Privacy policy

Dynamo Geeks (dynamogeeks.com) is a developer community: articles, questions and answers, quick updates, polls, images and video, topics and topic discussions, real-time chat and DMs (including end-to-end encrypted "secret chats"), reputation and badges, a leaderboard, people discovery, jobs, events and a newsletter. This policy explains what we collect to run that, and what we do and do not do with it.

The site is built and run by Playxoft Studios Private Limited ("Playxoft", "we", "us"), a private limited company registered in Tamil Nadu, India (CIN U58203TN2025PTC178070). We are the data controller for the personal data described here, except where this policy says a particular piece of data is processed end-to-end and unreadable to us.

Search terms that bring people to this page include "Dynamo Geeks privacy policy", "does Dynamo Geeks read my chats" and "how do I delete my Dynamo Geeks account". If you came here for one of those, the short answers are in the FAQ at the bottom.

We collect what we need to run a developer community, nothing more:

• Account information. Your email address and a hashed password (or a linked Google/GitHub sign-in), handled by Firebase Authentication, a Google product. We never see or store your raw password ourselves.
• Profile information. Display name, username, bio, avatar, job title, social links, and the optional fields that power people discovery: your country (a two-letter code, for "near you" matching and job targeting), your city (free text you type yourself and that other members see as-is), your time zone (an IANA zone like "Asia/Kolkata", for scheduling things like AMAs across time zones), and the languages you say you speak (for "speaks your language" matching). All of these are optional and you control them in Settings.
• Content you post. Articles, questions, answers, quick updates, polls, images, video embeds, comments, likes, saves, follows, and the topics you join. Most of this is public by design, because it is what the community reads.
• Chat messages and DMs. Ordinary chat rooms and direct messages are stored on our servers (in Neon Postgres and, for media, Cloudflare R2) so that chat history, search and moderation work. Secret chats are different: see the dedicated section below.
• Reading history. When you are signed in, we keep a short record of which posts you have opened and when, used only to shape your own "For you" feed (so you see less of what you have already read) and to compute your own reading list. It is not shown to other members and is not sold or shared.
• Reports. If you report a post, comment, message, job or another member, we store who reported it, what was reported, the reason you picked, and any note you add, so a moderator can review it.
• Payment information. If you buy Pro, Recruiter, a Showcase placement or a featured job, your card details go directly to Dodo Payments; we receive only the result (amount, currency, status, a reference id), never your full card number.
• Device and usage data. Standard web request data (what Cloudflare, as our host, sees to serve any website: IP address at the network edge, browser type, pages requested) and anonymous, cookieless page-view and performance counts from Cloudflare Web Analytics. See Cookies and local storage for what is and is not a cookie.

We keep the list of companies who can see any of your data short, and every one of them processes it only to provide a specific part of the service:

• Firebase Authentication (Google LLC). Handles sign-in and account security: your email, your hashed password or linked social account, and session tokens. Google's own privacy policy covers how it processes this.
• Neon, Inc. (Neon Postgres). Our primary database. Almost everything you create on the site, your profile, posts, comments, chat messages in ordinary rooms, reports, lives here, encrypted at rest by Neon.
• Cloudflare, Inc. Our hosting and infrastructure provider, in several roles: it runs the Cloudflare Worker that serves every page and API request, stores uploaded images and video and encrypted chat attachments in R2 (object storage), runs Turnstile (a CAPTCHA alternative that checks you are not a bot on sign-up and a few other forms, without tracking you across the web), and provides two separate, cookieless measurement tools: Web Analytics (page views and Core Web Vitals) and Analytics Engine (aggregate product counters such as "how many sign-ups this week", never tied to anything we would call personal data beyond an internal user id).
• Dodo Payments. Our payment processor and, importantly, our merchant of record for every paid product (Pro, Recruiter, Showcase, featured jobs). That means Dodo Payments is the entity that actually sells you the product, collects the money, and handles sales tax and VAT/GST in your country; we never hold your card number.
• ZeptoMail (Zoho). Our transactional email provider: account confirmation, password reset, notification emails, newsletter confirmation and the weekly digest. It sees your email address and the content of the email we ask it to send.
• Tinybird. Planned, not yet in production. If and when we turn this on, it will process aggregate event analytics (not chat content, not post content) to help us understand how the site is used. This policy will be updated before that happens, with a note here naming the exact events involved.

One tool that does not process any member's personal data: Doppler, which we use internally to store our own infrastructure secrets (API keys, database connection strings). It never holds a member's email, profile or content.

• To create and secure your account, and to let you sign in.
• To show your content, profile and activity to other members, the way a social platform has to.
• To rank and personalise your "For you" feed, using your reading history, likes, saves and the topics you follow.
• To power people discovery: "near you", "speaks your language" and time-zone-aware event scheduling, from the location and language fields you choose to fill in.
• To calculate reputation, badges and the leaderboard from your genuine contributions. Reputation is never for sale and is not affected by anything in this policy.
• To send transactional email (confirmations, notifications, the digest you opted into) and, if you choose, newsletter emails, always with a one-click unsubscribe.
• To review reports, enforce our community guidelines, and keep the site safe.
• To process payments for Pro, Recruiter, Showcase and featured jobs.
• To detect and prevent fraud, spam and abuse, including automated bot checks (Turnstile) on forms that are frequently targeted.
• To understand overall usage in aggregate (page views, performance, feature adoption) so we can improve the product. These numbers are never sold.
• To comply with legal obligations, and to respond to lawful requests.

A secret chat is a conversation you deliberately start as end-to-end encrypted. The encryption keys are generated inside your browser using the WebCrypto API and never leave the device they were created on; they are stored as non-extractable browser keys, which means no code, not ours, not a browser extension's, not even a court order served on us, can pull the raw key bytes out of your device. Every message is encrypted on your device before it is sent and decrypted only on the recipient's device.

What this means in practice: we cannot read your secret chats. Our servers see and store only encrypted bytes (ciphertext) that we cannot decrypt, plus the minimum metadata needed to route a message to the right device (who the conversation is between, and roughly when a message was sent). We cannot hand over the contents of a secret chat to anyone, including law enforcement, because we do not hold the keys.

Each device you use has its own key pair. If you add a new device, it gets new keys, and the app will show you (and the other side) a "safety number" you can compare to confirm you are really talking to who you think you are, the standard way end-to-end encrypted apps let you verify a conversation has not been intercepted.

Ordinary chat rooms and direct messages that are not marked "secret" are not end-to-end encrypted. They are stored on our servers like any other content you post, so that features like chat search and history work, and so that our moderation team can review them if they are reported for abuse, harassment or illegal content. If privacy from us specifically matters for a conversation, start it as a secret chat.

We use very little, and none of it is advertising tracking:

• Session cookie. One cookie, set by our sign-in system (next-firebase-auth-edge), keeps you signed in. It is strictly necessary: without it, the site cannot tell you are logged in. We do not need, and do not ask for, cookie consent for this one, because it is essential to the service you asked for.
• Theme preference. Stored in your browser's local storage (not a cookie), remembering whether you prefer light or dark mode.
• Feed preferences. Also local storage, not cookies: dg:home-order remembers how you like your home feed sorted, and dg:taste remembers, on your own device, the tags of posts you have opened recently, so a signed-out visitor still gets a feed that leans towards what they actually read. Neither is sent anywhere except back to us as part of loading your feed, and neither identifies you by name.
• No advertising cookies. We do not run third-party ad networks and do not use cookies to track you across other websites.
• Cloudflare Web Analytics is cookieless by design: it counts page views and performance without placing a tracking cookie or fingerprinting your browser.

Local storage and cookies both live in your own browser. You can clear them at any time in your browser's settings; doing so will sign you out and reset your theme and feed preferences, but will not delete your account or content.

• The processors listed above (Firebase/Google, Neon, Cloudflare, Dodo Payments, ZeptoMail), each only for the purpose described.
• Other members, for what you choose to make public. Your posts, comments, profile and public activity are visible to anyone, because that is how the community works. Your email address is never shown publicly, in a post, in a profile, or in this site's structured data (what search engines read).
• Recruiters, only if you opt in. If you mark yourself "open to work", recruiters with a paid Recruiter account can find you in search by topic reputation, location and role, and contact you through an in-app message. We never reveal your email address to a recruiter, and you can switch "open to work" off at any time.
• Moderators, for reported content. If something you post or send in an ordinary (non-secret) chat is reported, a moderator may read it to decide whether it breaks our guidelines.
• Sponsors and advertisers never receive personal data. A Showcase placement is a labelled sponsored card shown to everyone in a feed; the sponsor does not get a list of who saw or clicked it, only aggregate counts.
• Legal requirements. We may disclose information if required by law, a valid court order, or to protect the rights, property or safety of Dynamo Geeks, our members or the public. As explained above, this cannot include the contents of a secret chat, because we do not have the keys to decrypt it.
• Business transfers. If Playxoft Studios Private Limited is ever involved in a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, member data may transfer as part of that, subject to this policy (or a successor policy we will tell you about).

We do not sell personal data to third parties, and we never will.

• Account and profile data for as long as your account is active, and for a reasonable period after deletion to prevent fraud and comply with legal obligations (typically no more than 90 days, except where law requires longer).
• Public content (posts, comments, answers) for as long as your account exists, because other members rely on it (an accepted answer helps the next person with the same problem). If you delete a post, it is removed; if you delete your account, your content is handled as described in "Contact and grievance officer" below.
• Reading history on a rolling basis, kept only long enough to be useful for personalising your feed.
• Chat messages in ordinary rooms and DMs for as long as the conversation exists, unless you or the other participant deletes it. Secret chat ciphertext is retained on our servers only until it has been delivered and can be removed on request, but remember: we cannot read it either way.
• Reports are kept for our own record-keeping and abuse-pattern detection, even after the reported content is removed.
• Payment records are kept as long as tax and accounting law requires (commonly several years), handled primarily by Dodo Payments as merchant of record.
• Aggregate analytics (Cloudflare Web Analytics, Analytics Engine counters) are kept in summarised, low-resolution form and are not tied to an identifiable person for longer than needed to compute the aggregate.

Wherever you are, you can ask us to access, correct, export or delete your personal data by writing to support@dynamogeeks.com. Depending on where you live, you also have specific rights under local law:

• India, Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act). You have the right to access your personal data, correct and update it, have it erased, nominate someone to exercise your rights if you become unable to, and withdraw consent you previously gave. You can also file a complaint with our grievance officer (below) and, if unresolved, with the Data Protection Board of India.
• European Union and United Kingdom, GDPR. You have the right to access, rectify, erase and port your data, to restrict or object to certain processing, and to lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority. Where we rely on your consent (for example, the newsletter), you can withdraw it at any time.
• California, CCPA/CPRA. You have the right to know what personal information we collect and why, to delete it, to correct it, and to opt out of its "sale" or "sharing" (we do not sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising, so there is nothing to opt out of, but you can still ask). We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of these rights.

We will ask you to verify your identity before acting on a request involving your account, so that nobody else can request access to or deletion of your data by pretending to be you.

Dynamo Geeks is not directed at children. You must be at least 13 years old to create an account, or 16 where your local law sets a higher minimum age for using an online service without parental consent (this applies in parts of the EU and UK under GDPR). We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under these ages. If you believe a child has created an account, email us at support@dynamogeeks.com and we will investigate and remove the account if confirmed.

Dynamo Geeks is run from India, and our processors (Firebase/Google, Neon, Cloudflare, Dodo Payments, ZeptoMail) operate global infrastructure, so your data may be processed in countries other than the one you live in, including the United States and the European Union. Where EU or UK personal data is transferred outside those areas, we and our processors rely on recognised safeguards such as Standard Contractual Clauses. Cloudflare in particular is built on a globally distributed network by design, so that pages load quickly wherever you are; this is a technical necessity of running the service, not a choice to move your data to any one jurisdiction.

• Passwords are never stored by us; Firebase Authentication handles them.
• Data in our database (Neon) is encrypted at rest, and all traffic to and from the site runs over HTTPS/TLS.
• Secret chats use end-to-end encryption with non-extractable device keys, described above.
• Turnstile and rate limits on sign-up, login and sensitive forms reduce automated abuse.
• Access to production systems and the database is limited to people who need it to run the service.

No system is perfectly secure. If you believe you have found a security vulnerability, please follow the security research rules in our community guidelines and report it to us privately before telling anyone else.

We may update this policy as the product changes, for example when a planned processor like Tinybird actually goes live. We will update the "last updated" date at the top of this page, and for material changes (a new category of data, a new processor who sees personal data, a change to your rights) we will also say so in the app or by email before the change takes effect.

Questions about this policy, or to exercise any of the rights above (access, correction, export or deletion of your data), email support@dynamogeeks.com. For a request to delete your account specifically, see the FAQ below; self-serve deletion is not built yet, so we handle it by hand after confirming it is you.

Under the DPDP Act, our grievance officer for data protection matters in India is reachable at the same address, or by post at:

How do I delete my Dynamo Geeks account?

Email us at the address on this page and ask for your account to be deleted. We do not yet have a self-serve "delete my account" button in Settings; until we do, a human on our side does it after confirming it is really you. We aim to act within 30 days, and sooner where the law requires it.

Can I get a copy of my data?

Yes. Email us and ask for an export. We will send you your posts, comments, profile fields and account details in a common format (CSV or JSON). We do not have an automated "download my data" button yet; this is a manual process while we build one.

Can Dynamo Geeks read my secret chats?

No. Secret chats are end-to-end encrypted on your device before they ever leave it. Our servers store only unreadable ciphertext and route it between devices; we have no copy of the keys needed to read it, and no feature exists on our side to decrypt it, even if asked by a court or a government. Ordinary chats and DMs (not marked "secret") are not end-to-end encrypted and can be read by our moderation team when investigating a report.

Do you sell my personal data?

No, and we never will. We make money from sponsored placements, Pro and Recruiter subscriptions, and featured job listings, none of which involve selling anyone’s personal data to advertisers or data brokers. See "Who we share data with" below for the handful of processors who do see some of your data in order to run the service.

Is Dynamo Geeks free to use?

Yes. Reading, writing, asking and answering questions, chatting, and joining topics are free. Pro (for writers) and Recruiter (for hiring) are optional paid upgrades, and businesses can pay for a labelled Showcase placement. None of that is required to use the site.