Scale Partner — Privacy Policy
In short: Scale Partner is a ledger for your business. It holds the customer and payment records you type in, so that they survive a lost phone and reach your customer's own app. It does not show you ads, it does not profile you, and it sells nothing to anybody.
- We identify you by your mobile number, and nothing else. There is no password, no email sign-in, no social login.
- Your app PIN never leaves your phone. It is not stored on our servers in any form — not even hashed. See section 4.
- Your fingerprint or face is never given to the app. Android checks it and tells Scale only yes or no. See section 4.
- Your contacts are read only while you are importing them, only when you grant permission, and the ones you do not import are never uploaded. See section 3.
- Scale never sends a WhatsApp message. It opens WhatsApp with the text prepared; you press send, inside WhatsApp. Scale cannot read your WhatsApp. See section 5.
- No advertising, no analytics SDK, no tracking. Version 1.0.0 ships with no advertising library, no analytics library and no crash reporting library of any kind (section 8).
Scale Partner ("Scale Partner", "the app", "we", "us") is a customer- and payment-record app for small business owners, published by Rohan Surve. This policy explains what information the app handles, why, where it goes, and the choices you have. By using Scale Partner you agree to this policy.
Scale Partner is the business owner's app. There is a companion app, simply called Scale, which your customers may install to see their own record with you. It has its own policy — see Scale — Privacy Policy.
1. Who is responsible for the data
Two different roles matter here, and mixing them up would misdescribe what happens:
- Your own account information — your mobile number, your name and email if you add them. We are responsible for this.
- Your customers' information — the names, numbers and payment records you enter about the people who buy from you. You decide what to collect and why; we store and process it on your behalf, so that your records survive a lost phone and so that the customer can see their own record in the Scale app. You are responsible for having a lawful basis for entering someone else's details, and for what you write in the free-text fields (see section 3).
2. Signing in — your mobile number
Scale Partner signs you in with your mobile number and a one-time password (OTP) sent to you by SMS. This is handled by Firebase Authentication, a Google service (section 7).
What this means concretely:
- Your mobile number is sent to Google's Firebase Authentication service so that it can send you the SMS and confirm the code you type back.
- Your number is stored against your account, and is shown to you in Settings so you always know which account you are signed in to.
- To stop automated abuse of the SMS system, Firebase runs an app verification check before sending. On Android this is Google Play Integrity; if it is unavailable, Firebase falls back to an invisible reCAPTCHA check, which may briefly open a web view. These checks are operated by Google and are described in Google's own privacy policy. Scale receives only a pass or fail.
- There is no password. If you change your mobile number, that is a new account.
In Settings → Profile you may optionally add:
- Your name — optional, free text, only ever set by you.
- Your email address — optional. In version 1.0.0 it is stored on your account record and shown back to you; the app does not send email, and we do not use it for marketing.
3. The business records you enter
This is the substance of the app. Everything in this section is information you type in or import, and it is stored in Cloud Firestore (section 7) under your account, as well as cached on your own phone (section 6).
3a. Your business
Business name; business category; business phone number; WhatsApp number; address; currency; timezone. All except the name and category are optional.
3b. Your customers
For each customer you add: name and mobile number (required), and optionally a WhatsApp number, email, gender, date of birth, address, joining date, an emergency contact, and free-text notes. You also set a status (for example active or paused).
Please note what the free-text fields mean. "Notes" is a plain text box. Whatever you type there is stored as you typed it. If you write something sensitive about a person there — a health condition, for example — then you have chosen to store sensitive information about them, and you are responsible for that choice. The app neither asks for nor requires any special category of personal data.
3c. Payments
For each payment record: amount, currency, due date, status (due, paid, voided and so on), the date it was marked paid, the payment method you choose, an optional note, and — if you set one — a repeat schedule. Scale Partner is a record of money owed and received. It does not process payments. No card number, UPI ID, bank account or any other payment instrument is ever collected by this app, because the app never moves money. "Payment method" is a label you pick (for example "cash" or "UPI") so your own ledger reads correctly.
3d. Importing from your phone's contacts
Scale Partner can add customers from your phone's contact list, so that you do not have to retype numbers.
- Android asks your permission first. You can refuse, and the rest of the app works normally — adding customers by hand is always available.
- The permission is read-only. Scale never edits, adds or deletes anything in your contacts.
- Contacts are read only while the import screen is open, to show you the list and to check which numbers you already have as customers. That duplicate check runs on your phone, against records already on your phone.
- Only the contacts you actually select are saved. The rest are never uploaded and are not retained by the app after you leave the screen.
- You can withdraw the permission at any time in Android Settings.
4. Your app PIN and biometric unlock
Signing in with an OTP proves who you are. A separate 4-digit PIN controls access to the app on this phone — because a small-business phone is often a shared phone.
- The PIN is never sent to us and never stored on our servers, in any form. It exists only on your device.
- On your device it is not stored as digits either. It is stored as a PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 hash with a random salt, inside Android's Keystore-backed secure storage.
- It is tied to the account it was set for. A different account signing in on the same phone discards it.
- After 5 wrong attempts the PIN is erased and you are signed out, so getting back in requires a fresh OTP to your number. That is also the "forgot PIN" route.
- The PIN and your signed-in session are excluded from Android cloud backup and from device-to-device transfer. A new phone always means a fresh OTP and a new PIN. This is deliberate.
Biometric unlock is optional and off until you turn it on. If you enable it, Android's own biometric prompt checks your fingerprint or face. Scale never sees, receives or stores any biometric data — Android performs the match in secure hardware and returns only a yes or no.
5. WhatsApp
Scale Partner can prepare a reminder message about a payment and hand it to WhatsApp on your phone. It is important to be exact about what this does:
- Scale opens WhatsApp with the customer's number and the message text already filled in. You press send, inside WhatsApp.
- Scale does not send messages, has no WhatsApp integration or business API, and cannot read your WhatsApp — not your chats, not your contacts, not whether the message was delivered or read.
- The only thing Scale records is that WhatsApp was opened for that customer, with the message text it prepared, and when. It never records that a message was "sent", because it has no way to know that.
- If WhatsApp is not installed, nothing is recorded at all and you are offered the text to copy.
- Once WhatsApp opens, what happens there is governed by WhatsApp's own privacy policy, not this one.
6. What is stored on your phone
- An offline copy of your business data. Scale keeps a local cache of your customers and payments so the app works at your counter with no signal, and so a payment you mark paid offline is saved and syncs when you are back online. It lives in the app's private storage.
- Your app language (English, हिन्दी or मराठी) — a device setting, not tied to your account, so that the login screen itself is already in your language and the choice survives signing out.
- Your PIN hash and biometric preference — section 4.
- Your signed-in session, so you do not re-enter an OTP every time.
Uninstalling the app removes all of the above from the phone. It does not delete your records from our servers — see section 10.
7. Service providers
Scale Partner is built on Google Firebase. Google processes data on our behalf under Google's terms. The specific services used are:
- Firebase Authentication — your mobile number, and the sending and checking of the OTP SMS.
- Cloud Firestore — the business, customer and payment records described in section 3. The database is hosted in Google's asia-south1 (Mumbai, India) region.
- Cloud Functions for Firebase — small server-side routines, also in asia-south1 (Mumbai, India), that match a customer's mobile number to their Scale account so that the right person sees the right record, and that keep your business details up to date on the records your customers can see.
- Google Play Integrity and, as a fallback, reCAPTCHA — the anti-abuse check described in section 2.
Although the database and the server-side routines run in India, Google is a global provider and may process some operational data elsewhere; see Google's own privacy documentation.
We do not sell your data. We do not share it with advertisers, data brokers or any third party for their own purposes. The only sharing that happens is described in section 9.
8. What Scale Partner does not do
Stated plainly, because "we may collect" language usually hides these:
- No advertising. No ad SDK is present in the app.
- No analytics SDK and no crash-reporting SDK. Version 1.0.0 ships without Firebase Analytics, without Crashlytics, and without any third-party analytics or attribution library.
- No advertising identifier is read.
- No location. The app requests no location permission and does not collect your location.
- No camera, microphone, photos, files or calendar permissions.
- No payment instruments. See section 3c.
- No purchases and no subscriptions in version 1.0.0.
9. Who can see what you enter
- You — everything in your own business.
- Your customer — if the person you added installs the Scale app and signs in with the same mobile number you entered for them, they can see their own record with you: your business name and details, the name you gave them, their status, and their own payment history and outstanding amount. This is the point of the product, and it is why the number you type matters. They cannot see your other customers, and no customer of yours can see another.
- Us — our access is limited to what is genuinely needed to run and support the service, for example investigating a fault you report.
- Nobody else, unless we are legally required to disclose something, or you ask us to.
Because a customer's identity is matched by mobile number, typing the wrong number can show one person's record to another. Please enter customer numbers carefully. You can correct a number at any time.
10. Keeping and deleting data
10a. While you use the app
Your records are kept for as long as your account exists, because a ledger is only useful as a history.
When you delete a customer or a payment in the app, it is archived rather than erased immediately — the record is marked deleted, disappears from your lists, and stops being visible to that customer. This is what makes an accidental deletion recoverable and keeps your books consistent. If you need such a record permanently erased, use the request route below.
10b. Deleting your account
You can delete your account inside the app. Open Settings → Close your account → Delete my account. The screen lists exactly what goes and what stays, asks you to confirm, and then asks for your app PIN. Deletion runs immediately, and it is not reversible — export or write down anything you still need first.
If you cannot sign in, or you no longer have the app, use the request page at rohansurve.in/scale/delete-account, or email rohan.surve5@gmail.com from a message that identifies the mobile number on the account. We may need to verify that you control that number before acting.
Either route deletes your account record, your business, your customers, your payment records and your message records — including the ones that were only archived by an in-app delete. In the app this happens at once; by email we aim to complete it within 30 days. Records may persist for a short further period in routine encrypted backups before those expire.
Deleting your account does not delete your customers' own Scale accounts — those belong to them, and each person may request their own deletion the same way.
Uninstalling the app is not a deletion request. It clears the phone, not the server.
11. Security
- All traffic between the app and Google's services is encrypted in transit (TLS/HTTPS). Data is encrypted at rest by Google Cloud.
- Access to records is enforced server-side by Firestore security rules, so a customer cannot read another customer's record and an owner cannot read another owner's business, regardless of what any app requests.
- The device PIN is hashed and held in Android Keystore-backed storage, and is excluded from cloud backup and device transfer (section 4).
- No system is perfectly secure. Please keep your phone locked and do not share your OTP with anyone. We will never ask you for your OTP or your PIN.
12. Children
Scale Partner is a tool for running a business and is not directed at children. It is intended for people aged 18 or over, and we do not knowingly collect information from children.
13. Your rights
You may ask us to give you a copy of your data, correct it, or delete it. Most correction can be done directly in the app. For access or deletion, contact us using section 15. We may need to confirm that you control the mobile number on the account before acting.
If your customers exercise their rights against you regarding data you entered about them, we will help you respond.
14. Changes to this policy
If this policy changes materially we will update the date at the top and publish the new version at this address before the change takes effect.
15. Contact
Rohan Surve
Email: rohan.surve5@gmail.com
Deletion requests: rohansurve.in/scale/delete-account