Privacy Policy

Section 01Two relationships, two sets of rules

Soom is sold to employers. That means we hold two different kinds of information, under two different sets of obligations, and it matters which one applies to you.

If you are an employee using Soom

Your employer decides what to collect about you, who inside the company can see it, and how long to keep it. We process it on their instructions. We are the data processor; your employer is the data fiduciary. If you want your information corrected or removed, ask your employer first — in most cases they can do it themselves, and where they cannot, the request has to come from them.

If you are a customer, or visiting this website

For your account details, billing information, support conversations and anything you submit through this site, we are the data fiduciary and you can come to us directly.

Section 02What we collect

Most of this is entered by your employer or by you, inside the product. Only name, email and a password are strictly required to have an account — everything else depends on which modules your employer uses and what they choose to record.

Health-related information

We do not ask for health data directly, but some of it arrives anyway: a sick-leave certificate uploaded as an attachment, a medical insurance declaration made for tax purposes, a medical expense claim, a blood group on a profile, or a leave reason that mentions an illness. Please treat free-text reason fields as visible to your manager and HR, and share only what you are comfortable with them reading.

People who are not Soom users

We also hold information about people who never signed up: job candidates (name, contact details, CV and interview notes), and landlords named in house-rent tax declarations (name and PAN). This is entered by our customers, and requests about it should be directed to the employer who entered it.

Section 03Location

This is the most sensitive thing Soom records, so it gets its own section.

• When. Your location is read when you open the app's home screen and when you clock in or out. It is stored only with a punch.
• What. Latitude, longitude, the accuracy of the reading, and a street address or locality resolved from those coordinates. When you clock in by scanning an office QR code, the punch also records which code you scanned and how far from it you were.
• Never in the background. The mobile app requests “while using the app” permission only. It cannot and does not track you when the app is closed.
• Office QR codes. Your employer can put up QR codes for clocking in and out. When you scan one, Soom checks how far you are from where HR placed that code on a map and refuses the punch outside the distance HR set. On Android it also refuses a scan when another app is faking the phone's location. The camera is used only to read the code; no picture is kept. Your employer can make scanning the only way to clock in at a branch. A punch made with the clock-in button has no distance check.

Your manager, HR and your employer's administrators can see the location recorded against each of your punches. Where your employer uses the client portal, the client you are assigned to can also see the check-in and check-out locations for the days you worked on their account. Punch location is kept for as long as the attendance record itself.

Section 04How we use it

We use the information to:

• run the features your employer has enabled — attendance, leave, payroll, expenses, documents and the rest
• calculate salaries and statutory deductions (PF, ESI, professional tax and TDS) and produce payslips and filings
• authenticate you, keep your account secure, and enforce two-factor authentication where it is switched on
• send notifications you or your employer have configured — approvals, reminders, announcements
• keep an audit trail of most changes made inside a workspace, which is a security feature and cannot be switched off
• provide support when you or your employer contact us
• keep the service working, diagnose faults, and prevent abuse

We do not profile you for advertising, sell access to your information, or use your workspace content to build features for anyone else.

Section 05Who can see your data inside your workspace

Access depends on the role your employer gives each person. As a general rule:

• Your manager can see your attendance and punch locations, your leave requests and the reasons you give, your daily reports, your date of birth and your emergency contact.
• HR and company administrators can see everything above plus salary, bank details, government identifiers, documents and career history.
• Approvers in a chain receive the request and its reason by email as well as in the app.
• External client users, where your employer uses the client portal, see a restricted view of the employees assigned to them: presence, leave availability, the daily reports tagged to their work, work email, date of birth and punch locations. They never see salary, bank details or government identifiers.

A small number of our own staff can access customer workspaces to operate the service, investigate faults and run migrations. Access is limited to people who need it, and most changes are recorded in an audit log.

Section 06Who else we share it with

We share information with the service providers that make Soom work. We do not sell it, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers.

We may also disclose information where the law requires it, to enforce our agreements, or to protect the rights and safety of people using Soom. If Soom is acquired or merged, information may transfer as part of that transaction; your employer would be told before it becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

Section 07Where it is stored

Soom runs in Amazon Web Services' Mumbai region, and your workspace data is stored in India.

Some of it necessarily leaves that region in the course of providing the service: push notifications pass through Google's and Apple's global networks, punch coordinates are sent to mapping providers for address lookup, sign-in with Google or Microsoft is handled on their infrastructure, and crash reports are processed in the United States. These providers operate globally and we cannot pin them to a single country.

Section 08How long we keep it

HR and payroll records are kept for as long as your employer maintains their workspace, and this is deliberate: employment, payroll and statutory records must remain available for years after someone leaves, and a former employee's payslips and tax records are frequently needed long after their last working day.

• When you leave a company, your record is marked as exited and your access is revoked. Your employment history, payslips, documents and attendance remain in your employer's workspace.
• Attendance and location history is kept for the life of the record.
• Audit logs are kept indefinitely, because a security log that expires is of limited use.
• Chat attachments are deleted after 30 days. Message text is kept.
• Notifications expire automatically, and sign-in sessions expire when their token does.

Section 09How it is protected

What we do:

• Traffic between you and Soom is encrypted in transit (HTTPS/TLS).
• Passwords are stored hashed, never in a readable form, and are never visible to us or to your employer.
• Stored data is encrypted at rest by our hosting providers, Amazon Web Services and MongoDB Atlas.
• Time-based two-factor authentication is available and can be switched on per account.
• Uploaded files are served through short-lived links rather than public URLs.
• Most changes inside a workspace are recorded in an audit log.

Two exceptions worth stating plainly: profile photos, company logos and announcement images are served from stable public URLs so they can be embedded in email, and are therefore viewable by anyone who has the link. And no system is perfectly secure — we cannot guarantee that a determined attacker will never succeed, only that we take it seriously and will tell you if something happens.

Soom does not currently hold an independent security certification such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001. We would rather say so than imply otherwise.

Section 10Your rights

Under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 you can ask for access to your information, ask for it to be corrected or completed, ask for it to be erased, nominate someone to act for you, and complain to the Data Protection Board.

How to exercise them

If you are an employee, start with your employer — they control the workspace, and most corrections they can make immediately. Where a request needs us, we act on their instruction.

If you are a customer or a website visitor, write to support@soom.co.in. We will respond within 30 days.

These are handled by people, not by a self-service screen. There is no “download my data” or “delete my account” button in Soom today, and we would rather tell you that than point you at one that does not exist.

Some information cannot be erased on request: payroll, tax and statutory records must be retained for the periods Indian law requires, regardless of who asks.

Section 11Children

Soom is workplace software and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly create accounts for anyone under 18. Dates of birth of employees' family members may be recorded by an employer for statutory purposes; those individuals do not have accounts and cannot sign in.

Section 12Changes to this policy

We update this page when the product changes. The date at the top always reflects the current version. If a change materially affects how we handle personal data, we will notify the affected workspace administrators by email before it takes effect.

Section 13Contact us

For anything about this policy, or to make a request about your information, contact our Grievance Officer:

See also our Terms of Service.