Version: 1.5 — effective 13 September 2026
When you register and use PPG, we collect: your name, email address, phone number, address, date of birth, photography interests, profile photo, and (where relevant for event safety) emergency contact details and medical notes you choose to provide.
If you create a public profile page, we also hold: the photographs you upload and the reduced-size copies we make from them for display; the captions and gallery names you write; the web address of your profile page; the composite preview image we generate from one of your photographs, your profile name and the PPG mark; and the gallery view records described in Section 8.
Your bio, your city and your photography interests appear on your public profile page if you create one. The rest of your address does not. Every screen on which those three are entered says so.
If you apply for Scholar membership, we also hold the eligibility document you upload and the name your device gave it; Section 4 says who can see it and how long we keep it.
If you use the contact form on another member's profile page, we hold the text of your message, your name and email address as they were when you sent it, and the address of the profile page you sent it from. A copy of every such message is also sent to PPG's support mailbox. We keep these so that a member who receives abusive or unwanted messages has something we can act on; Section 6 says for how long.
We use your information to: manage your membership and account, process payments for memberships/workshops/merchandise, communicate with you about events and your account, calculate and track your rewards points, and (where you've provided it) respond appropriately to medical or emergency situations during in-person events.
Medical notes and emergency contact details are stored with your profile and are used solely for participant safety during in-person PPG activities. This information is only accessed by authorized PPG admin staff and is not used for any other purpose.
If you apply for Scholar membership, we ask you to upload a document that shows you are eligible — for example a student identity card, a fee receipt or a bonafide certificate from your institute. We hold the file exactly as you uploaded it, together with the name your device gave it and the date you sent it.
We use it for one purpose only: so that an administrator can decide whether to approve your application. It is not used to verify your identity for anything else, it is not shared outside PPG, and it is never published or shown on any page of this site.
Only PPG administrators can open it. The file is stored on our own server rather than with the image provider that serves the photographs on this site, it is not available at a public web address, and it is served only to a signed-in administrator and never stored by your browser or by anything in between.
We delete it 90 days after your application is decided, whichever way it was decided — approved or rejected — and the same applies to an application to renew a Scholar term. The 90 days run from the decision, not from the end of any Scholar term that follows it, so a document that led to an approval is deleted 90 days after that approval even if your term is still running. After that we keep only the fact that a document was provided and when it fell due for deletion — not the document itself. If you delete your account, every eligibility document you have uploaded is deleted with it straight away, as described in Section 6.
We do not sell your personal data. We share data only with: payment processors (for processing transactions), transactional email providers (for account and order communications), the object storage and content delivery provider through which every photograph and profile image on this platform is stored and served, and where required by law.
We keep your account and profile data for as long as your membership is active.
You can delete your account yourself, from your member area, or ask us to delete it. Deletion is held back only while you have an entry or a team place outstanding in an activity that is still running; the screen tells you which one, and we will help if you cannot clear it yourself.
When the deletion does go through, it is immediate. There is no waiting period, no grace period and no recovery window. Your account, your profile, your galleries and every photograph you uploaded are removed at that point. We do not keep a backup, so a deleted account cannot be restored, by you or by us.
Some records outlive the account, and two of them continue to identify you.An order placed in the Shop is kept for 8 years for the tax and audit purposes Indian law requires, but your name, email address, phone number and delivery address are removed from it, so it no longer identifies you. The record of an activity you took part in is kept as part of that activity's result. The two that do identify you are: the record that your account was deleted, which keeps your name and email address so that we can answer a later question about what happened to the account; and any messages you sent through another member's profile page, which keep your email address as it was when you sent them, so that a report of abusive messages can still be acted on after the sender has left.
Messages sent through a member's profile page are deleted automatically 24 months after they are sent. They are not deleted earlier when either the sender or the recipient deletes their account.
Gallery view records are deleted automatically after 90 days, as described in Section 8.
You have the right to access, correct, and request deletion of your personal data, subject to our legal retention obligations. Your email address is used as your account identifier and cannot be self-edited. Contact admin via the [Contact page →] for an email change.
When someone opens a member's gallery page, we record one row so that the same visitor is counted only once for that gallery on that day.
We do not store your IP address or your browser's user-agent string.If you are not signed in, we combine those two values with the gallery's identifier and a secret value that only we hold, and we store only the resulting 64-character hash. The hash cannot be turned back into an IP address. Because the gallery's identifier forms part of it, the same visitor produces a different hash on every gallery, so these records cannot be used to follow a visitor around the site.
If you are signed in, we use your member ID instead of your IP address, so that you are counted once whether you are on wifi or mobile data. That record is hashed in the same way, but because we hold both your member ID and the secret value, it is personal data about you for as long as we keep it. We use it for one purpose — not counting you twice — and for nothing else.
These records are deleted automatically 90 days after they are created. The lifetime view count a member sees for their own gallery is a separate number and is not affected by that deletion.
PPG uses cookies for session management to keep you logged in across the main community website, the shop, and the blog subdomains.
PPG is committed to complying with applicable Indian data protection law, including the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.
PPG membership is open only to people aged 18 or over, and PPG does not knowingly collect or process the personal data of anyone under 18. Clause 2.8 of the Terms & Conditions sets out the membership rule.
PPG asks for your age when you register and relies on the answer. It has no way to verify it.
If you believe we hold data about someone under 18, tell us using the contact form — there is a box to tick for this, and you do not need a PPG account to use it. A member of the PPG team reviews every such report. Where it is acted on, we suspend the account and remove that member's profile and photographs from public view, and we write to the registered email address. We do not delete their data at that point — the account can be restored if the report was mistaken, and deleting on the strength of an unverified report would be its own harm. Reports are never acted on automatically. We keep a record of what we decided and when, and we keep that record even if the account is later deleted, because it is the evidence of how we responded.
Anyone may view the public parts of this site — the homepage, and member profile pages that their owners have chosen to make public — without an account. PPG does not ask the age of a visitor who is not signed in, and the view counting described in Section 8 applies to those visitors as it does to everyone else.
If a breach of security affects your personal data, we will notify you and the Data Protection Board of India as the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 requires.
If you are not satisfied with how we have handled your data or your request about it, you may complain to the Data Protection Board of India. Please raise it with us first, using the details in Section 13, so that we have the chance to put it right.
Our Data Protection and Grievance Officer is Vaishali Prabhune. Questions or requests regarding your data can be directed to our contact address, which is published on the [Contact page →]. We will acknowledge within 7 working days and respond within 30 working days.
