Privacy policy

Who we are

Shawords (shawords.com) publishes shayari, poems and quotes with their poets, sources and meanings. “We” in this policy means the people who run Shawords. You can reach us through our contact page.

What we collect

• Server logs. Like almost every website, our server records each request: IP address, browser type, the page asked for, the referring page and the time. We use these only to keep the site running and secure (for example, to block abuse), and they are deleted automatically after about 10 days.
• Your country, not your location. To choose which homepage to show (Hindi/Urdu shayari or English quotes), we look up the country of your IP address in a local database. This happens in memory and the result is not stored.
• View and like counts. We count how often each poet and piece is viewed and liked, so we can show what readers enjoy most. We store only the totals. To avoid counting the same visit or like twice, your IP address is kept only in the server’s working memory (about 30 minutes for views; for likes, until the server next restarts) and is never written to our database.
• Visitor statistics. We run our own simple statistics, with no third-party analytics service. For each page you open we record the page, roughly how long it was in view and how far you scrolled, the website or campaign that sent you (for example “google.com”), your country (looked up from your IP address, which is not stored), device type, browser, operating system, screen-size group and language, and a random visitor ID kept in your browser. We also record actions such as sharing, copying or downloading a piece. None of this contains your name, IP address or email, and it is deleted after 25 months.
• What you send us. If you use the contact form, report a correction or send a copyright notice, we keep what you wrote, your name and email if you gave them, and your IP address (to stop spam). We use this only to deal with your message.

We do not ask you to create an account, and we do not collect payment details.

Cookies and data on your device

• Homepage choice — a cookie called sw_home remembers whether you picked the shayari or the English quotes homepage (kept for one year).
• Saved items, likes and theme — your bookmarks, the pieces you liked and your light/dark choice are kept in your own browser’s storage. They stay on your device; only the like itself is counted on our side, as a total.
• Visitor ID — a random ID and the start of your current visit, kept in your browser’s storage as sw_v, so our statistics can count visitors without cookies. It is not linked to who you are.
• Editors — people who sign in to edit the site get a login cookie. Readers never do.

You can clear all of these at any time in your browser settings. The site still works; it will just forget your choices.

Advertising

To keep Shawords free, we may show ads served by Google (Google AdSense). When ads are shown:

• Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your previous visits to this and other websites.
• Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visits to Shawords and/or other sites on the Internet.
• You can opt out of personalised advertising in Google Ads Settings, or opt out of some third-party vendors’ cookies at aboutads.info.
• Read how Google uses information from sites that use its services.
• Where the law requires it (for example in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland), we will ask for your consent before personalised ads or their cookies are used.

Other services

Our fonts are served from our own server. Portraits on poet and author pages are loaded from Wikimedia Commons, so when you open such a page your browser fetches the picture from Wikimedia, which sees your IP address and browser like any website (see the Wikimedia privacy policy). We do not use third-party analytics (our visitor statistics run on our own server) or social-media trackers. Share buttons only open your device’s own share menu.

Who we share data with

We do not sell or rent personal data. Data is processed only by us and by the company that hosts our server, and we would disclose it only if the law requires us to.

Your rights

You can ask us what personal data we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it — including any message you sent us. Depending on where you live, laws such as India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 or the EU/UK GDPR give you these rights. Write to us through the contact page (choose “Privacy / my data”) and we will reply within 30 days.

Children

Shawords is a general-audience reading site. It is not aimed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from them. If you think a child has sent us personal data, contact us and we will delete it.

Keeping data safe

The site is served only over encrypted HTTPS, our database is not reachable from the internet, and access to messages is limited to the editors who handle them.

Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle data, we will update this page and the date at the top.