Legal

Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 2026

DB Studios (“we,” “our,” or “us”) operates the UPSC PYQ Boost mobile application (the “App”) and the public website at upsc-pyq-boost.web.app (the “Website”). This page informs you of our policies regarding the collection, use, and disclosure of personal data when you use our App or Website.

Information We Collect

Information You Provide

• Phone number — collected when you sign up or upgrade from a guest account using Firebase Phone Authentication, used solely to verify your identity and secure your account.
• Display name — chosen by you during profile setup, shown on leaderboards and within the app.

Information Collected Automatically

When you use the App we create a profile record for your account and keep it up to date. That record contains:

• Account identifiers — the account ID issued by Firebase Authentication, and the short user code shown on your Profile screen. The user code identifies your account when you contact us, including when you request deletion.
• Progress and score data — XP, coins, current streak, badges earned, weekly and total scores, your lifetime totals of questions attempted, answered correctly and answered incorrectly, and your per-subject performance statistics. These power the leaderboards, progress tracking and daily challenges.
• Activity timestamps — when your account was created, when it was last active, and when you last played. These are used to keep streaks accurate and to identify guest accounts that have been inactive long enough to be removed (see Data Retention).
• Whether the account is a guest account — so the App can offer to upgrade it to a full account.

Who Can See Your Profile

The App’s leaderboard is built by reading profile records across all accounts, so the information listed above is readable by other signed-in users of the App, not only by us. The public leaderboard on our website is different: it is a separate, limited copy containing only rank, display name, weekly score, XP and streak for the top ten accounts, and it contains no account identifier and no phone number.

Advertising Data

This app displays advertisements served through Google AdMob. AdMob may collect and use data such as advertising identifiers to serve ads, including personalized ads, and to measure ad performance. Google’s use of this data is governed by Google’s own privacy policy: policies.google.com/privacy

You may be able to opt out of personalized advertising through your device’s ad settings (Android Settings → Privacy → Ads).

Website Analytics

The Website (its homepage, Current Affairs pages and archive) uses Google Analytics 4, provided by Google LLC, which acts as a third-party data processor on our behalf. It is used on the Website only, not in the App. We use it to understand how the Website is used — which pages are visited, how people arrive at them and how long they stay — so that we can improve the product.

Google Analytics collects:

• A pseudonymous client identifier — a random ID stored in a first-party cookie (_ga) that lets Google Analytics recognise a returning browser. It is not linked to your App account, phone number, display name or user code.
• Pages visited and engagement — the pages you open, how you reached them (referrer), how long you keep a page open, how far down a page you scroll, and clicks on links that lead off the Website.
• Approximate location and device information — country or region derived from your IP address, and the browser, device category and screen size in use.

IP addresses. Google Analytics 4 does not log or store IP addresses. The IP address is used only transiently to derive the approximate location above and is discarded.

Retention. Event-level analytics data is retained by Google Analytics for 14 months, after which it is deleted automatically. Only aggregated reports, which cannot identify an individual browser, are kept beyond that.

Opting out. You can prevent Google Analytics from collecting data in your browser by installing the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on, or by blocking cookies and scripts from googletagmanager.com and google-analytics.com in your browser settings. Google’s own handling of analytics data is described at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites and in Google’s privacy policy linked above.

How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect to:

• Authenticate and secure your account
• Display your profile, scores, and rank on leaderboards
• Track your quiz progress, streaks, and badge achievements
• Send you app notifications related to daily challenges and streaks
• Display advertisements to support free access to the app
• Maintain, troubleshoot, and improve the app

Data Storage and Third-Party Services

Your data is stored using:

• Google Firebase (Firestore database and Authentication), operated by Google LLC. Firebase’s privacy and security practices are described at: firebase.google.com/support/privacy
• Firebase Remote Config, also operated by Google LLC, which we use to turn app features on and off — including the advertising described above — without shipping an update. It delivers settings to the App; we do not use it to store your profile data.
• Google AdMob, for advertising, as described above.
• Google Analytics 4, on the Website only, for usage analytics as described under Website Analytics above.

Some app data (such as preferences and cached quiz content) is stored locally on your device and is not transmitted to us.

Data Retention

We retain your account data for as long as your account remains active.

Guest accounts. An automated job runs once a week and removes guest accounts that have been inactive for more than 30 days. For each such account it deletes the profile record and the display-name reservation. It does not delete the underlying anonymous sign-in record held by Firebase Authentication, and it does not release any short user code that was issued to the account; user codes are never reused. Registered (phone) accounts are not touched by this job.

To have an account removed, use the deletion request process described under Your Rights below.

Your Rights

You may:

• Edit your display name within the app
• Request deletion of the cloud records we hold for your account, by email

Deletion is not automatic and cannot be carried out from inside the App. You request it by email and we process it manually; full instructions, including which details to send, are on our deletion request page. We will tell you the expected completion time when we acknowledge your request.

What a deletion request removes. Once we have verified and processed a request we delete these cloud records for the account:

• the profile record, which is also the row your entry on the in-app leaderboard is drawn from;
• the display-name reservation;
• the short user code record, where the account has one;
• the Firebase Authentication account record.

Guest accounts are included.

What it does not remove. Some data is stored only on your own phone or tablet and never sent to us — your quiz history, bookmarks, any quiz in progress, and your saved preferences. An email request cannot reach that data, and it cannot reach your other devices. Uninstalling the App removes its local data from that device, subject to your device’s own backup and restore settings. Signing out ends the session on a device; it does not delete cloud records.

We describe the specific records above rather than promising deletion of “all associated data”: operational logs, backups, support email, and third-party services described in this policy may have their own retention periods.

Children’s Privacy

This app is intended for users preparing for competitive examinations and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, please contact us so we can remove it.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Changes will be posted on this page with an updated “Last updated” date.

Contact Us

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us: