Privacy Policy

Welcome to SIHJantaParty ("we", "our", or "the platform"), accessible at sihjantaparty.in. SIHJantaParty is a collaborative web application built for college students and hackers participating in the Smart India Hackathon (SIH 2026).

Our platform helps students discover complementary teammates, match open squad seats based on tech stacks, track team compliance with official SIH guidelines (such as mandatory female representation and maximum 6-member team caps), chat with team leads before committing, and explore over 226+ released SIH problem statements.

By accessing or using SIHJantaParty, you acknowledge that you understand the data practices described in this Privacy Policy. We collect only the information necessary to provide team-building and hackathon collaboration functionality.

When you use SIHJantaParty, we collect information that you directly provide to us during registration, profile onboarding, and squad collaboration:

• Account & Profile Identity: Your full name, preferred display name / handle, primary email address, and profile picture avatar.
• Academic Information: Your college or university name, academic degree, graduating year, city, and state.
• Technical Skills & Role: Your selected technical skills (e.g. Next.js, Python, Flutter, PyTorch, ROS, Solidity), primary role (e.g. Frontend, Backend, Full-Stack, AI/ML, Hardware/IoT, UI/UX, CyberSecurity), and availability status.
• SIH Diversity Information: Gender selection (Male / Female). This is collected strictly to assist hackathon teams in tracking compliance with the official Smart India Hackathon rule requiring at least one female teammate per squad.
• Optional Contact Links: GitHub username, LinkedIn profile URL, portfolio link, and optional phone number. Phone numbers are protected by a privacy toggle (showPhone: false by default) and are not publicly displayed unless explicitly enabled.
• Squad Collaboration Data: Team creation information, join requests, team invitations, selected problem statements, and messages sent within squad chats and direct conversations.

To provide a fast and secure login experience, SIHJantaParty supports Single Sign-On (OAuth) through Google and GitHub, managed by our authentication provider, Clerk.

When you authenticate with Google or GitHub, our authentication provider obtains and shares with us:

• Your Full Name (used to populate your profile name).
• Your Verified Email Address (used to authenticate your account and send essential team notifications).
• Your Public Profile Avatar URL (used to display your profile picture on your team card and chat headers).
• An Account Identifier (used to securely recognize your account on future sign-ins).

This information is used strictly for authentication, account creation, account management, and providing the core functionality of the platform.

We use the information collected for the following operational purposes:

• Authentication & Account Management: Creating your account, authenticating your sessions, and securing access to protected dashboard areas.
• Hackathon Matchmaking: Helping team leaders find hackers with the technical skills needed for specific problem statements.
• Squad Management: Managing team rosters, enforcing team size limits (maximum 6 members), and displaying SIH diversity indicators.
• In-App Communication: Enabling real-time squad chat and direct messaging between participants.
• Transactional Notifications: Notifying you in-app when you receive team invitations or updates on join requests.

We do not share your personal information with advertisers or marketing networks. We utilize third-party cloud infrastructure providers to operate the application:

• Clerk Inc. (Authentication): Manages user authentication, session tokens, and OAuth authentication flows.
• MongoDB Atlas (Database Hosting): Provides cloud database hosting for storing user profiles, teams, problem statement data, requests, and messages.
• Hugging Face Spaces (Messaging Microservice): Hosts the WebSocket service for real-time messaging delivery.
• Vercel Inc. (Web Hosting): Hosts the web application frontend and serverless API routes.

Legal Circumstances: We may disclose information if required to comply with a valid legal obligation, court order, or applicable law, or to protect the security, rights, and safety of our platform and users.

SIHJantaParty is built to support student hackathon participants. We do not operate advertising networks, cross-site tracking scripts, or data-broker integrations.

We take reasonable and appropriate technical safeguards to protect your personal information against unauthorized access, loss, or misuse:

• Transport Encryption: All web traffic and API requests are transmitted over secure HTTPS connections.
• Authentication Security: User credentials and sessions are managed through Clerk, utilizing industry-standard credential hashing and secure token management.
• Access Control: Backend data access layers enforce authorization checks to ensure users can only view or manage data they are permitted to access.
• Environment Isolation: Database connection strings and API secrets are restricted to secure server environment variables.

You maintain control over your profile and account data:

• Editing Your Profile: You can update your skills, contact details, availability, bio, and social links at any time directly through the Profile Editor in your dashboard.
• Requesting Account Deletion: You can request the deletion of your account and associated personal data at any time.
• How to Request Deletion: Send an email from your registered account address to contact@sihjantaparty.in with the subject "Account Deletion Request". We will review and process your request by removing your profile, team memberships, and associated personal records from our database.

SIHJantaParty uses strictly necessary session cookies and storage tokens managed by Clerk to keep you securely signed in to your account.

We do not use marketing cookies or third-party behavioral analytics trackers. You may configure your browser to block cookies, but doing so will prevent you from logging in and accessing protected dashboard features.