PRIVACY POLICY
Privacy Policy — Pharmocia (Customer App)
Last updated: 15 August 2026
Applies to: the Pharmocia customer mobile app for Android and iOS
Contact: pharmocia07@gmail.com
1. Introduction
Pharmocia is an online pharmacy platform that connects you with licensed partner pharmacies for the sale and delivery of medicines and healthcare products. This policy explains what personal data the customer app collects, why we collect it, who we share it with, and the choices and rights you have.
Because the app handles prescriptions, allergies, medical conditions and other health information, we treat a large part of this data as sensitive personal data and apply stricter handling to it.
This policy is written for compliance with India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 ("DPDP Act"), the Information Technology (Reasonable Security Practices and Procedures and Sensitive Personal Data or Information) Rules, 2011, and the disclosure requirements of the Google Play and Apple App Store data-safety programmes.
By creating an account, placing an order or uploading a prescription, you agree to the practices described here.
A separate policy covers the Pharmocia Partner app used by pharmacies.
2. Who we are
Pharmocia operates the platform described in this policy and acts as the data fiduciary (controller) for the personal data below.
| Operating entity | Pharmocia |
| Support and privacy contact | pharmocia07@gmail.com |
| Grievance Officer | Contact via pharmocia07@gmail.com with the subject line "Grievance Officer" |
| Data Protection Officer | Contact via pharmocia07@gmail.com with the subject line "Data Protection" |
Partner pharmacies are independent, licensed businesses. When a partner pharmacy dispenses your order, it processes your data both on our instructions and, for its own statutory pharmacy record-keeping, as an independent data fiduciary.
3. What the app does
Browse and search the catalogue, scan medicine barcodes, upload prescriptions, manage delivery addresses and family profiles, place and track orders, run medicine subscriptions and refill reminders, hold a wallet balance, use referrals and offers, and raise support tickets.
4. Data we collect
4.1 Data you give us
Account and identity
- Mobile phone number (your primary identifier and login)
- Name
- Email address, where you provide one
- City
- Date of birth and gender, where you provide them
- Referral code, and the code of the customer who referred you
Health data (sensitive)
- Prescription images and files you upload, and the doctor name, clinic name, prescribed-on date and validity date recorded from them
- Medicine names and dosages read from your prescription
- Allergies, medical conditions and blood group you enter in your health profile
- Emergency contact details you enter
- Health details you add for family members you manage on your account — name, relationship, date of birth, gender, allergies and conditions
- The medicines you order, request, subscribe to, wishlist or set reminders for, which necessarily reveal health information
Delivery
- Delivery addresses: label, recipient name, recipient phone, address lines, landmark, city, state, postal code, and latitude/longitude where available
- Delivery notes you add to an order
Payments
- Payment mode chosen (UPI, card, net banking, wallet or cash on delivery)
- Wallet balance and wallet transaction history
- Payment references and status returned by our payment provider
- Promotion and offer redemptions
We do not store your full card number, CVV or UPI PIN. Online card, UPI and net-banking payments are completed through our payment provider, and we retain only a payment reference and the outcome.
Support
- Support tickets, the messages in them, and any attachments you send
- Questions you put to the in-app support assistant
4.2 Data collected automatically
- Device push token and platform (Android, iOS or web) when you enable notifications, so we can send order updates
- Session records, including IP address and app user agent, kept against your login sessions so you can be signed out and sessions revoked
- Login security records: the phone number an OTP was requested for, the requesting IP address, attempt counts and outcomes, used to rate-limit and block abuse
- In-app analytics events: an event name, a session identifier, and event properties such as which screens or flows were used, linked to your account identifier where you are signed in
- Time zone, defaulting to Asia/Kolkata, used to schedule reminders and subscription runs at a sensible hour
- Order and delivery timestamps, status history and ETA
4.3 Device permissions
The app requests only the permissions it needs, and only at the point of use. Declining a permission disables that feature and nothing else.
| Permission | Platform | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Camera | Android, iOS | Scan medicine barcodes and photograph a prescription |
| Photo library / files | iOS, Android | Select an existing prescription image or document to upload |
| Notifications | Android, iOS | Order status, prescription verification, refill reminders |
The app does not request background location, contacts, microphone, call logs, SMS reading or advertising identifiers. Delivery coordinates come from the address you save, not from continuous device tracking.
4.4 Data stored on your device
- Authentication tokens, held in the device's encrypted secure storage (Android Keystore / iOS Keychain)
- Local preferences such as your theme choice
4.5 What we do not collect
We do not knowingly collect data from children. The app is for adults aged 18 and over. Where you order for a child as a family member on your account, you are responsible for that information and confirm you are their parent or lawful guardian. We do not sell personal data, and we do not use your health data for advertising or profiling.
5. Why we use your data, and our legal basis
| Purpose | Data used | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Create and secure your account | Phone, OTP records, session and device records, IP | Performance of a contract; legitimate use for security |
| Take, route and deliver orders | Name, phone, address, coordinates, order and cart contents | Performance of a contract |
| Verify prescriptions before dispensing prescription-only medicines | Prescription image, extracted medicines and dosages, patient details | Legal obligation under the Drugs and Cosmetics Rules; performance of a contract |
| Prepare a draft transcription of a prescription for a pharmacist to check | Prescription image | Performance of a contract; see Section 7 |
| Check a prescription for signs of reuse or tampering | Prescription file and its metadata | Legal obligation; prevention of fraud |
| Process payments, refunds and wallet credits | Payment reference, amounts, order details | Performance of a contract |
| Issue GST-compliant invoices and keep tax records | Order, tax and customer details | Legal obligation |
| Send order, prescription and delivery notifications | Phone, email, push token | Performance of a contract |
| Refill reminders and subscription deliveries | Reminder and subscription settings, time zone | Consent, withdrawable at any time |
| Marketing messages, offers, banners and referrals | Contact details, referral code | Consent, withdrawable at any time |
| Answer support tickets and assistant questions | Ticket content, order and account context | Performance of a contract |
| Detect fraud, abuse and OTP flooding; rate-limit logins | IP, phone, attempt records | Legitimate use; security |
| Understand and improve how the app is used | Analytics events, session identifier | Legitimate use |
6. Who we share your data with
We share only what is needed, and only with the following recipients.
Partner pharmacies. The pharmacy assigned to your order receives your name, delivery address and phone, the items ordered, your order notes, and — where the order requires it — your prescription and the patient details on it. A registered pharmacist at that pharmacy reviews the prescription before any prescription-only medicine is dispensed. Pharmacies see the orders routed to them; they do not get access to your wider order history or health profile.
Delivery partners. Where an order is delivered by a courier network (including Uber Direct, where enabled for your area), we share the pickup and drop addresses, the recipient name and phone, and the order reference so the delivery can be completed and tracked. Riders are not given your prescription or your health profile.
Payment provider. Payment amount, currency, method, an idempotency key and an opaque customer reference are sent to complete a charge or a refund. Card and UPI credentials are entered with the provider, not with us.
Communication providers. An SMS gateway receives your phone number and message text for OTPs and order alerts. A push provider receives your device token and the message. Our SMTP email provider receives your email address and the message.
AI processing (Groq). Prescription images and support questions may be sent to Groq's API for transcription and assistance. See Section 7.
Geocoding provider. Address text may be sent to convert an address into coordinates for delivery routing.
Regulators, courts and law enforcement. Where we are legally required to disclose, including drug-control and health authorities, tax authorities and lawful orders.
A successor entity, in the event of a merger, acquisition or reorganisation. You will be notified before your data becomes subject to a different privacy policy.
We do not sell your personal data, and we do not share it with data brokers, advertising networks or insurers.
7. Automated processing and AI
Two features use a third-party AI model, provided by Groq. In both cases the model assists a human and never decides anything on its own.
Prescription transcription. When you upload a prescription, the image may be sent to a vision model that transcribes what is legible — doctor name, clinic, dates, medicine names and dosages — and flags anything questionable, such as unreadable handwriting or a missing registration number. The output is a draft only. The prescription stays in a pending state until a registered pharmacist reviews it, corrects it and records the decision. No medicine is dispensed on the model's output alone, and the model is never asked to judge whether a prescription is valid or safe.
Authenticity checks. Uploaded prescriptions are checked for signs of reuse (the same file submitted against more than one prescription) and for editor or generator markers in the file's metadata. These are deterministic checks and observations for a pharmacist to verify, not an automated verdict.
Support assistant. The in-app assistant answers logistics questions about your own orders, refunds, wallet and prescription status. It is blocked from answering clinical questions — dosage, interactions, side effects, whether a medicine is safe for you — and hands those to a human. Relevant parts of your question and order context are sent to Groq to generate a reply.
You have the right to ask for human review of any decision that affects you. Write to pharmocia07@gmail.com. Prescription decisions are already made by a pharmacist, not automatically.
8. Storage, security and location
Your data is stored in a PostgreSQL database with encryption in transit enforced on the connection. Prescription files and other uploads are held as private records in that database, with ownership checked on every request and a 10 MB per-file limit; they are not placed in a public bucket and have no publicly guessable URL.
Security measures in place include:
- OTP-based login with hashed one-time codes, expiry, attempt limits, and per-phone and per-IP rate limiting
- Hashed refresh tokens and revocable sessions
- Role-based access control across our internal staff roles
- An immutable audit log of administrator actions, recording who did what, to which record, and when
- HTTPS everywhere, a strict allowlist of permitted origins, and idempotency keys on payment-affecting requests
- Authentication tokens held in the device's encrypted secure storage
Data is stored and processed in India. Some of our processors — including the AI, delivery, and communication providers named above — may process data on infrastructure outside India. Where that happens, transfers are limited to what the service requires and are subject to contractual protections. We do not transfer data to any territory that the Government of India has restricted under the DPDP Act.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your personal data, we will notify you and the Data Protection Board of India as required by law.
9. How long we keep data
| Data | Retention |
|---|---|
| Account profile and health profile | While your account is active, then deleted or anonymised on request |
| Prescriptions and pharmacist decisions | Retained as long as required by the Drugs and Cosmetics Rules, 1945 for dispensing records, generally not less than two years from the date of dispensing |
| Order, invoice, tax and payment records | Retained for the period required by tax and accounting law, generally eight years |
| Wallet ledger | Same as financial records above |
| Support tickets and messages | Three years from closure |
| OTP challenges | Minutes; expired and consumed challenges are short-lived |
| Session and login-attempt records | Until the session expires or is revoked; security logs kept up to twelve months |
| Analytics events | Up to twenty-four months, then deleted or aggregated |
| Push device registrations | Until the device is deregistered or becomes inactive |
When a retention period ends, data is deleted or irreversibly anonymised.
10. Your rights
Under the DPDP Act you have the right to:
- Access a summary of the personal data we hold about you and how it is processed
- Correct or complete inaccurate or incomplete data — most profile, address, family and health-profile fields can be edited in the app directly
- Erase your data where it is no longer needed for the purpose it was collected for and no law requires us to keep it
- Withdraw consent at any time, as easily as you gave it — notification preferences and reminders can be turned off in the app
- Nominate another individual to exercise these rights on your behalf in the event of your death or incapacity
- Grievance redressal — raise a complaint with us first, and escalate to the Data Protection Board of India if you are not satisfied
To exercise any of these rights, write to pharmocia07@gmail.com from the email or with the phone number registered on your account. We will respond within 30 days.
How to Delete Your Account
To request deletion of your account, simply write an email to pharmocia07@gmail.com from the email or phone number registered on your account, and it will be done in 7 working days.
Deleting your account does not delete records we are legally required to keep — dispensing records against a prescription, and invoices and tax records against completed orders. Those are retained for the statutory periods in Section 9 and are not used for any other purpose.
11. Your choices in the app
- Notifications — turn order, promotional and reminder notifications on or off under Profile → Notifications, or by revoking the notification permission in your device settings
- Camera and photos — revoke in device settings; barcode scanning and prescription upload stop working, nothing else changes
- Reminders and subscriptions — pause or cancel at any time
- Health profile and family members — edit or remove entries at any time
- Addresses — add, edit or delete saved addresses at any time
- Marketing — opt out via the notification settings or by writing to pharmocia07@gmail.com
12. Children
The app is not directed at children under 18, and we do not knowingly create accounts for them. Where a parent or lawful guardian adds a child as a family member in order to buy medicine for that child, the parent or guardian is responsible for that data and warrants that they have the authority to provide it. If you believe a child has registered an account directly, write to pharmocia07@gmail.com and we will remove it.
13. Health information disclaimer
Pharmocia is a marketplace and delivery platform. It does not provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, and nothing in the app is a substitute for consulting a qualified doctor or pharmacist. Prescription-only medicines are dispensed only against a valid prescription verified by a registered pharmacist at a licensed partner pharmacy. The in-app assistant does not answer clinical questions and will route them to a human.
14. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy as the app changes or the law changes. The "Last updated" date at the top will always reflect the current version. For material changes we will notify you in the app, and where required we will ask for your consent again. Continuing to use the app after an update means you accept the revised policy.
15. Contact us
Questions, requests and complaints about privacy:
Email: pharmocia07@gmail.com
Subject line: "Privacy" for general queries, "Grievance Officer" for complaints, "Data Protection" for rights requests
If we do not resolve your grievance to your satisfaction, you may escalate to the Data Protection Board of India under the DPDP Act, 2023.