Legal
Spear Officers: app privacy notice
Scope
This notice covers the Spear Officers Android application only. It supplements our platform privacy notice, which covers the wider Spear service. Where the two differ on app behaviour, this notice governs.
The app is issued to serving police officers by their own department. It cannot be used without an account provisioned by that department. It is not available to the general public and collects no data from anyone who is not a logged-in officer.
Who is responsible
The deploying police department (the tenant) determines why patrol duty data is collected and is the Data Fiduciary for it under the DPDP Act 2023. Bitsmith acts as a Data Processor on that department's instructions. For the officer's own login account, Bitsmith is the Data Fiduciary.
What the app collects
| Data | Why | Retention |
|---|---|---|
| Precise device location (GPS) | Captured twice per check-in: at QR scan and again at the selfie, to confirm the officer is physically inside the checkpoint geofence. Collected only during an active check-in. Never in the background. | 1 year |
| Selfie photograph | Attendance evidence that the assigned officer, not a substitute, reached the checkpoint. Taken only when the officer submits a check-in. No face recognition, no biometric matching, no face template is created. | 1 year |
| Email address | Officer login and session authentication. | Life of the account |
| Device model and app version | Attached to each check-in for support, and to detect mock-location tampering. | With the check-in record |
| Crash and error diagnostics | Stability and fault diagnosis, in builds where crash reporting is enabled. | Provider default |
An officer may also tag other officers on patrol with them so the whole party is credited from one check-in. Only the department's own officer roster can be tagged.
What the app does not do
- No background or continuous location tracking: location is read only during a check-in
- No face recognition, biometric matching, or face templates
- No advertising, no ad identifiers, no analytics profiling
- We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it with third parties for their own purposes
- No contacts, call logs, SMS, or files on the device are accessed
Storage and transfer
All traffic uses HTTPS. Selfie evidence is stored in a private, non-public Amazon S3 bucket in the AWS Mumbai (ap-south-1) region, accessible only to authorised users of the officer's own department tenant. Check-in records are held in the department's tenant database. Data is not transferred outside India in the normal course of the service.
Offline check-ins are queued in encrypted local storage on the device and uploaded when connectivity returns; the local copy is cleared once the upload succeeds.
Permissions the app requests
- Location (precise): geofence verification at check-in. The check-in cannot be verified without it.
- Camera: scanning checkpoint QR markers and capturing the evidence selfie.
Both may be declined in Android settings. Declining them does not stop the officer using the device, but attendance cannot be marked through the app.
Your rights, access and deletion
Patrol duty records belong to the officer's department. To access, correct or delete a check-in, its location or its selfie, contact your station in-charge or tenant administrator first. They control that data and can action it directly.
If your department cannot resolve it, or your request concerns your Bitsmith login account, email hello@bitsmith.tech with subject "Spear Officers: privacy request". We aim to acknowledge within 72 hours and will act on the department's instructions where we hold the data as processor. Duty and investigation records may be subject to statutory retention or law-enforcement exemptions.
Subprocessors and security
Our living subprocessor list is at bitsmith.tech/subprocessors. Security practices are described at bitsmith.tech/security.
Contact
Bitsmith Technologies Private Limited, Pune, India · hello@bitsmith.tech
Changes
We may update this notice; the "Last reviewed" date will change. Material changes will be communicated to deploying departments through product or contract channels.