Privacy Policy

Introduction

Welcome to Sharan Initiatives ("we," "our," or "us"). We operate the website at sharaninitiatives.com (the "Site") and are committed to being transparent about how we handle information when you visit us. This Privacy Policy explains what data is collected when you browse our Site, how that data is used, and what choices you have.

The short version: reading anything on this Site is anonymous and requires no account. Two parts of the Site — the Money budgeting app and the Health tracker — do require you to sign in, and the information you enter there is stored in your account so it is available on your other devices. We do not sell data to anyone, and we do not use what you enter in those apps for advertising. This policy explains exactly what is collected in each case.

What Information Is Collected

Analytics Data (Google Analytics 4)

We use Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to understand how visitors use our Site. Google Analytics collects the following types of information automatically when you visit:

• Pages you visit and how long you spend on each page
• The general geographic region you are visiting from (country and city level — not your precise address)
• The type of device, browser, and operating system you are using
• How you arrived at our Site (e.g., from a search engine, a direct link, or another website)
• Interactions such as clicks on links and buttons
• A randomly assigned, anonymised identifier stored in a cookie to distinguish returning visitors from new ones

This data is aggregated and does not identify you personally. We cannot look at Google Analytics and see "Priya visited the blog page." What we see is "450 visitors came from Bangalore this week." Google Analytics is operated by Google LLC and is subject to Google's own privacy policy.

Advertising Data (Google AdSense)

We display advertisements on our Site through Google AdSense (publisher ID: ca-pub-1817277598203344). To show you relevant ads, Google AdSense may:

• Place advertising cookies on your browser that track your browsing across websites that participate in the Google advertising network
• Use your browsing history and interests to decide which ads to show you (this is called interest-based or personalised advertising)
• Collect your IP address, device type, and browser information for fraud prevention and ad serving
• Measure whether you clicked on an ad and whether that led to a purchase or other action on an advertiser's site

Sharan Initiatives receives revenue when ads are displayed or clicked, but we do not receive or store the personal data that Google collects for advertising purposes. That data is held by Google under their own privacy policy.

Hosting and Performance Data (Vercel Analytics)

Our Site is hosted on Vercel. Vercel Analytics collects lightweight, privacy-friendly performance metrics such as page load times, Core Web Vitals scores, and the number of page views. This data does not use cookies and is not linked to individual visitors. It helps us ensure the Site loads quickly and works correctly across different devices and networks.

Information You Give Us (Money and Health apps)

Most of this Site is a blog and a set of calculators that need no account. Two parts are different: the Money budgeting app and the Health tracker. Using either means signing in, and storing what you enter.

Signing in with Google

Signing in uses Google. We ask Google only for your basic profile — your name, your email address and your Google account identifier. We do not ask for, and cannot obtain, access to your Google Drive, Gmail, Contacts, Calendar or any other Google service. We never see your Google password, because you enter it on Google's own pages rather than ours.

What the Money app stores

Only what you type into it: the monthly income you record, the percentage split you choose between needs, wants and savings, the expense entries you add (amount, description, category, date and any note), any categories you create, and your investment planning sheet.

What the Health app stores

Only what you record or choose to import: daily entries such as sleep, weight, waist measurement, blood pressure, resting heart rate, steps, self-rated energy and mood, alcohol units and free-text notes; your height and year of birth if you enter them; and laboratory results you add, including the marker, value, unit and the reference range printed on your report.

Where this is stored

In Google Cloud Firestore, operated by Google on our behalf, in a database we control. Access is enforced by server-side security rules that allow each signed-in account to read and write only its own records — rather than the app merely choosing to show you your own data. Your records are not accessible to other users of the Site.

Comments on articles

If you leave a comment, what you write is public. It is stored with the name and profile picture on your Google account and the date you wrote it, and anyone who visits that page can read all of it. Your email address is not shown. Please do not put anything private in a comment, your own or anyone else's.

The first comment from an account is read before it appears; after that, comments from that account are published as they are written. We may hide or delete any comment, and we keep a record of which account wrote each one so that moderation is possible at all. You can delete your own comments at any time, and deleting one removes it completely.

Services You Connect Yourself

Both are optional. Neither is switched on unless you set it up, and both apps work fully without them.

Oura Ring

If you connect an Oura ring, you register your own application with Oura and provide its credentials, which are stored in your account. We then retrieve daily summaries — sleep duration, resting heart rate and step counts — for roughly the last month, and merge them into your daily entries. Values you entered by hand are never overwritten.

Oura does not permit web browsers to contact it directly, so these requests pass through a server operated by this Site on their way to Oura. That server stores nothing and keeps no record of the contents: it forwards the request and returns the reply. We say this plainly rather than implying the data never leaves your browser, because it does travel through our infrastructure in transit. You can disconnect at any time from the Health app's settings, which removes the stored access credentials.

Reading lab reports with Google Gemini

If you choose to have a laboratory report read automatically rather than typing it in, you supply your own Google Gemini API key, which is stored in your account and used only from your browser. The file you select is sent from your browser directly to Google's Gemini service using your key; it does not pass through our servers, and we never see the file or the key.

Two things worth knowing before using it. First, on Gemini's free tier Google may use submitted content to improve its products — for a laboratory report, that is health information; enabling billing on your key moves it to paid-tier terms. Second, the results are always shown to you for checking before anything is saved, because automated transcription can misread a printed value.

What We Do NOT Collect

To be absolutely clear:

• We never see or store a password — signing in is handled entirely by Google, and we only receive your name and email address
• We do not collect any personal information from you simply for reading the Site; an account is needed only for the Money and Health apps
• We do not run contact forms that store your data in our own database (if we ever add one, this policy will be updated)
• We do not collect payment information — the Site does not sell anything directly
• We do not collect your precise location (only city-level data through analytics)
• We do not record your keystrokes or take screenshots of your session

How We Use This Information

The data collected through our analytics and advertising partners is used for the following purposes:

• Understanding our audience: Analytics data tells us which blog posts and pages are most useful, which countries our visitors come from, and which devices we need to optimise for.
• Improving the Site: Performance metrics from Vercel help us identify slow pages and fix technical problems.
• Displaying advertisements: AdSense data is used by Google to serve ads on our pages, generating revenue that helps us keep the Site running.
• Fraud prevention: Google uses some technical data (IP address, browser fingerprint) to detect and prevent invalid ad clicks.

We do not use any of this data to make automated decisions that affect you, build personal profiles about you ourselves, or target you for direct marketing.

Cookies

Cookies are small text files placed on your device by websites you visit. Our Site uses cookies primarily through the third-party services described above:

• Google Analytics cookies (e.g., _ga, _ga_7ER7M85XQS): These distinguish unique visitors and sessions. They expire after 2 years.
• Google AdSense cookies (e.g., IDE, DSID): These are used for interest-based advertising and conversion tracking. Expiry varies.
• Essential cookies: Some cookies are strictly necessary for the Site to function (e.g., maintaining your session if you navigate between pages). These do not track you for advertising purposes.

For a detailed breakdown of every cookie used, including its purpose and expiry, please see our Cookie Policy.

Third-Party Services and Their Policies

We work with the following third parties on this website. Each operates under their own privacy policy and we encourage you to read them:

• Google Analytics 4 — Operated by Google LLC. Privacy policy: policies.google.com/privacy
• Google AdSense — Operated by Google LLC. Manages advertising on our Site. Privacy policy: policies.google.com/privacy
• Vercel — Hosts and serves our website. Privacy policy: vercel.com/legal/privacy-policy

Sharan Initiatives does not control how these third parties collect or use your information beyond what is described here.

We Do Not Sell Your Data

We may share information with service providers (like Google and Vercel) who help us operate the Site, but only to the extent needed to provide those services, and those providers are not permitted to use your data for their own independent purposes beyond what we have described.

Your Rights and Choices

Opt Out of Google Analytics

You can prevent Google Analytics from collecting data about your visits in two ways:

• Install the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on — this works across all websites that use Google Analytics.
• Block or delete cookies through your browser settings. Deleting the _ga and related cookies will reset your analytics identifier.

Opt Out of Personalised Advertising

You can control whether Google shows you personalised (interest-based) ads:

• Visit Google Ads Settings to manage or turn off personalised ads for your Google account.
• Visit the Network Advertising Initiative opt-out page or the Digital Advertising Alliance opt-out page to opt out across many advertising networks at once.
• Note: opting out of personalised ads does not mean you will see no ads — you will still see ads, but they will be less relevant to your interests.

Managing Cookies in Your Browser

You can configure your browser to refuse all cookies or to alert you when cookies are being set. The steps depend on your browser:

• Chrome: Settings → Privacy and security → Cookies and other site data
• Firefox: Settings → Privacy & Security → Cookies and Site Data
• Safari: Preferences → Privacy → Manage Website Data
• Edge: Settings → Cookies and site permissions

Please note that disabling all cookies may affect how this Site and other websites function.

Children's Privacy (COPPA)

Because we use Google AdSense, Google's own policies around child-directed content also apply. We do not designate our Site as child-directed content within the Google AdSense platform.

Data Retention

Information you enter in the Money and Health apps is kept for as long as you keep your account, because its purpose is to show you a history — a budget or a set of measurements is only useful over time. It is not deleted on a schedule. You can remove it yourself whenever you want: the Health app's settings page deletes every health record permanently, and you can request deletion of any other data by writing to the address below. Deletion is immediate and we keep no backup copy, so it cannot be undone. The data held by Google Analytics is retained according to our GA4 settings — we have configured data retention to 14 months, after which Google automatically deletes it. Vercel Analytics data is retained per Vercel's own retention schedule. Please refer to the respective privacy policies of Google and Vercel for details.

Data Security

Our Site is served over HTTPS, which encrypts data in transit between your browser and our servers. The underlying infrastructure is managed by Vercel, which maintains industry-standard security controls. While we take reasonable measures to protect information, no internet transmission is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security of data transmitted through third-party services.

Links to Other Websites

Our Site contains links to external websites, including links within our blog posts. Once you leave our Site, this Privacy Policy no longer applies. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of external sites and encourage you to review their privacy policies before providing any personal information.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time as our services change or as laws require. When we do, we will update the "Last updated" date at the top of this page. If the changes are significant, we will make a reasonable effort to highlight them. We encourage you to review this page periodically.