Privacy Policy

1. Introduction & Data Fiduciary Identity

AnimeArena Technologies Private Limited ("AnimeArena", "we", "us", or "our") acts as the Data Fiduciary (under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023) and Data Controller (under the European Union General Data Protection Regulation) regarding personal data collected through https://animearena.live.

We are committed to transparent, privacy-first engineering and compliance with global data protection regimes. This policy explains how we collect, process, store, and protect your personal information.

2. Data We Collect

We collect only the minimal data necessary to provide competitive fan voting and maintain platform security:

• Identity & Account Data: Email address, pseudonym/username, avatar image, and hashed passwords. When authenticating via Google or Discord OAuth, we collect your verified email, public avatar URL, and platform user identifier.
• Financial & Transactional Records: Star purchase history, checkout session identifiers, billing country, and timestamped ledger records. We do not collect, process, or store raw credit card or bank account details; all payment credentials are handled directly by PCI-DSS Level 1 certified processors.
• Engagement & Voting Data: Records of Star allocations, anime votes, community battle participations, tier list configurations, and tournament bracket selections.
• Technical & Security Telemetry: IP addresses, browser user agent strings, device characteristics, Cloudflare Turnstile bot risk scores, and security audit logs.

3. Legal Bases for Processing

We process your personal data under the following lawful grounds:

• Contractual Necessity: To deliver requested platform features, maintain your Star wallet balance, and execute voting allocations.
• Legal & Regulatory Compliance: To maintain mandatory financial records, calculate statutory GST/taxes, and satisfy anti-fraud obligations.
• Legitimate Interests: To detect and prevent bot attacks, enforce anti-whale velocity limits, investigate Sybil attacks, and preserve leaderboard ranking integrity.
• Consent: For optional marketing updates or cookies where express opt-in consent is legally mandated.

4. Absolute Prohibition on Minor Data Collection

Under DPDPA 2023 § 9, the US Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), and GDPR Article 8, AnimeArena does not knowingly collect, store, or process personal data of individuals under eighteen (18) years of age.

If we discover that personal data has been submitted by or collected from an individual under 18 without verifiable parental consent (which our platform does not support), we will take immediate steps to permanently delete the data and terminate the corresponding account.

5. Data Subject Rights & Grievance Redressal

Depending on your location, you have statutory rights concerning your personal information:

• Right to Access & Portability: Request an export of your stored profile data and transaction history.
• Right to Rectification: Request correction of inaccurate or incomplete personal information.
• Right to Erasure ("Right to be Forgotten"): Request deletion of your account and personal identifiers, subject to statutory tax and financial ledger retention laws.
• Right to Object & Restrict Processing: Opt out of non-essential processing where applicable.

To exercise your data protection rights or file a complaint with our Resident Grievance Officer in India:

6. Third-Party Service Providers

We partner with vetted third-party service providers under strict data processing agreements:

• Payment Processing: Whop Inc. (Merchant of Record) and licensed payment gateways.
• Bot & DDoS Mitigation: Cloudflare (Turnstile and CDN edge delivery).
• Database & Infrastructure: PostgreSQL database hosting with encryption-at-rest and strict access controls.
• Email Delivery: Transactional email service providers for verification and password reset workflows.