Privacy Policy
MilanKnot
Last updated: 1 November 2026
MilanKnot is a matrimonial app. To do its job it has to hold things about you that are genuinely personal: your date of birth, your community, your family, your photographs, and what you are looking for in a marriage. This page says exactly what we hold, why, and who can see it.
It is written to be read, not to be survived. If anything here is unclear, please write to us at the address at the bottom and we will explain it.
Who we are
MilanKnot is operated and is trading as HemlaDella in India
For the purposes of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, we are the Data Fiduciary for the information described here, and you are the Data Principal.
What we collect, and why
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Mobile number | It is your account: you sign in with it and a code we send by SMS - there is no password. One account per number, which helps keep profiles genuine. Passed to another member only when you have both agreed to share contact details. |
| Email address (optional) | Only if you add one: for payment receipts and the email notices you choose. It is not used to sign in, and is not shown to other members. You can remove it at any time. |
| Name, date of birth, gender, height | Shown on your profile. Date of birth determines the age other people see and filter on. |
| Marital status, religion, community, sub-community, mother tongue, gothra | Shown on your profile and used for matching, because these are what families actually search on. |
| City, state, country | Shown on your profile and used for matching. |
| Education, occupation, employer, income range | Shown on your profile. |
| Family details, lifestyle, diet, habits, hobbies, languages | Shown on your profile. |
| Birth time and birth place, nakshatra, manglik status | Optional. Used to calculate horoscope compatibility if you or the other family want it. |
| Photographs | Shown on your profile, subject to your privacy setting. |
| Selfies for photo verification (optional) | If you choose to verify your photos, you take four live selfies in the app or on the website. Your phone or computer compares them with your profile photos; the comparison runs on your own device and no face measurements are sent to us or stored. The selfie pictures themselves are kept privately for up to 90 days so our owners can check a verification, then deleted. Only the result - "Photos verified" and the date - is shown on your profile. |
| Notification settings, and an address for each device you turn notifications on for (optional) | To tell you about a new message, interest, match, support reply or a photo that was not approved. The address is issued by your phone's or browser's push service and is used only to deliver our notifications. A notification says who and what - for example "Rohan sent you a message" - never the message itself, and you can hide names too. |
| DigiLocker verification (optional) | If you verify with DigiLocker, you sign in on DigiLocker's own page and agree to share. We compare the name, date of birth and gender on your Aadhaar-backed DigiLocker account with your profile, and look at the names of education documents in it. We keep only the result, the date, which checks passed, the names of those education documents, and a one-way fingerprint of the DigiLocker account so it cannot verify a second MilanKnot account. We never keep your Aadhaar number, your documents, or DigiLocker's copy of your details, and we end our access straight after the check. |
| How you use Discover | Which Discover view you open and where you sent an interest from (for example, the list or Today's picks) - no names or messages - so we can make matching easier to use. Kept for 180 days. |
| Profiles you open | When you open someone's profile, we record that you viewed it and when. The member whose profile it is can see that you viewed it if they have MilanKnot Plus. Anyone you have blocked, or who has blocked you, never sees this. |
| Payments for MilanKnot Plus (optional) | If you buy Plus: the plan, the amount, the date, and the payment reference from our payment provider. We never see or store your card number, UPI PIN or bank login - you pay on the payment provider's own page. |
| Blood group | Optional, shown on your profile. |
| Health details: blood group, thalassemia and sickle cell carrier status, hereditary conditions in the family (such as diabetes) and allergies | Optional health information. See below. |
| Credits (if you use them) | Your credit balance and a history of what you bought and spent them on, so the balance is right and a mistake can be put right. |
| LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat handles | Optional. Released only with your contact details, on the same terms. |
| Your partner preferences | To decide which profiles to show you. |
| Messages you send | To deliver them to the person you are talking to. |
| Voice and video calls, and their recordings | Calls between matched members go through MilanKnot so your phone number stays hidden. Every call is recorded for safety (sound only for a voice call), and you are asked to agree once before your first call. We also keep who called whom, when and for how long. A recording is deleted after 7 days, unless someone reports the call - then it is kept with the report as evidence, and only our safety team can see it. |
| Video introduction (optional) | A short video you choose to add to your profile. Before other members can see it, it is watermarked and checked automatically - pictures for explicit content, and what is said and shown for phone numbers, addresses and other private details - and then by our moderators. |
| Messages you send to support, and your rating of the help you got | To answer you, and to improve support. |
| Interests, shortlists, passes, blocks and reports | To run the product, and to act on reports of misuse. |
| Changes to your name, date of birth, gender, religion or community | Recorded so these cannot be changed repeatedly to mislead other members. |
| When you last opened the app | Shown to other members as an approximate band, such as "Active today". |
| How complete your profile is | Worked out from what you have filled in. Decides whether your profile is shown to others and whether it is kept - see "How long we keep it". |
| Error reports | When the app or website hits an error on your screen, it sends us the error message, which screen it happened on, the app version and whether it was the Android app or a browser, linked to your account. Never your profile, your messages or anything you typed. At most ten a session. Used only to find and fix problems; kept for 30 days. |
| Screening results and moderators' decisions | Whether each photograph was cleared, and what a moderator decided about photographs and reports, so that appeals and repeated misuse can be handled. |
Health information. Blood group, carrier status, hereditary conditions and allergies are health data, and we treat them differently from everything else. They are optional, and they are shown only to members you have matched with - never in Discover, and never before a match. Carrier status, conditions and allergies are shown even then only if you switch that on yourself, and you can switch it off at any time.
Who can see what
Not everything on your profile is visible to everyone, and this is enforced by the database rather than by the app on your phone. That distinction matters: it means a modified or older version of the app cannot show somebody information they are not entitled to.
| Information | Who can see it |
|---|---|
| Your age, photos and profile details, your surname and your profile ID | Signed-in members, subject to your photo privacy setting |
| Your first name | Only members you have matched with. Before that, other members see it shortened (for example "H*** Krishnan"). |
| Your photographs, if you set them to private | Only members you have matched with |
| Your mobile number and social handles | Only after you and the other member have both agreed to share contact details. Before that, your number is not sent to their device at all. |
| Your blood group | Only members you have matched with |
| Your carrier status, hereditary conditions and allergies | Only members you have matched with, and only if you turn it on |
| Whether your last photo check passed, and why not | Only you. Other members see only which of your photos are verified. |
| Your verification selfies | MilanKnot's owners; a support team member only while you have an open support request with us. Every look is recorded. |
| Your messages | Only you and the person you are writing to |
| Recordings of your calls | Nobody, unless someone reports the call: then only our safety team, as evidence |
| Your video introduction | Our moderators first; then signed-in members, as with your photos |
| Your messages to support | Our support staff |
| Your email address, if you add one | Nobody. It is used only for receipts and the email notices you choose. |
| Your preferences, blocks and passes | Nobody. A member is never told they were passed over or blocked. |
| Photographs waiting for review, and reports about an account | Our moderators, only to decide whether they break our rules |
What we do not do
- We do not sell your personal data. Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to anyone.
- We do not share your profile with other matrimonial sites or partner networks.
- We do not use your photographs for advertising or promotion.
- We do not read your messages for advertising purposes.
- We do not run third-party advertising trackers inside the app.
Who processes data for us
We use a small number of service providers, each for one job:
- Supabase hosts the database, file storage and sign-in.
- MSG91 sends the sign-in codes by SMS. It receives your mobile number and the code, nothing else about you.
- Cloudflare Turnstile checks, when a sign-in code is asked for, that the request comes from a person and not a program. It sees the signals from your browser or phone that it needs for that check - not your profile or your number.
- Resend sends emails to members who have added an email address: payment receipts, warnings before an unfinished profile is deleted, and - unless you switch it off - a daily summary when something is waiting and you have not opened MilanKnot for a day (counts only, no names).
- Google Play distributes the app.
- GetStream connects voice and video calls between members and makes the safety recordings. It receives only your MilanKnot profile ID - never your name or number.
- Bunny.net (Bunny Stream) stores and plays video introductions and keeps call recordings until they are deleted. Videos play only inside MilanKnot, watermarked, through links that expire.
- Cloudflare Workers AI turns what is said in a video introduction into text and checks it for unsafe content and private details. The video's sound is sent only to get that result.
- DigiLocker (Government of India, Ministry of Electronics and IT) verifies your identity and education if you choose to, as described above.
- PayU Payments takes payments for MilanKnot Plus and for credits. You pay on PayU's own page; it receives your first name, mobile number, email and the amount, and tells us whether the payment succeeded. For a plan that renews, it also keeps the UPI Autopay or card mandate you approve, which we use only to charge each renewal.
- Google Firebase Cloud Messaging, and the push service built into your web browser (run by Google, Mozilla, Apple or Microsoft, depending on the browser), deliver notifications if you turn them on. They receive the device address and the short notification text - never your messages or profile.
- Google Cloud Vision checks each uploaded photograph for explicit or violent content before other members can see it. The image is sent only to get that result. A photograph it cannot clear is held until one of our moderators has looked at it.
- OpenAI or Anthropic (Claude) - one of the two at a time - powers MilanKnot Assistant, which answers Help & support requests at any hour. When you write to support, the assistant receives your messages in that request and a few facts about your own account needed to answer (your plan and its end date, auto-renew, credit balance, and whether your profiles are shown, waiting for photo checks or missing details). It never receives other members' details, your photos or your conversations with matches. Anything it cannot settle - and anything about money or safety - goes to our team. Neither provider uses this data to train its models.
Place names outside India come from the Countries States Cities Database (github.com/dr5hn/countries-states-cities-database), used under the Open Database License (ODbL); places in India come from India Post's All India Pincode Directory.
These providers act on our instructions. They are not permitted to use your data for their own purposes.
Where your data is held
Your data is stored on servers operated by our hosting provider. Some of these may be located outside India. Where that is the case, we rely on the provider's contractual commitments to protect the data to the standard described here.
How long we keep it
- While your account exists, we keep your profile, messages and settings so the product works.
- If you delete your account, it is hidden from everyone at once and kept for 30 days, so you can change your mind: sign in within 30 days and choose Restore. After that, your profile, photographs, messages, preferences and contact details are deleted, and stored photograph files are removed within a day. Deleting one profile of an account that has several works the same way.
- If your profile is never finished - it does not reach 70% complete within 30 days of signing up - it is deleted, with its photographs. We warn you in the app, and by email a week and two days before.
- If a finished profile falls below 70%, it is hidden straight away and deleted after 7 days unless it is completed again. The app warns you when it happens, and we email you before it is deleted.
- A record that a profile was deleted for being unfinished keeps only its internal id and dates, not its contents.
- Reports of misuse about an account are kept for up to three years after that account is deleted, together with the reported profile's name, email address, phone number and main photograph, and the name of the member who reported it. Only MilanKnot's owners can see this, and every time they look is recorded. It lets us recognise the person if they return with a new account; otherwise somebody could remove a report by deleting and recreating their account, and the person who reported them would be no safer. Chats with other members and the rest of the account are not kept, except as below.
- When a member reports another, the messages between those two members, and any screenshots the reporter attaches, are copied into the report so that MilanKnot's owners can review what happened. The member reporting is told this before they send the report. These copies are kept with the report, for as long as the report is kept, and are never used for anything else.
- Call recordings are deleted 7 days after the call, unless the call is reported; a reported call's recording is kept with the report, as above.
- Selfies from photo verification are deleted 90 days after they were taken, or with your profile if that is sooner.
- Profile views are deleted after 90 days.
- Error reports from the app or website are deleted after 30 days.
- Payment records are kept for eight years after the payment, because tax law requires it, even if you delete your account; only the amount, date, plan and payment reference are kept.
- Notifications: a device's address is removed when you sign out on it, turn notifications off, the push service tells us it no longer works, or it has not been used for 120 days. A record of each notification sent is kept for 30 days, so delivery problems can be looked into, then deleted.
- Your conversations with our support team, including any rating you gave, are kept for up to three years after your account is deleted, with the name and email you used, so that complaints and repeated problems can be looked into.
Your rights
Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 you have the right to:
- Know what personal data we hold about you and what we do with it.
- Correct anything that is wrong, incomplete or out of date.
- Erase your data, by deleting your account.
- Withdraw consent for anything you gave it for, for example by switching off carrier status or by making your photographs private.
- Complain to us, and if we do not resolve it, to the Data Protection Board of India.
- Nominate another person to exercise these rights on your behalf in the event of your death or incapacity.
Deleting your account
You can delete your account from inside the app or on the website: My Profile, then Delete my account. It is hidden from everyone immediately and removed for good after 30 days, unless you sign in before then and choose to restore it.
If you can no longer sign in, write to us at the address below, or on WhatsApp, giving the mobile number on the account. We will confirm it is you and delete it for you.
Some fields you cannot change yourself
Your name, date of birth and gender can be corrected freely for the first seven days after you sign up. After that they are fixed, and religion, community, mother tongue and gothra can be changed only occasionally. This is deliberate: it stops somebody matching with people as one person and then becoming another. If one of these is genuinely recorded wrongly, write to us and we will correct it.
Age
MilanKnot is for adults looking to marry. You must be at least 18 years old to create an account, and the app does not accept a date of birth under 18. We do not knowingly hold data about children. If you believe a child has created an account, please tell us and we will remove it.
Security
Access to every piece of data described here is controlled by rules enforced in the database itself, not by the app. Photographs are held in private storage and served through short-lived links rather than public addresses. Your mobile number is held separately from your profile so that it cannot be read by members you have not shared it with.
No system is perfect. If you find a security problem, please tell us at the address below rather than posting it publicly, and we will fix it.
Changes to this policy
If we change this policy in a way that materially affects you, we will say so in the app before the change takes effect. The date at the top always shows the current version.
Contact and grievances
For any question about this policy, or to exercise any of the rights above:
Grievance Officer: Hemlata Jaiswal
Email: support@milanknot.com
Entity: trading as HemlaDella
We aim to respond within 7 working days, and in any case within the period required by law.