should we ever introduce one). You may withdraw consent at any time by contacting us.

7. Automated decision-making

We do not use your personal information to make decisions that would produce legal effects concerning you, or similarly significant effects, through fully automated means without human involvement. Reports and summaries generated by the Service are informational only — they simply calculate and present figures from the data your Business has already entered, and they do not make decisions about you or your customers.

8. How we share information

We do not sell your data. We share information only in the specific, limited circumstances below, and never for a third party's own marketing purposes.

• Service providers (sub-processors). We use Google Firebase Cloud Messaging to deliver push notifications, which requires sharing the relevant device token with Google for that limited purpose only. We also rely on cloud infrastructure providers for server hosting, our managed database, and our managed cache/session store, to run the Service. These providers process data strictly on our instructions, under contractual confidentiality obligations, and do not use it for their own independent purposes.
• Within your own Business. Inventory, invoice, and customer/loan data you or your staff enter is visible to other Employees of the same Business only to the extent the Customer has granted them the relevant permission — for example, an Employee without Inventory access cannot see inventory-management screens, and an Employee without Business access cannot see or switch between Businesses.
• Platform administrators. AnkaadiX's own staff can see account and Business administrative details — such as status, contact information, and activation history — that are needed to onboard, support, and activate Businesses. They do not have routine, unrestricted access to your day-to-day sales, inventory, or customer/loan data, and access is limited to what is needed for the support or administrative task at hand.
• Legal and safety disclosures. We may disclose information where we reasonably believe it is required by law, regulation, legal process, or a valid governmental request, or where disclosure is necessary to protect the rights, property, or safety of AnkaadiX, our users, or the public, including to detect, prevent, or address fraud or security issues.
• Business transfers. If AnkaadiX is involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, reorganization, or sale of some or all of its assets, account and Business data may be among the assets transferred. We will ensure this policy continues to apply to that data, or notify you and provide an opportunity to object where the new owner intends a materially different use.
• With your direction. If you explicitly ask us to share information with someone else (for example, exporting a report to share with your accountant), we will do so as instructed.

9. International data transfers

Depending on where our infrastructure and service providers operate, your information may be processed in a country other than the one where you or your Business are located, which may have different data-protection laws than your own. Where this happens, we take steps to ensure the data continues to be protected consistent with the commitments in this policy, including relying on providers with appropriate contractual and security safeguards.

10. How long we keep information

We keep different categories of information for different lengths of time, based on how long it is needed for the purpose it was collected for:

• Account and Business data (profile details, inventory, invoices, customer/loan records, staff/permissions) — retained for as long as the account or Business remains active, plus a reasonable grace period afterward in case you wish to reactivate, unless you request earlier deletion (section 12) or a longer period is required by law, to resolve a dispute, or to enforce our agreements.
• Authentication tokens. Access tokens expire automatically after roughly 15 minutes; refresh tokens expire automatically after roughly 30 days of inactivity, and are deleted immediately on logout or when superseded by a new sign-in.
• Technical/diagnostic logs. Kept only for a limited operational window sufficient for troubleshooting and security review, then routinely deleted or aggregated in a way that no longer identifies you.
• Support correspondence. Kept for as long as reasonably necessary to resolve your inquiry and for a further period afterward for quality and record-keeping purposes.

When information is no longer needed for these purposes, we delete it or render it anonymous, except where retention is required by law.

11. How we protect information

We use a combination of technical and organizational measures designed to protect your information, including:

• Password hashing. Passwords are hashed with bcrypt before storage and are never stored or logged in plain text.
• Tenant data isolation. Every Business's operational data is scoped at the database and application level so it cannot be queried or accessed by another Business or Customer.
• Short-lived, revocable sessions. Access tokens are short-lived, refresh tokens are individually revocable, and we enforce a single active session per account — reducing the impact of a lost device or a leaked token.
• Granular staff permissions. Employee access is scoped to the exact screens and actions a Customer has explicitly granted, following the principle of giving access only where it is needed.
• Encryption in transit. Communication between the app/dashboard and our servers is protected using industry-standard transport encryption (HTTPS/TLS).
• Internal access controls. Platform-administrator access is itself permission-gated internally, so only staff who need a given capability for their role have it.

No method of transmission over the internet or method of electronic storage is completely secure, and while we work hard to protect your information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security. If you become aware of any security vulnerability or incident involving the Service, please contact us immediately using the details in section 20.

12. Your rights and choices

Depending on your role and the law that applies to you, you may have some or all of the following rights over your personal information:

• Access — to ask us what personal data we hold about you.
• Correction — to ask us to correct inaccurate or incomplete data, such as your name, email, or phone number.
• Deletion — to ask us to delete your account and associated personal data, subject to the retention exceptions described in section 10.
• Restriction or objection — to ask us to limit certain processing, or to object to processing based on legitimate interests.
• Portability — to ask for a copy of certain data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format.
• Withdrawal of consent — where processing is based on your consent, to withdraw it at any time, without affecting processing that already took place.

How to exercise these rights. Contact us using the details in section 20. To protect your account, we may need to verify your identity before acting on a request. We aim to respond to legitimate requests within a reasonable time, and in any event within any timeframe required by applicable law.

A note for Employees. Because an Employee's account, and the Business data they enter, is administered by the Customer who created that account, day-to-day access, correction, and permission changes for an Employee are managed by that Customer through the app or dashboard. An Employee does not have a self-service "delete my account" option inside the app, since the account belongs to the Customer's Business relationship with AnkaadiX — but an Employee may still contact us directly with any request, including deletion, and we will route it to the appropriate party or act on it directly where we are able to.

A note about end-customer data. If you are an end customer of a Business using AnkaadiX (for example, someone whose phone number was recorded against a loan), and you have a question or request about that data, please contact the Business directly, as they control that record; if you are unable to reach them, you may also contact us and we will assist where we can.

13. Additional regional disclosures

Some jurisdictions grant additional or differently framed rights (for example, rights described under the EU/UK GDPR, or under US state privacy laws such as the California Consumer Privacy Act). Where such laws apply to you, we honor the rights they grant in addition to, or in place of, those listed in section 12, including any right to know the categories of personal information collected and disclosed, and any right to non-discrimination for exercising a privacy right. We do not sell personal information as defined under such laws, so no "opt-out of sale" mechanism is required. If you would like to make a rights request under a specific regional law, please say so when you contact us so we can apply the correct process.

14. Cookies and similar technologies

This website (the one you are reading now) does not use tracking or advertising cookies, and does not run any third-party analytics or advertising scripts. It only sets a preference cookie/local-storage value to remember your light/dark theme choice on your own device.

The AnkaadiX admin dashboard uses essential, first-party session cookies — specifically, an access-token cookie and a refresh-token cookie — solely to keep you signed in as you navigate between pages. These cookies are not used for advertising, are not shared with any third-party ad network, and are not used to track you across other websites.

The Android app does not use browser cookies at all; it stores its own session tokens locally on the device, as described in sections 3.4 and 11.

15. No advertising or behavioral tracking

We want to be unambiguous about this: AnkaadiX does not run advertisements, does not use advertising SDKs or trackers in the app, dashboard, or website, does not build advertising profiles from your data, and does not participate in cross-app or cross-site behavioral tracking or ad targeting of any kind.

16. Children's privacy

The Service is a business tool intended for use by adults operating or working at a business. It is not directed at, marketed to, or designed for children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 (or the relevant minimum age for consent to data processing in your jurisdiction, if higher). If you believe a child has provided us with personal information without appropriate consent, please contact us and we will take steps to investigate and delete it as appropriate.

17. Offline use and local device storage

A core design goal of the app is that checkout keeps working even without an internet connection. To make this possible, the app maintains a local, on-device cache of your product catalog, and queues any sale made while offline directly on the device. Once the device reconnects, queued sales are automatically and idempotently uploaded to our servers — designed so that a retried or repeated sync never creates a duplicate invoice or deducts stock twice. This locally cached and queued data benefits from your device's own operating-system-level storage protections, and queued sales are removed from local storage once they have synced successfully. Because this data lives on your device until it syncs, it could be lost if the app is uninstalled, the device is reset, or the app's local data is cleared before a pending sync completes — we recommend syncing regularly if you know you will be offline for an extended period.

18. Third-party links

This website or the Service may occasionally link to third-party websites or services (for example, a link to send an email or open WhatsApp). We are not responsible for the privacy practices of those third parties, and we encourage you to review their own privacy policies before providing them with information.

19. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time to reflect changes in the Service, our data practices, or applicable law. When we do, we will update the "Last updated" date at the top of this page, and for material changes, we will make reasonable efforts to notify you directly — for example, through an in-app or dashboard notice. We encourage you to review this page periodically. Continuing to use the Service after a change becomes effective constitutes your acceptance of the updated policy.

20. Contact us

If you have questions, concerns, or requests regarding this Privacy Policy, or wish to exercise any of the rights described in section 12, please contact us at kiroshan.t@gmail.com or +94 77 748 6279. We will do our best to respond promptly and to resolve any concern you raise.