Privacy policy

CHiiRO is a community platform for founders and investors. You can build a professional profile, join communities, post and answer questions, apply to jobs, register for events and message other members.

CHiiRO is operated by Rootree Analytic Inc., a corporation incorporated in Canada ("Rootree", "we"). Rootree decides what personal information is collected and why, and is accountable for it. More about the company: rootreeinc.com.

For privacy questions, rights requests and complaints, email hello@chiiro.co. If your request concerns your account, please write from the email address your CHiiRO account uses.

Rootree has not appointed a data protection officer.

Your device contacts. The invite screen can read your device's address book, but only if you allow it. This is optional, and you can refuse without losing any other feature. The contacts are read and shown on your device. We found no code in the app that sends them to our servers.

Our backend logs every request it receives. We keep these logs for security, abuse prevention and diagnosing faults. This processing is essential to running the service and cannot be turned off.

• What is stored. The time, endpoint, response status, IP address, user agent, your account key when you are signed in, and the content of the request and of our response. These are stored in readable form; they are not encrypted.
• Passwords are not stored in our logs.
• Sign-in tokens and codes. On 24 September 2026 we removed the session tokens, one-time codes and other secret values that older log entries contained. New log entries can still contain the session tokens our servers return when you sign in. We are changing this.
• How long. We keep server logs and do not delete them. There is currently no automatic time limit on them.
• Who can reach them. Administrative access to the server that runs our API is allowed only from two network ranges, and its internal service ports are closed to the internet.

What the app sends depends on its version. At the date at the top of this page, version 1.0.16 is available through open testing on Google Play and through Apple TestFlight; the main Google Play release is an earlier version.

Versions up to 1.0.15 use Mixpanel and Google Firebase Analytics. From the first launch, without asking, they send usage events (screens viewed, app opens, certain actions) and your account identifier to those two services. They include no crash-reporting service.

From version 1.0.16, Mixpanel and Firebase Analytics are removed, and optional analytics and crash reporting are asked for through a privacy choice. The first time you open the app, a privacy sheet asks you to choose. It has three buttons of equal weight: Accept all, Essential only and Customise. You can change your choice at any time in Settings → Privacy.

• Essential is always on: sign-in, security, fraud and abuse prevention, and our own server records (2.3).
• Analytics & diagnostics is optional. It covers:
  • Crash reports, sent to Google Firebase Crashlytics: the crash stack trace, device model and operating-system version.
  • Usage events (for example app opened and screen viewed), sent to our own servers. From version 1.0.16 the app sends usage data to no analytics company.

Nothing optional is collected until you have answered the sheet. If you choose Customise, the analytics switch starts in the on position, and you can turn it off before confirming. If you choose Essential only, or turn the switch off later, the app sends no usage events and crash reporting is switched off.

Data that versions up to 1.0.15 sent to Mixpanel and Firebase Analytics stays with those providers, under our accounts with them. Please update the app when a newer version is available to you.

• Precise location. The app asks for no location permission and never reads your device's position. Where this policy says "location" it means the city you type in or a city-level estimate from your connection. A backend table can store a precise position. It holds one record, dated October 2025, from before this policy.
• Payment or financial information. See clause 11.
• Health, fitness or biometric data.
• Cross-app tracking or advertising identifiers. The Android app removes the advertising-ID permission, and nothing in the app reads the iOS advertising identifier.
• No sale of personal information, and no sharing of it for cross-context behavioural advertising. The companies listed in clause 3.3 process data for us as service providers. That is not a sale.
• No third-party advertising and no advertising profiles.

• Anyone, signed in or not: what you post in public communities, and your questions and answers.
• Any signed-in member: your name, photo, banner, headline, city, bio, professional and education history, skills, interests, and connection and follower counts.
• Specific people, and us: your direct messages (the recipient; also the operator, because an administrative account is a member of every direct-message room and the server can read message contents, see 9.1); your job applications (the member who posted the role).
• Members of that community: what you post in a private community (but see 3.2).
• Never shown to other members: your email, phone number, date of birth, password, device and technical data, search history, reports you file and your block list.

A private community is intended to be readable only by its members. We have recorded an internal defect under which discussions in private communities could be read without signing in. Until it is confirmed fixed, do not post anything in a private community that you would not post in an open one.

Direct messages are not sent to a third party. They are carried by a Matrix server that Rootree runs itself, on its own virtual machine in our Azure account (Central India).

Processing agreements. No written data processing agreement is on record with any of the providers above.

We may disclose personal information if the law requires it, or if disclosure is necessary to investigate abuse, enforce our Terms of Use or protect someone's safety.

If CHiiRO or Rootree is acquired, merged or reorganised, personal information may transfer as part of that deal. You will be told before your information becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

Wherever you live, you can ask to access, correct, download or delete your personal information. You can edit most of it yourself in the app. From version 1.0.16 you can change your analytics choice at any time in Settings → Privacy. You can turn push notifications on or off in your device's settings.

You also have the right to restrict processing and to object to processing based on legitimate interests; to data portability; to withdraw consent at any time (withdrawal does not affect processing already done); and not to be subject to decisions based solely on automated processing with legal or similar effect (CHiiRO makes none). You can complain to your data protection authority or, in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office.

Under PIPEDA you can learn what we hold and how it is used and disclosed, access it, challenge its accuracy, withdraw consent (subject to legal or contractual limits), and challenge our compliance: first with us (1.2), then with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

You can ask to know, delete and correct your personal information. We do not sell or "share" it, and we will not treat you differently for exercising a right.

Use the in-app controls where they exist, or email hello@chiiro.co. We respond within 30 days. If a request is complex we may take longer, and we will tell you why.

• In the app: tap your profile photo (top left of Home), then the gear icon to open Settings, then Delete Account at the bottom. The app shows what will be removed. Type DELETE and confirm. Deletion takes effect immediately.
• On the web: chiiro.co/data-deletion explains the steps and works without the app.
• By email: write to hello@chiiro.co from the address your account uses. We will act within 30 days and tell you what was removed.

CHiiRO is a community where people answer each other's questions. If deleting an account erased everything it ever wrote, the answers other people came for would disappear, and conversations others took part in would have holes. So deletion removes you, not the discussion others contributed to.

Deletion is the one place where we permanently erase data rather than archive it. Your identity and profile data are deleted outright and cannot be recovered.

• Permanently erased: your name, email address, phone number, date of birth and gender; photo, banner, bio and about text; work history, education, skills and interests; uploaded files and documents; direct messages; connections, follows, votes and bookmarks; search history; saved locations; your sign-in credentials and one-time codes; and the record that links your account to everything else.
• Kept, permanently detached from you: discussions, comments, questions and answers you posted stay where they are, shown as from "a removed account", with no name, photo or link to you. This cannot be reversed.
• Your devices: push tokens are removed so nothing more is sent to your phone. A record that a device was registered is kept, without the token.
• Sign-in security events: kept, with your account key, IP address, user agent, device fingerprint and location estimate removed at the time of deletion. Only the shape of each event remains: what happened, whether it succeeded, and when.
• Server request logs are not deleted or changed when you delete your account (2.3). Entries made while you used CHiiRO keep what they recorded, including your account key and IP address.
• Reports you filed: kept with your identity removed, so moderation can finish.

One limit we cannot remove. Free text can identify its author even after every identifier is gone. A post that names a company, a city and a year may point to the person who wrote it. If you want a specific post gone, delete it before you delete your account.

The app connects to our API at https://api.chiiro.co over HTTPS, and this website is served over HTTPS. We do not claim that all app traffic is encrypted. The Android app's configuration still permits unencrypted connections to our messaging server (matrix.nexteir.in). Direct messages are not end-to-end encrypted: rooms are created without encryption and the server can read message contents.

Passwords are stored only as a hash. Account email, first and last name, phone number and date of birth are encrypted with AES-256-GCM before storage. Some information is not encrypted: display name, bio and other free-text profile fields; the name, email and phone entered on a job application; and the IP addresses, user agents and request and response content in our server logs. We would rather tell you that than make a blanket claim.

Content you post publicly is stored readably because the product has to search and show it. No system is perfectly secure.

CHiiRO itself holds no security or compliance certification.