Privacy Policy

Poolmate stores your name, email, phone number and your rides. Your name and phone number are shown to the other students in a pool you join — that is the point of the pool, and it is the main thing to understand before you use it. Nothing is sold to anyone.

• Your account: name, email address and phone number. If you set a password it is stored hashed, never as text we can read. If you sign in with Google we store the account identifier Google gives us — never your Google password.
• Verification codes: one-time codes and password-reset links, which expire shortly after they are issued.
• Your rides: pickup, destination, date, time, how many of you are travelling, the route distance, and whether the ride is open, full, finished or cancelled.
• Pool chat: messages you send inside a pool, along with your name and when you sent them.
• Notification permission: if you turn on notifications, the address your browser gives us for delivering them. It identifies a browser, not you, and is deleted when you turn notifications off.

• Other students in your pool see your name and phone number, and anything you write in the pool chat. You see theirs. This is how people co-ordinate a shared cab, and it cannot be switched off while you are in a pool — if you are not comfortable with it, leave the pool or book a private cab instead.
• A driver you are matched with, for a private cab booking, is sent your name and phone number so they can find you. You are given theirs for the same reason.
• Poolmate's administrators can see accounts and rides in order to run the service and deal with problems.
• Nobody else. Your data is not sold, rented, or handed to advertisers.

Running the site means some data passes through other companies. Each one only receives what it needs to do its job:

• MongoDB Atlas — stores the database.
• Vercel — hosts the site and serves it to your browser.
• Resend — sends verification and password-reset email.
• MSG91 — sends SMS one-time codes, where SMS sign-in is used.
• Telegram — carries private-cab requests to the verified driver group, including the name and number of the student who booked.
• OpenStreetMap and its routing services — receive what you type into the pickup and destination boxes, in order to suggest places and measure the route. They are not told who is asking.
• Google — only if you choose to sign in with Google.

Poolmate sets one cookie: the sign-in token that keeps you logged in. There are no advertising cookies, no tracking pixels and no third-party analytics following you around. Clearing it signs you out.

Your account and your ride history are kept while your account exists, so that My Rides continues to show what you have booked. One-time codes and reset links expire within minutes or hours of being issued. Notification addresses are removed as soon as you turn notifications off.

Mail support@poolmate.in from the address on your account and ask for it to be deleted. Your account and personal details will be removed. Messages you sent in a pool chat may remain visible to the people who were in that pool, because they are part of their conversation too.

You can also ask what is held about you, or ask for something to be corrected, at the same address.

Poolmate is for university students and is not intended for anyone under 16.

If this policy changes in a way that affects what is collected or who can see it, the date at the top of this page changes with it.