Who we are and whose data this is
Sanchika is a newsroom workspace for Indian-language newspapers. Reporters file stories and photographs, desks edit and approve them, and wire copy arrives alongside. In this policy, “Sanchika”, “we” and “us” mean the team that builds and runs the service. “Your newspaper” means the publisher that subscribes to Sanchika and adds you to its newsroom.
Under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, your newspaper is the data fiduciary for everything in its newsroom: its people, its stories, its photographs and its settings. It decides who is added, what is filed and what is kept. Sanchika is the newspaper’s data processor, and handles that data only to run the service for it.
Sanchika is the data fiduciary only for what you send us directly: an email to us, or a walkthrough you book from this website.
What we hold
About the people in a newsroom
- Mobile number. This is how you sign in. Only numbers your newspaper’s administrator has added to its roster can sign in. No one can create their own account.
- Name and role. Your name as the newspaper entered it, your name in the paper’s language if it gave one, your roles and desks, and, for a reporter, the area you cover.
- What you add yourself. A profile photograph, which your newspaper requires so colleagues recognise you, and the original it was cropped from. A designation and an email address are optional.
- When you were last active. While Sanchika is open, it notes the time every two minutes, so editors can see who is working.
- A record of work. Sanchika records who filed, edited, approved, rejected or downloaded each story, and when. It also records each sign-in and each AI request, with its size and which model answered. These records hold what was done and when, not the text of a story. A headline, a name or a short note may appear beside an entry.
- Refused sign-ins. If a number that is not on the roster tries to sign in, we record the attempt with the number masked (for example +91 ••••••2345), never the full number.
We do not collect your location, your contacts, your device identifiers or your payment details. Sanchika’s own records do not hold your IP address. The sign-in service records it with each session, and our hosting providers keep short-lived technical logs that include it.
The newsroom’s content
- Stories as filed, every later version, headlines, captions, editors’ notes and the conversation with Ask Sanchika on each story.
- Photographs, and attachments such as documents and audio recordings that a reporter adds to a story.
- Reference material the newspaper uploads, such as its style book, example articles and web links, which Sanchika reads and re-reads each week, and wire copy from agencies it subscribes to.
- The newspaper’s settings, including its desks, its areas, its house style, its masthead and its automations.
A story may itself contain personal information about the people it reports on. That is the newspaper’s journalism, held on its behalf. Questions about it belong with the newspaper.
What we use it for
- To sign you in and keep you signed in.
- To move stories between reporters, desks and editors as the newspaper has set up its workflow.
- To prepare drafts, captions, checks and suggestions with the newspaper’s chosen AI provider.
- To produce the clippings, text files and deliveries the newspaper asks for.
- To show the newspaper’s editors how their newsroom is working, where its plan includes Insights.
- To show whoever the newspaper puts in charge of an area the stories filed there, how often each reporter there files and how much of it is used, with each reporter’s mobile number so they can be called. This can be another reporter.
- To keep the service running, to fix faults and to answer requests for help.
We do not sell personal data. We do not use it for advertising. We do not use a newspaper’s stories to train AI models, and we do not share them between newspapers. Each newspaper has its own separate database.
AI providers
Your newspaper chooses which AI provider Sanchika uses, from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, and connects it with its own account. When Sanchika drafts, checks or suggests, it sends the relevant story text, captions, style passages or question to that provider, under the newspaper’s own agreement with that provider. A caption is written from its text and the story’s opening.
Photographs are sent in one case only. When an editor’s comment on a laid-out page needs Sanchika to see a story’s photograph — to find the part of it to blur, or whether its subject can be cut out — Sanchika may send that photograph to the newspaper’s own AI provider. It sends the smaller copy made for screens, never the original, and only the photographs of the story the comment is about. This is on unless the newspaper’s administrator switches it off, in Newsroom › Pages; switched off, Sanchika asks the editor instead. Sanchika never blurs or removes a photograph on its own: an editor chooses, and the choice is recorded with who made it. Faces in photographs are still found on Sanchika’s own servers, never by an AI provider.
While a newspaper is being set up, before it has connected its own account, Sanchika uses its own OpenAI account for setup tasks. These are reviewing the workflow, drafting the house voice from sample articles, trying that voice on a sample story, matching place names from an uploaded reporters sheet, and answering Insights questions.
Cutting a photograph out in the clipping studio is done in the editor’s own browser, by an open model the browser fetches from Google’s and jsDelivr’s file servers the first time. The photograph is not sent to either, or anywhere outside Sanchika.
AI output is a suggestion. Your newspaper’s editors decide what is published.
Where it is kept
Each newspaper’s database and files are stored in India, in Mumbai. The application runs in Mumbai too, though requests reach it through its host’s worldwide network. An AI provider may process a request outside India, under the terms of the newspaper’s account with that provider.
Cookies and your browser
Sanchika sets no cookies. It has no advertising, no analytics and no tracking scripts. Its type is served from our own domain, not from a font service.
The app stores these things in your own browser:
- Your sign-in session, so you stay signed in on that device.
- Unsaved edits to a story, so they survive a lost connection.
- Small preferences, such as whether you have already seen a tip.
It also keeps a copy of the app’s own pages, so it opens quickly on a weak connection. That copy never includes stories or photographs. Clearing the site’s data in your browser removes all of this.
How long we keep it
- While your newspaper subscribes, its newsroom is kept for as long as it keeps using Sanchika. Stories are the newspaper’s record, so they stay unless the newspaper removes them.
- When someone leaves, the administrator can deactivate them, which stops them signing in at once. On request, we then erase them: their name becomes “Erased person”, their number, email, designation and sign-in are removed, and we delete their photograph from storage. Stories they filed, and their notes on them, remain with the newspaper as its record.
- The record of work is kept for as long as the newsroom exists.
- When a newspaper disconnects a wire, wire copy it had not taken, and its photographs, are deleted. Wire stories it had already taken stay.
- When a newspaper leaves Sanchika, it has 30 days to ask for its stories and photographs. After that, or sooner if it asks, we delete its whole newsroom: every story, person, setting and file. Deleted files cannot be recovered, and backup copies of the database expire on their own within 30 days.
Your rights
Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, you can ask to see the personal data held about you, to have it corrected or completed, and to have it erased. You can also name someone to act for you, and complain about how it has been handled.
Because your newspaper decides what its newsroom holds, start with your newspaper. Its administrator can correct your details and deactivate your account directly. If you cannot reach your newspaper, or it asks us to help, write to us at hello@sanchika.news. We will pass your request to the newspaper, or act on its instruction, and reply within 30 days.
You can change your own name, your name in the paper’s language, your designation, email address and photograph in Sanchika whenever you like.
Security
- Sign-in uses a one-time code sent to your number. There are no passwords to be guessed or reused.
- Each newspaper has its own database, and access within it follows the roles its administrator gives. Sanchika staff reach a newsroom’s data only to run, support or fix the service, or on the newspaper’s instruction.
- Story photographs and attachments are private, and open only through short-lived links for signed-in people.
- AI and delivery passwords are encrypted before they are stored, and are never shown again.
- Everything between your browser and Sanchika is encrypted in transit.
Profile photographs, with the original each was cropped from, and a newspaper’s masthead and app icon are the exception. They are stored so that anyone who has the file’s link can open it, which lets them appear on clippings and on the sign-in page. Do not upload a profile photograph you would not want seen that way.
If a breach affects personal data, we will tell the affected newspaper without delay, so that it can inform the people concerned and the Data Protection Board of India as the law requires.
This website
sanchika.news is a set of static pages. It sets no cookies and has no analytics. If you book a walkthrough, Calendly takes your booking under its own privacy policy, and we use your details only to hold that conversation. If you email us, we keep the correspondence for as long as it is useful to reply and follow up.
Children
Sanchika is a workplace tool for newspaper staff. It is not meant for anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly hold a child’s personal data as a user.
Changes to this policy
If Sanchika starts to handle data differently, we will update this page and the date at its top. If a change is significant, we will tell each newspaper’s administrators at least 30 days before it takes effect.
Contact and grievances
For any question or complaint about privacy, write to hello@sanchika.news. The Sanchika founder answers these personally and acts as our grievance officer. We will acknowledge you within 3 working days and resolve the matter within 30 days. If you are not satisfied, you can complain to the Data Protection Board of India.