The short version
SmashDrop is a badminton app. To work, it needs to know who you are, roughly where you play, and what happened in your matches. That is most of it.
- Your location is rounded to about a kilometre before it is stored, every time. Enough to put you in a neighbourhood. Useless for finding your door.
- Your phone number is never shown on your profile. It is only shared once you and another person have agreed a gear deal, and then you each get the other's.
- We do not sell your data, we do not run advertising, and we do not build a profile of you for anybody else.
- You can delete your account from inside the app, and it takes your personal data with it.
Who we are
SmashDrop is operated by Axilerate Technologies, Mahadevpura, Bangalore 560016, India. For anything in this policy, write to support@smashdrop.com.
For the purposes of India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, we are the Data Fiduciary for the personal data described here.
What we collect
When you sign up
- Your phone number, used to sign you in by one-time password, and as the contact detail released when a gear deal is agreed.
- Your name and, optionally, a profile photo.
- Your gender, self-declared. This decides eligibility for the women's section and nothing else.
- Whether you play, coach, or run an academy. These are independent, and they decide which parts of the app you see.
- The date your account was created, which is what your seven-day trial is measured from.
Where you play
- A locality and city you type in, used to describe where you play.
- An approximate coordinate, if you choose to share one. See Location, specifically — this is the section worth reading.
What happens on court
- Challenges you send, receive, accept or decline, and the times and places agreed.
- Match scores, game by game, and who reported and confirmed them.
- Derived counters: matches played, matches won, hours on court. These are maintained by the server from confirmed results and attended sessions — they are not something you or anybody else can type in.
- Bookings you make with coaches and academies, and whether you attended.
- Tournament entries, fixtures and results, including a partner's name where a doubles entry needs one.
- Buddy groups you form or are invited to, and their fixtures.
Skill claims
- A short video of you playing a shot, which you upload yourself.
- Reviews of it — a coach's decision and the reason for a rejection, or the votes of opponents from matches you both confirmed.
Gear
- Listings you create: photographs, title, description, category, condition, asking price, what you paid if you choose to say, and the pickup point you pin.
- Offers you make or receive, their amounts, and their outcome.
Technical data
- A device push token, if you allow notifications, so we can tell you a challenge arrived.
- Ordinary server logs — IP address, timestamps, and which requests were made — kept for security and debugging.
- Crash and error reports from the app framework, which may include device model and OS version.
What we never collect
- Background location. The app has no use for your position while it is closed and does not ask for permission to have it.
- Your contacts, calendar, microphone, or SMS.
- Payment card details. Subscriptions are billed by Apple and Google; we never see a card number.
- Advertising identifiers. There is no advertising in SmashDrop and no third-party ad or analytics SDK in the app.
- An exact home address, except where you type one in to have a shuttle-points reward posted to you — and that is kept out of every listing the app reads back publicly.
How we use it
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Phone number | Signing you in; releasing contact details when a gear offer is accepted |
| Name, photo, locality | Showing you in the directory so somebody can decide whether to challenge you |
| Gender | Deciding eligibility for the women's section |
| Approximate coordinate | Answering "who is within 5 km of me" |
| Match records | Working out your rank, your hours and your shuttle points |
| Skill videos | Letting a coach or six opponents judge the claim |
| Gear photographs | Checking that a listing is genuinely badminton kit before it is published |
| Push token | Telling you something is waiting on you |
| Logs | Keeping the service up and investigating abuse |
Under the DPDP Act we process this on the basis of your consent, given when you create an account and, separately, when you turn on location or notifications. Where we keep records of a completed transaction or a confirmed match, we also rely on the legitimate uses ground, because a scoreboard that could be erased by one of the two players is not a scoreboard.
What other people can see
SmashDrop is a directory. Being findable is the point of it, so it is worth being exact about what "findable" means.
Any signed-in user can see: your name, your photo, your locality and city, your rank, your matches played and won, your win rate, your hours on court, your verified skills, and your shuttle points balance. Those numbers are a claim about how much you play, which is exactly what somebody deciding whether to challenge you wants to know.
Only people in the same context can see: the score of a match (the two — or four — players in it, and the organiser in a tournament), your buddy group's roster and fixtures, and what somebody offered on a gear listing (only the buyer and the seller — a board where the next buyer can read the current offer is one where they simply offer a rupee more).
Only you can see: your phone number, until a gear offer is accepted; any postal address you give for a reward; and your position at full precision, which we never have in the first place.
The women's section is visible only to women who have opted into it. It is not shown, listed, or hinted at to anybody else.
Location, specifically
This is the part we thought hardest about, so here is all of it.
Every signed-in user can read the player directory. That is what makes it a directory. A precise coordinate on a profile would therefore be a home address published to everybody who installs the app. So your coordinate is rounded to two decimal places, roughly 1.1 km, by the server, every time.
It is done on the server rather than in the app on purpose. A rounding done in the app could be bypassed by a modified client.
- Permission is asked for at the moment you tap "within 5 km" or "use my current location", never when a screen opens.
- Only foreground access is requested. The app never asks for background location.
- Sharing a coordinate is optional. Without one you stay findable by name and by locality.
- Venues are different. An academy, a court or a tournament is a public place people need directions to, so those keep full precision. So does the pickup point on a gear listing. The form asks you to pin the court, not your door.
Photos and videos
Photos you add — a profile picture, an academy gallery, a tournament cover, gear photographs — are stored on our servers and shown where you put them.
Gear photos are checked before a listing goes up. They are sent, with the title and category you gave, to Anthropic's Claude model, which answers whether they really show badminton equipment. This keeps the board from turning into general classifieds, and it is why at least one photo is required. Replacing the photos on a live listing sends it back to be checked again. Anthropic uses them only to answer that question, not to train models.
Skill videos are shown to whoever is judging the claim — a coach you asked, or opponents from matches you both confirmed — alongside the claim itself. They are not public, and they are not used for anything else.
Who we share it with
We do not sell your data, and we do not share it for anybody else's marketing. We use these companies to run the service:
| Who | For what | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Database, authentication and file storage | Cloud hosting |
| Expo (Expo Application Services) | App builds, over-the-air updates, push notification delivery | USA |
| Apple & Google | App distribution and subscription billing | Global |
| RevenueCat | Reconciling subscription status between the stores and your account | USA |
| Anthropic | Checking that gear photographs show badminton equipment | USA |
| Apple / Google geocoders | Turning a coordinate into a locality name on your device | Global |
| A WhatsApp Business API provider | Delivering your sign-in one-time password | India |
Some of these are outside India, so your data may be transferred and processed abroad. We will also disclose data where we are legally required to, and where it is genuinely necessary to protect somebody's safety.
Payments
SmashDrop Pro is billed by Apple or Google, under their terms and with their payment methods. We never see or store your card, UPI handle or bank details. What we receive is the fact that a subscription started, renewed, lapsed or was refunded, tied to your account so the app knows what to unlock.
SmashDrop takes no payment for gear. Nothing is bought or sold through the app; two people agree a deal and meet. There is no escrow, no commission and no shipping.
How long we keep it
- Your profile and match record — while your account exists.
- Skill videos — until the claim is decided, and then for as long as the verified badge stands, so a coach's decision can be checked.
- Gear listings and offers — while the listing exists. Deleting a listing deletes its photographs and its offers with it.
- Subscription records — as long as tax and accounting law requires, which in India is generally eight years.
- Server logs — a rolling window, typically 30 days.
Your rights
Under the DPDP Act you may ask us to:
- Show you a summary of the personal data we hold about you and who we have shared it with.
- Correct or complete anything inaccurate. Most of this is editable in the app; the server-owned counters are not, because they are derived from confirmed results rather than entered.
- Erase your personal data — see below.
- Withdraw consent, as easily as you gave it. Turning off location permission or notifications in your phone's settings is enough for those.
- Nominate somebody to exercise these rights on your behalf if you die or become incapacitated.
- Complain to the Data Protection Board of India if we have not dealt with you properly.
Write to support@smashdrop.com and we will respond within 30 days.
Deleting your account
In the app: You → Account → Delete account. You can also write to support@smashdrop.com from your registered number's account and we will do it.
What goes: your profile, name, photo, phone number, gender, location, skill videos and claims, gear listings and their photographs, your offers, buddy memberships, and any postal address you gave for a reward.
What stays, and why: a match happened to two or four people. Deleting your account does not erase the score from your opponents' records, their hours, or a tournament result somebody else won. One player cannot delete another player's season. Those rows stay with your name removed, showing as a former player.
Deletion is not reversible, and a new account starts from zero — including a fresh look at whether you have had a trial.
Security
Access is enforced in the database, not just in the app, so a modified client cannot read what it is not entitled to. Traffic is encrypted. Values like your match counters cannot be written by a client at all. Sign-in is by one-time password to your phone, so there is no password to leak.
No system is perfectly secure. If we discover a breach affecting your personal data we will notify you and the Data Protection Board as the law requires.
Children
SmashDrop is not intended for children under 18. Under the DPDP Act, processing a child's data requires verifiable parental consent, and we are not set up to obtain it. If you believe a child has created an account, write to support@smashdrop.com and we will remove it.
This website
www.smashdrop.app sets no cookies and runs no analytics or advertising scripts. It loads a web font from Google Fonts, which means Google's servers see the request (including your IP address) when the font is fetched. Nothing else on the page talks to a third party. Our host keeps ordinary access logs.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will say so in the app before the change takes effect, not only by editing this page. The date at the top always reflects the current version.
Contact & grievances
General privacy questions: support@smashdrop.com
As required by Rule 3(2) of India's Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, and by the DPDP Act:
Grievance Officer: Emmanuel M Shine
Axilerate Technologies
Email: hello@axilerate.com
Address: Mahadevpura, Bangalore 560016, India
We acknowledge complaints within 24 hours and resolve them within 15 days, as the Rules
require.
If you are not satisfied with how we have handled a complaint, you may escalate it to the Data Protection Board of India.