SyncZ — Terms & Privacy

1. What SyncZ is

SyncZ is a network for students of Indian engineering colleges. It lists campus events, symposiums, hackathons and sports tournaments, and lets students post about them, register for them, and find what is happening near their college.

SyncZ is operated by Chandru M ("we", "us"). By creating an account you agree to these terms.

2. Who can use it

You need a working email address and you must give accurate information about your college and department. One account per person.

Anyone studying at a listed college can hold an account and read SyncZ. Posting, and listing events as an organiser, require you to be 18 or over.

Until you are 18 you can do almost everything: read your campus feed, events, circulars and exam dates, like and comment, follow people, ask organisers questions, register for events, keep your own academic record, and report anything that should not be here. What you cannot do is create a post or list an event as an organiser.

Listing events additionally requires organiser verification, which means sending us a photograph of your student ID and a photograph of your face. We do not accept either from anyone under 18, and the request is refused before any photograph is uploaded.

These limits are enforced by our database rather than by the app, so they are not something a modified copy of the app can get around. They lift by themselves on your eighteenth birthday — you will not need to ask us or tell us your date of birth again.

We ask for your date of birth once, when you set up your profile. If you are 18 or over we store only that fact and not the date. If you are not 18 yet we store the date you turn 18, so that posting unlocks by itself on that morning without you having to ask us or tell us again. Neither is ever shown to another student.

This is a declaration, not a verified check: we ask, and we act on the answer. Organizer verification additionally requires identity documents, and we do not accept ID documents or photographs from under-18s.

3. Your account

You can sign in with an email address and a password, or with Google. Signing up with Google means you start without a password — Account settings offers "Create a password" whenever you want one. Both routes reach the same account.

You are responsible for what happens on your account. Keep your password to yourself. If you think someone else has it, change it from Account settings — every other device is signed out when you do.

Your username is public. Your email address is never shown to other students.

4. What you must not do

We can remove content and suspend accounts that break these rules. Serious cases — anything involving safety or a criminal offence — may be reported to the appropriate authorities.

• Pretend to be another person, a college, or an official body.
• Post events that do not exist, or that you have no part in running.
• Harass, threaten, or abuse anyone, or post content that targets someone.
• Post content that is illegal in India, or that infringes someone else's rights.
• Collect other students' personal details for anything other than running the event they registered for.
• Use automated tools to scrape the app, or try to get at data that is not yours.
• Submit documents that are not yours, or that have been altered.

5. Events are run by organisers, not by SyncZ

This is the most important thing on this page. SyncZ lists events. It does not run them, host them, fund them, or vet them beyond checking that the organiser is who they say they are.

We do not guarantee that an event will take place, that it will be as described, that prizes will be paid, or that a venue is safe. We take no fees and handle no payments. Any arrangement about an event is between you and its organiser.

Some organisers collect registrations on their own form instead of in SyncZ. When they do, the app says so and sends you to their link. What happens on that form is between you, the organiser, and whoever provides the form — we never see what you enter there.

6. What the verification ticks mean

A verified organizer tick means somebody on our team looked at a college ID and a selfie and accepted them. A college tick means we have confirmed an account speaks for that institution. A SyncZ team tick marks our own accounts.

A tick is not an endorsement of any event, and it is not a promise that an organiser will behave well. We can remove a tick at any time, and changing your college removes an organizer tick automatically — it was approved against one institution and does not carry to another.

7. Your content

What you post stays yours. By posting it you give us permission to store it and show it to other users of SyncZ — that is all we need to run the app, and it ends when the content is removed.

You are responsible for what you post, including having the right to post any photo or poster you upload.

8. Leaving

You can deactivate your account at any time from Account settings. Your profile, posts and events are hidden from everyone else. Nothing is deleted, and signing back in restores all of it.

You cannot deactivate while an event you organise has students registered and has not finished — you either wait for it to finish or cancel it, and everyone registered is told. This exists so nobody is left signed up to an event whose organiser has vanished.

Deleting is the other option, and it is in the same place: Account settings → Delete account. It is permanent. Your profile, posts, events, comments and registrations go immediately, the images you uploaded are removed from storage straight after, and there is no grace period and no way for us to bring any of it back. The same rule about unfinished events applies. If something blocks you from deleting, write to admin@syncz.in and we will do it for you.

9. What we do not promise

SyncZ is provided as it is. We do not promise it will always be available, error-free, or that it will suit any particular purpose. We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for anything that happens at an event you found here.

Nothing in these terms limits any right you have under Indian consumer law that cannot be limited by agreement.

10. Changes

We may update these terms. The date at the top changes when we do, and significant changes will be notified in the app. Continuing to use SyncZ after a change means you accept it.

11. Law, and how to complain

These terms are governed by the laws of India, and the courts at Chennai have jurisdiction.

Under India's Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, complaints about content or about this app go to our Grievance Officer: Chandru M, admin@syncz.in. We will acknowledge a complaint within 24 hours and resolve it within 15 days.

1. What we collect

• Your email address, which you give us to sign in.
• If you use "Sign in with Google": your email address, your name and your Google profile picture. Google sends us those three things when you approve the sign-in, and nothing else. We never get your Google password and no access to your Google account.
• Your username, display name, college, department and profile photo, if you add one.
• What you post: events, posts, comments, likes and bookmarks.
• What you register for, and the details you type on a registration: contact name, department, phone number, team name and the names of your team-mates.
• If you apply to be a verified organizer: a photograph of your college ID card and a selfie, and your confirmation that you are 18 or older.
• Basic technical information needed to run the app, such as when your account was created and last changed.

2. What we do NOT collect

We do not track your location. The app shows how far an event is by comparing your college's coordinates with the event's college — it never asks your device where you are, and there is no location permission in this app.

We do not read your contacts, your messages, or anything else on your phone. The camera and photo permissions are used only when you choose to upload a picture.

We do not sell your data to anyone, and we do not use it for advertising.

3. Why we hold it, and for how long

Your account details run your account. Your posts and registrations are the app working as intended. Verification documents exist to check that someone claiming to run a campus event actually studies there — which is the whole reason a tick means anything.

We keep your information while your account exists. Deactivating hides it; ask us and we will delete it.

4. Who can see what

• Your username, display name, photo, college, department and posts are visible to other signed-in students.
• Your email address is not visible to any other user. It is stored separately from your public profile precisely so it cannot be read by anyone else.
• What you type on a registration — your phone number, your team-mates, your note — is visible only to the organiser of that specific event, and to our admins. It is not public and not visible to other participants.
• Your identity documents are visible only to our admins, for review.
• Nobody outside SyncZ is given access to any of it.

5. How verification documents are checked

A person on our team reviews them and decides. We may use automated checks to help — for example, comparing the face in your selfie with the photo on your ID, or reading the text on the card — but an automated check never grants or refuses a tick on its own.

You can ask us to delete your documents after a decision is made.

6. Where it is stored, and who processes it

Your data is stored on Supabase, in their Mumbai (India) region. We use Resend to send emails such as login and password-reset codes, and Amazon Web Services for the automated document checks described above. These providers process data on our instructions only.

If you choose "Sign in with Google", Google checks who you are and tells us the three things listed in section 1. Google is not acting on our instructions there — it is handling your Google account under its own privacy policy, and ours covers only what we do with what Google sends us. Using an email address and password instead keeps Google out of it entirely.

If an organiser uses their own registration form instead of SyncZ's, anything you enter there goes to that organiser and their form provider, and this policy does not cover it.

7. Your rights

Under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 you can ask us for a copy of your data, ask us to correct it, ask us to erase it, and complain about how we have handled it. Write to admin@syncz.in and we will respond.

You can correct most things yourself: your name, bio and photo from Edit profile, and your college and department from Account settings.

8. Children

The DPDP Act treats anyone under 18 as a child, and requires verifiable consent from a parent or guardian before a child's personal data is processed. We do not have a way to verify a parent. We are telling you that plainly rather than implying otherwise, and you should read the rest of this section knowing it.

What we do instead is limit the two things that carry the most risk. Under 18 you cannot publish a post, and you cannot become a verified organiser — which also means we never collect a photograph of your student ID or of your face, since that is what organiser verification requires. Everything else, including reporting anything that should not be here, is open to you. These limits are enforced in the database rather than in the app.

We are not going to describe that as protection it is not. It limits publishing and identity-document collection; it does not obtain the parental consent the Act asks for, and it does not stop us processing your data while you use SyncZ.

We ask for a date of birth once. If you are 18 or over we keep only the fact that you were checked, the date we asked, and the version of this notice you were shown — not your birthday. If you are not 18 yet we keep the date you turn 18, because an account that unlocks by itself has to know which day that is; that date is your birthday plus eighteen years, and we treat it as private accordingly. It is withheld from every other user, from search, and from anything another student can see.

We do not record a child's answer as consent. Under the Act a child's own consent is not a lawful basis without a verified parent, so filing it as consent would be recording something that did not happen.

What is still missing, said out loud: a way for a parent to give consent, to see what we hold, or to withdraw it; and a re-consent when you turn 18. If you are a parent or guardian and want your child's account removed, write to admin@syncz.in and we will remove it — you do not need to give a reason.

9. What you agreed to, and when

When you confirmed your age we recorded the date and the version of this notice that was on screen at the time. That record is yours to see — ask at admin@syncz.in — and it exists so that "you agreed" can never be a claim we make without being able to show what you agreed to.

You can withdraw by deleting your account, from Account settings. It takes effect immediately and does not require you to write to anyone.

10. Security, honestly stated

Passwords are stored only as a one-way hash — nobody at SyncZ can read yours, and we will never ask you for it. Access to your data is enforced by the database itself rather than only by the app, so a modified copy of the app cannot reach data that is not yours.

No system is perfectly secure. If we ever discover a breach affecting your data we will tell you and the Data Protection Board as the law requires.