Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

Go-LX ("Go-LX", "we", "us" or "our") operates an online marketplace that connects people who wish to buy and sell indigenous cattle (including cows, bulls, calves, and heifers) in India, and a directory of veterinary professionals who serve cattle owners. This Privacy Policy explains what information we collect, how we use it, how it is shared, and the choices you have. By using Go-LX you agree to the practices described here.

This policy is written to comply with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDPA) and applicable Indian law.

2. Information We Collect

We collect the following information, depending on how you use Go-LX:

• •Account details — your email address (used to sign in), a hashed password (we never see or store your password in plain text), your mobile number, name, state, district, profile photo (optional) and preferred language. We never store one-time codes in plain text; they are hashed and expire after a short window.
• •Listing details — for each cattle you list: breed, gender, age, weight, milk yield (if applicable), health notes, vaccinations, Cattle/Cow Aadhaar number (if you provide one), village/town, district, state, price, purpose (sale or adoption), photographs, and the status of the listing (pending, approved, rejected, sold, adopted).
• •Vet directory details — if you list yourself as a veterinarian: full name, qualification, registration number, clinic name and address, specialisations, services offered, languages spoken, contact information and photographs you choose to publish.
• •Gaushala directory details — if you register a gaushala (cow shelter): organisation name, registration/trust number (if applicable), contact person name, mobile, email (optional), address, district, state, capacity, services offered, photographs and any description you choose to publish.
• •Cattle Adoption details — if you apply to adopt cattle listed for adoption: your existing account information, your stated home type (rural farm, urban home, gaushala, temple, other), household context, prior experience with cattle, transport plan, an uploaded copy of a government ID proof (used only for adopter verification), and your explicit acceptance of the adopter pledge.
• •Adoption handover details — once an adoption is matched, we record the handover status, dates, and any handover notes uploaded by the giver or the adopter; completed handovers may be displayed on the public "Happy Homes" page in an anonymised form (district-level location, breed and photos only — no personal identifiers).
• •Cattle Adopter interest form — if you submit the public adopter-interest form, we collect your name, mobile number, optional email, optional state/district, your preference and an optional message so we can contact you about adoption opportunities.
• •Donations and support — if you choose to donate to support Go-LX, we collect basic transaction information. Our payment processor, PayPal, processes your payment on our behalf; we do not store your credit card or financial credentials in our systems. We also track clicks on the PayPal donation button for analytical and administrative purposes.
• •Feedback, contact and newsletter — any feedback or contact message you send (subject, message, and your email or mobile if you provide them), and your email address if you sign up for the Go-LX newsletter.
• •Buyer activity — listings you save (the "heart" button), listings you have recently viewed (stored on your device), and any contact requests you send to sellers.
• •Contact requests — when a buyer asks for a seller's phone number, we record the request and the seller's response (approve / reject, with an optional reason).
• •Reports — if you report a listing or a user, we collect the reason and any details you provide so our team can review the report.
• •Notification preferences — whether you have enabled browser/PWA push notifications, and the encrypted push-subscription identifier issued by your browser.
• •Technical data — basic information your browser sends automatically (such as user-agent and an approximate request region) used to operate and secure the service. For view-count deduplication and abuse-prevention rate-limiting we briefly process your IP address as a one-way hash; the raw IP is not stored.
• •Page engagement signals — to understand which pages help and which confuse, we record a single visit row per (page × session × 24h) and short engagement summaries (time-on-page while the tab was visible, scroll depth, whether you returned to a previous step, whether a form was completed). These signals are tied to a per-session identifier, not to your name.
• •Geolocation data — when you visit Go-LX or interact with forms and tracking elements, we perform an IP-based geolocation lookup (resolving country, region, city, ISP, approximate latitude/longitude, and timezone) using a third-party geolocation service (ip-api.com). This data is stored at a rounded, coarse city/regional level (~10 km resolution) to generate administrative geo-analytics dashboards (e.g. mapping donor locations and tracking form engagement by region). We store only a one-way HMAC hash of your IP address (ip_hash) to avoid logging or storing raw IP addresses.
• •Form-field drop-off metadata — to fix forms that don't work for real users, we record metadata about which fields you focused, which you filled, the character length of the value, and whether the value passed our basic validation. We never read the value itself. Fields hinted as sensitive (e.g., password, OTP) are excluded from the focus / length signals as well.
• •Geo-verified listing photo (sellers only, optional) — when you list cattle, you may use the "Live photo + GPS" verification step. If you choose to do this, your device camera takes a fresh photo and we record the GPS coordinates and capture timestamp alongside it. The coordinates are stored against the listing and are used to verify that the listing was created at the cattle's actual location; we do not display the exact coordinates publicly (only the district is shown). You can decline the verification step and post the listing without it.
• •Diagnostic error logs — when something breaks in your browser or on our servers, we capture a short error report (the error message, the page URL, and a stack trace if available) so we can fix it. We strip personal data from these reports before storing them and never use them for marketing.

3. How We Use Your Information

We use your information only to operate Go-LX, specifically to:

• •Create your account and verify it through a one-time password (OTP) sent to your mobile number.
• •Publish your cattle listings (after a human review), your vet directory listing (after verification of your qualification details), and your gaushala directory listing (after verification of the organisation details).
• •Let logged-in buyers request a seller's contact details, and let sellers approve or decline those requests.
• •Process cattle adoption applications — match adopters to listings, verify the uploaded ID proof, coordinate the handover, and (with consent and only in an anonymised form) celebrate completed adoptions on the public Happy Homes page.
• •Respond to feedback, contact requests, gaushala registration enquiries and adopter-interest enquiries.
• •Process donations and send receipts/acknowledgements.
• •Send the Go-LX newsletter to subscribers who have opted in, and let them unsubscribe at any time.
• •Send transactional in-app and push notifications about your listings, contact requests, approvals, rejections, adoption applications, handover updates and account activity.
• •Show accurate view-counts on listings without counting the same visitor multiple times per day.
• •Moderate the platform, review reports, prevent fraud, abuse or misuse (including rate-limiting public submissions to prevent spam).
• •Generate administrative dashboards (e.g. analytics on donor origins, tracking form geolocation trends, and platform usage stats).
• •Show the site and your saved preferences in your chosen language.

4. Mobile Number — How It Is Shared

Your mobile number is used to sign you in via OTP and is held in our system to associate your account with your listings. By default your mobile number is NOT visible to other users when they view your listing.

Buyers who are signed in can request your contact details. You will be notified of each request and you decide whether to approve or decline. Your number is shown to a specific buyer only after you approve their request. You can decline a request at any time, with an optional reason.

Veterinarians who list themselves in the public Vets Directory consent to publish their contact number openly on their vet profile, because the purpose of that directory is to be reachable by cattle owners.

The OTP itself may be delivered via a third-party SMS provider that processes the number on our behalf solely to deliver the code.

5. Photographs, Profile Media and GPS-verified Photos

You may upload photographs of your cattle, your vet clinic, or a profile picture. These photos are stored with our cloud storage provider and are served publicly on the listing or profile they belong to. Do not upload photos that contain personal documents, identifiable photos of other people without their consent, or anything you do not have the right to publish.

When listing cattle, you may optionally use the "Live photo + GPS" verification step. If you do, your browser asks for camera and location permission, takes a fresh photo and records the GPS coordinates and capture time at that moment. The coordinates are stored against the listing for trust and moderation; the public listing page shows only the district. You can decline the verification step and still publish a listing — verification only adds a "Verified" badge for buyers.

When you delete a listing or your account, the associated images and any verification coordinates are also removed from our storage, subject to the data-retention rules below.

6. Cattle Adoption — ID Proof and Handover

When you apply to adopt cattle that is listed for adoption, we ask you to upload a copy of a government-issued ID proof (such as Aadhaar, voter ID or driving licence). This is used only to verify your identity so we and the giver can be confident the animal is going to a real, traceable home. ID proofs are stored in a private bucket in our cloud storage, are not shown publicly, and are accessible only to Go-LX admins reviewing the adoption.

You will also be asked to provide details about your home and your plan to transport and care for the cattle, and to explicitly accept the Go-LX Adopter Pledge (no resale, no slaughter, ongoing care for the animal's natural life). Acceptance is recorded with a timestamp.

Once an adoption is approved and handed over, we may publish a brief record of the handover on the public Happy Homes page. This record is anonymised — it shows the cattle's breed, photographs and district-level location, but not the adopter's name, mobile number or full address. ID proofs are never shown publicly.

7. Gaushala Directory

If you register a gaushala (cow shelter) on Go-LX, the organisation's name, district/state, registration/trust number (if you provide it), services offered and photographs are intended to be shown publicly so that the public, donors and cow-givers can find you. Your contact person name, mobile number and email are also displayed on the public gaushala profile, by your consent, because the purpose of the directory is to be reachable. Treat this the same as putting your details on a public noticeboard — only register if you want to be contacted.

8. Newsletter and Marketing

The Go-LX newsletter is opt-in only. If you submit your email through a newsletter form, we store your email, the source (e.g., footer, homepage) and your preferred language. We will send only occasional emails about Go-LX (new schemes, breed content, product updates). We do not share newsletter emails with advertisers, and every email contains an unsubscribe link. You can also ask us to remove your email at any time by writing to the address in section 18.

9. Cookies, Local Storage and Analytics

Go-LX uses only essential cookies and local-storage entries. These keep you signed in, remember your selected language, and let the platform function. We do not use advertising cookies, behavioural-tracking cookies that follow you across other websites, or third-party advertising analytics.

We do use lightweight first-party analytics on our own pages to count page-views per session (deduplicated by a hashed identifier) and to measure how forms and key journeys actually perform — for example, where users drop off in the listing form. These analytics never sell, share or sync data with advertisers. We also run Vercel Analytics in privacy-preserving mode (no cookies, IPs hashed) for high-level traffic counts.

To support geo-enriched tracking and analytics, we perform an IP-based location query using the external ip-api.com lookup service. The lookup translates your request's transient IP address to a general region/city. This raw IP address is processed temporarily but is never written to our database or storage; only the resulting geodata (rounded to ~10 km resolution) and a one-way IP hash are stored.

Recently-viewed listings are stored only in your browser's local storage and are not sent to us.

10. Push Notifications

If you opt in, Go-LX may send browser/PWA push notifications about new contact requests, approval status changes, and other listing activity. Push notifications are powered by your browser/operating system's push service (e.g., Google or Apple), which receives an opaque token but not the content of the notification. You can disable push notifications at any time from your profile settings or from your browser's site permissions.

11. How Information Is Shared

We do not sell your personal information. Information is shared only as follows:

• •Public listing content (title, photos, breed, age, location at district level, seller display name) is visible to all visitors. Contact details are gated as described in section 4.
• •Public vet directory content is visible to all visitors by the vet's consent.
• •Service providers — our database, file storage, SMS delivery, push notification delivery, payment processing (PayPal), and IP geolocation lookup (ip-api.com) are handled by trusted providers who process data on our behalf under contractual safeguards.
• •Legal reasons — we may disclose information if required by Indian law or to protect the rights, safety and property of users and Go-LX.
• •We do not share your data with advertisers and we do not allow advertising networks to track Go-LX users.

12. AI Crawlers and Search Engines

We allow legitimate search-engine crawlers (such as Googlebot and Bingbot) and certain AI-assistant crawlers (such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot and others) to index public pages of Go-LX so that buyers and sellers can find listings via search and AI-assistant answers. These crawlers do not have access to private pages such as your profile, saved listings, contact requests or admin areas. Our crawler policy is published at /robots.txt and /llms.txt and may change as our policies evolve.

13. Data Retention

We keep your account, listings and vet profile for as long as your account is active. Contact requests and reports are kept for as long as needed for moderation, audit and to resolve disputes.

If you delete a listing, it is removed from public view immediately. We retain a minimal record (such as the listing id and timestamps) for fraud prevention and auditing.

You may delete your account from your profile settings. On deletion we remove your personal information except where we must retain it to comply with the law, resolve disputes, prevent abuse, or enforce our Terms.

14. Your Rights

Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 you have the right to:

• •Access — request a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
• •Correct — ask us to correct inaccurate information, or update it directly from your profile.
• •Erase — ask us to delete your account and personal data, subject to legal retention obligations.
• •Withdraw consent — turn off push notifications, remove your vet listing, or delete cattle listings at any time.
• •Grievance — write to us using the contact details below with any privacy concern. We will respond within a reasonable timeframe.

15. Data Security

We take reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect your information, including HTTPS-encrypted connections, hashed passwords/OTPs, row-level access controls on our database, and restricted administrative access. However, no method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

16. Children

Go-LX is intended for users aged 18 and above. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a minor has provided us information, please contact us so we can remove it.

17. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. The "Last updated" date above shows when it was last revised. Significant changes will be highlighted on this page or communicated through Go-LX.

18. Contact and Grievance Officer

For any privacy questions, data requests, or grievances, contact us at support@golx.org. We will treat your request as our grievance officer would under the DPDPA.