Legal
Last updated: September 2026
This Privacy Policy explains how SiyaRa Enterprise Limited, the company that operates Katha ("Katha", "we", "us", or "our"), collects, uses, shares, and protects your personal information when you use our website and matchmaking services (the "Service"). Katha is operated from Ontario, Canada. Our database and file storage are hosted in North America. By creating an account or using the Service, you agree to the practices described here. If you do not agree, please do not use the Service.
Because Katha is a matrimonial platform, we collect information that is more sensitive than most websites: government identification, exact birth details, and heritage information. We describe below exactly what we collect and why, we ask for your express consent before we use sensitive information for matchmaking, and we tell you how long we keep each kind of information.
The person responsible for personal information at Katha is our Privacy Officer, reachable at support@kathamatrimonial.com.
Account and identity information: your name, email address, mobile phone number, date of birth, gender, height, weight, marital status, and number of children (if applicable). Your date of birth is used to confirm you are an adult, to show your age to other members, and to compute your birth chart. It is never shown to other members.
Profile and matchmaking information: your profile photos and an optional short video introduction, a bio, your city and location, citizenship and residency status, education, occupation, employer and industry, income range (if you choose to provide it), lifestyle details (diet, exercise, drinking, and smoking), your match preferences, and family details such as your parents’ names and occupations and sibling information. Family details are about people who are not Katha members. By entering them you confirm that you have their permission to share them with us for the purpose of your profile.
Sensitive information (collected with your express consent): your religion, community details (caste, subcaste, and gotra, all optional), and your exact date, time, and place of birth, which we use to generate your Vedic birth chart (Kundli) and compatibility scores. You may leave the optional fields blank. In the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area, religion and community are special categories of personal data; we process them only because you choose to provide them for matchmaking.
Identity verification information: every member must be verified before their profile is shown to anyone. We collect a selfie photograph, taken with a specific hand gesture we ask for, and images of a government-issued identity document: a driver’s licence, passport, provincial or state ID card, Canadian permanent resident card, or Aadhaar card. Section 6 explains how these are handled and how quickly they are deleted.
Communications and activity: the message requests, messages, reactions, interests, shortlists, and passes you exchange with other members; the profiles you view; the members you block; the reports you make or that are made about you; and any correspondence you send us.
Payment information: if you subscribe, your payment is processed by Stripe. We do not collect or store your full card number; Stripe handles card data directly. We receive limited billing details such as your subscription status, plan, renewal date, and a payment reference.
Technical and usage information: your IP address, device and browser type, pages viewed, actions taken, approximate location derived from your IP address, and information collected through cookies, analytics, and error-monitoring tools.
We use your information to create and display your profile to other verified members, compute Kundli and Guna Milan compatibility, suggest and rank matches, enable message requests and messaging between connected members, verify identities and keep the community safe, process payments and manage subscriptions, prevent fraud, abuse, and ban evasion, provide support, comply with legal obligations, and improve the Service.
Automated screening and decisions. Every photo and video introduction you upload is automatically screened for explicit content before it is stored; a photo or video that fails the screen is rejected and not kept. Match suggestions and compatibility scores are produced automatically from profile information and birth charts. Identity documents are reviewed by a person, never by an automated system. If you believe an automated screen rejected a photo wrongly, write to us and a person will look at it.
Under Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and applicable provincial law, including Quebec’s private-sector privacy law, we rely on your consent to collect, use, and disclose your personal information for the purposes above. For sensitive information (religion, community, and birth details) we rely on your express consent, which you give by choosing to provide that information for matchmaking. You may withdraw consent at any time by editing your profile or deleting your account, subject to legal and contractual limits; withdrawing consent for information that the Service needs (for example, your date of birth) means we can no longer provide the Service to you.
If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, our legal bases are: performance of our contract with you (providing the Service you signed up for); your consent (sensitive information, optional analytics cookies, and non-essential notifications); our legitimate interests (keeping members safe, preventing fraud and abuse, securing and improving the Service), balanced against your rights; and compliance with legal obligations (tax, accounting, and responding to lawful requests). Where we process special-category data, we do so on the basis of your explicit consent.
With other members: once your profile is approved, it is visible to other approved members, subject to the controls and paywalls in the Service. Members you have blocked, and members who have blocked you, cannot see your profile. Your full profile and all of your photos are shown to members with a paid plan and to members you are in a conversation with; other members see a shorter version with your first photo. Your date of birth, phone number, email address, government ID, and selfie are never shown to other members. We show only an age, never a birth date.
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.
With service providers who process data on our behalf, under contracts that limit what they may do with it:
For legal and safety reasons: we may disclose information if required by law, to respond to legal process, to enforce our Terms, or to protect the rights, safety, or property of Katha, our members, or the public. Staff may review messages and profiles that have been reported by another member. We may also disclose information in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, and we would tell you before your information became subject to a different privacy policy.
We use essential cookies for authentication and session management, which are necessary for the Service to function. We also use optional analytics cookies (Google Analytics) to understand and improve the Service. Analytics cookies are only set if you accept them in the cookie banner shown when you first visit; until then, no analytics cookies are set. You can change or withdraw your choice at any time using the “Cookie preferences” link in the footer, and you can also control cookies through your browser settings. When enabled, Google Analytics may set its own cookies and process website-usage data (such as pages viewed and device information) with Google on our behalf. We do not use cookies to serve third-party advertising.
Verification is required. We verify every profile before it joins Katha, so that each person you see is who they say they are. To be verified you upload a selfie, taken in the moment with a hand gesture we ask for, and a government-issued ID. These images are:
Review is done by people. We do not perform automated facial recognition or biometric matching, and we do not build a biometric template from your selfie. If we ever introduce biometric processing, we will update this policy first and obtain any additional consent required by law. If your account is deleted, any verification images still on file are deleted with it.
Katha is operated from Canada. Our database and file storage are hosted in North America, and the service providers listed above are located in, or process data in, the United States and other countries whose laws may differ from those in your country. If you are in the United Kingdom, Canada is recognised as providing adequate protection for your data; for transfers to providers in the United States we rely on contractual safeguards (standard contractual clauses or the UK addendum) with those providers. By using the Service you consent to these transfers.
We keep your personal information while your account is active. When you delete your account, or we close it, we delete your profile, photos, video, messages, birth chart, and other personal data within 30 days. A few records are kept longer, for these reasons only:
Verification images are deleted on approval, or within 14 days of a rejection, as described in Section 6.
We use technical and organisational measures to protect your information: encryption in transit, access controls, row-level security on our database so that members can only read what the Service intends them to see, private storage for photos and documents, automated content screening, rate limits, and audit logs of administrative actions. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security. If a breach of security safeguards involving your personal information creates a real risk of significant harm to you, we will notify you and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, and any other authority the law requires, as soon as feasible. We keep a record of every such incident.
We send emails that are part of the Service: confirming your address, verification decisions, reminders while your verification is incomplete, receipts, and notices when someone sends you a request or a message. We send text messages only to deliver a verification code; we never send marketing by text. You can ask us to stop notification emails at any time by writing to support@kathamatrimonial.com; we will still send the emails needed to run your account, such as receipts and security notices.
You can correct most of your information and delete your account from the Settings page. To ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, or to exercise any other right, email us; we will confirm your identity and respond within 30 days, or sooner where the law requires. Depending on where you live, you have the following rights:
To exercise any of these rights, use the Settings page or email support@kathamatrimonial.com. Exercising your rights is free. If you have authorised someone to act for you, we will ask for proof of that authority.
Katha is only for adults. You must be at least 18 years old to use the Service, and identity verification confirms it. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If we learn that we have collected information from a person under 18, we will delete it and close the account.
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we make a material change, we will update the "Last updated" date above and email you at least 30 days before it takes effect, where it is feasible to do so. If you keep using the Service after the change takes effect, you accept the revised policy; if you do not agree, you can delete your account before then.
If you have questions about this policy or how we handle your information, or if you wish to exercise your privacy rights, write to our Privacy Officer at support@kathamatrimonial.com. Katha is operated by SiyaRa Enterprise Limited, Ontario, Canada.