Privacy
This policy explains what Tuffclassified collects about you, why, who else sees it, how long we keep it, and what you can make us do about it. It is written to be read, not to be survived. Last updated 1 August 2026.
Tuffclassified is a classifieds site. We do not write the listings on it — the people who use it do. In the language of the Information Technology Act, 2000 we are an intermediary, and in the language of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 we are a Data Fiduciary for the personal data described here. Section 5A of our Terms & Conditions names the person you complain to, and this policy repeats those details at the end.
1. WHAT WE COLLECT
1.1 What you give us
| What | When | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Name, email address, password | Registering | To have an account at all, to sign you in, and to reach you about it |
| Phone number, location, profile photo, website | Your profile, if you fill them in | So buyers can contact and place you. Optional, and you may remove them |
| Listing text, photos, price, category, location | Posting a listing | To publish it. A listing is public — anything in it is visible to anyone |
| Message contents, your name and email | Contacting a seller or us | To pass the message on, and to answer it |
| Name, address, phone, email, signature | Filing an intellectual-property complaint | The law requires those particulars, and we pass your name, company and email to the seller you complained about |
| Search terms | Searching | To return results, and in aggregate to see what people look for and cannot find |
1.2 What we record without asking
- Your IP address, recorded against your account when you register, against each listing when you post it, against abuse reports, and against an intellectual-property complaint if you file one. We use it to trace fraud and abuse and to enforce our Terms. It is the one thing here we keep for as long as the record it is attached to.
- Ordinary web server logs — the page requested, the time, the browser's user agent, the referring page.
- Which listings get viewed, as a count per listing. We do not build a per-person browsing history.
1.3 Cookies
We use as few as we can get away with, and none of them for advertising by us:
- a session cookie, so you stay signed in;
- a sign-in flag, so our cache knows to build your pages for you rather than serve you somebody else's;
- a language cookie, if you pick a language, which expires after a day;
- a favourites cookie, so a listing you save stays saved.
Third parties named in section 3 set their own; those are theirs, not ours, and section 3 says what they are for. You can refuse cookies in your browser. If you refuse ours you cannot sign in, because that is the cookie that signs you in.
1.4 Children
Tuffclassified is not for people under 18 and we do not knowingly keep an account for one. Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 a child's data needs verifiable parental consent, and we do not track children or target advertising at them. If you believe a child has an account here, tell the Grievance Officer and we will remove it.
2. WHY WE ARE ALLOWED TO HOLD IT
Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 we hold your data on one of two footings. Most of it is on your consent, given when you registered or when you filled a field in, for the purposes set out in section 1 and no others. The rest is on legitimate uses the Act allows without separate consent — keeping the site secure, meeting a legal obligation, and complying with a court order or a lawful government request.
You may withdraw consent at any time, as easily as you gave it, by deleting your account (section 6). Withdrawing it does not unwind what was lawfully done beforehand, and it does not erase a record we are required to keep — an abuse report or a decided complaint, for instance.
3. WHO ELSE SEES IT
We do not sell your personal data, and we never have. It is shared only as follows.
3.1 Other people using the site
Your listings, your public profile, and whatever you chose to put in them are public. If you put your phone number on a listing, everyone can see your phone number. If you file an intellectual-property complaint, the seller is told your name, your company and your email, because they are entitled to answer the person accusing them.
3.2 Services we use to run the site
| Who | What reaches them | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | Your IP address and request details; a token when you complete the anti-bot check on a form | Serving and protecting the site, and keeping bots off our forms |
| StopForumSpam | The email address and IP address used to register | Checking a new account against a public register of known spam sources |
| Google AdSense | Set by Google directly in your browser, on their own terms | Advertising, which is what pays for the site |
| Google Workspace | The contents of email we send you | Sending it |
| Our hosting and object storage | Everything, at rest | Running the servers and holding uploaded photos |
Google's use of advertising cookies is governed by Google's own policies, which you can read and change at policies.google.com/technologies/ads. We do not give Google your name, your email address or your phone number.
3.3 Automated processing we do ourselves
Three things on this site read listings by machine, all of them on our own servers, and none of them profile you as a person:
- a search index, so a search returns results;
- a similarity model over listing titles, which is what produces "related listings";
- a prohibited-content classifier, which compares a listing against examples of listings we have already banned and flags likely matches for a human to look at.
Where that classifier results in a listing being blocked automatically, you can have that decision reviewed by a person: write to the Grievance Officer.
3.4 Law and safety
We disclose data where we are required to by law, on the order of a competent court or a lawful request from a government agency, and where we genuinely believe it necessary to prevent fraud, to enforce our Terms, or to protect somebody's safety.
4. WHERE IT IS KEPT, AND FOR HOW LONG
Our servers are in India. Some of the services in section 3 are outside it, so some data is processed abroad on their infrastructure.
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Your account and profile | Until you delete it |
| Your listings | Until they expire or you delete them; expired listings are removed on a schedule |
| Messages sent through the site | Kept while the listing lives, then removed with it |
| Server logs | A short rolling window, then overwritten |
| Abuse reports and moderation decisions | Kept, including after the listing is gone — they are the record of why we acted |
| Intellectual-property complaints | Kept as a permanent register, because we may have to produce it |
| Search terms | Kept in aggregate; not tied to you |
| Backups | Deleted content persists in backups until those are overwritten on their ordinary cycle. We do not edit individual records out of a backup |
5. HOW IT IS PROTECTED
The site is served over HTTPS. Passwords are stored hashed with bcrypt and cannot be read back by us or by anyone who obtains the database — if you have forgotten yours we can only reset it, not tell you what it was. Access to the servers is restricted and keyed. Forms carry anti-bot and anti-forgery checks.
None of that is a guarantee, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something. If a breach occurs that is likely to affect you, we will notify you and the Data Protection Board of India as the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 requires.
6. WHAT YOU CAN MAKE US DO
Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 you have the rights below. The first two do not need us at all — they are buttons on your own account page, and they work immediately.
- Get a copy of your data. Account settings → Download my data. It gives you a file containing your profile, your listings and your alerts.
- Delete your account. Account settings → Delete account. This removes your account and your listings and cannot be undone.
- Correct anything wrong. Most of it you can edit yourself; for the rest, ask.
- Complain, and be answered. Section 7.
- Nominate someone to exercise these rights for you if you die or become incapable. Ask the Grievance Officer.
Three honest limits. Deleting your account does not reach a copy somebody else already made of a public listing — search engines, screenshots, scrapers — because that copy was never ours to delete. Deleted content persists in our backups until they are overwritten on their ordinary cycle; we do not edit individual records out of a backup, and nobody who tells you they do is describing a real system. And we keep abuse reports and decided complaints after an account is gone, because they are the record of a decision we may have to stand behind.
Beyond those, deletion is deletion. The licence you give us over what you post is limited to running and promoting the site, and it ends when you delete the content or your account — see section 14 of the Terms & Conditions, which says the same thing in the same words.
The Act also asks something of you: do not file a false or frivolous complaint, and do not impersonate somebody else when exercising these rights.
7. COMPLAINTS
Write to our Grievance Officer, who is the same person named in the Terms:
Navjot Tomer
Grievance Officer, Tuffclassified
16-Ujjwal, Mahanagar Colony
Bareilly, 243001
U.P. India
Email: admin@tuffclassified.com
We acknowledge a complaint within 24 hours and decide it within 15 days, as rule 3(2)(a) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 requires.
If we do not answer you, or you are not satisfied with how we did, you may take the matter to the Data Protection Board of India.
8. CHANGES
We will update this policy when what we do changes. The date at the top says when it last did. Where a change materially affects you we will tell you rather than rely on you re-reading the page.