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Publisher Guidelines

Version 1 · Effective 20 September 2026

1. About these Guidelines

These Publisher Guidelines (the “Guidelines”) are the rules you must follow when you use the Gharial SDK in your Apps. They are part of the Agreement under the Publisher Terms. Words with a capital letter mean what the Terms say they mean. If the Guidelines and the Terms conflict, the Terms prevail.

2. What you must do

You must obtain valid consent from each End User before the SDK collects any data. Consent must be freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous: a clear action by the End User, after a plain explanation of what is collected and why. A box that is already ticked, or a notice that the End User cannot refuse, is not consent.

You must meet the consent rules of every place where your Apps are used. These include the GDPR and the UK GDPR, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 of India, and similar laws elsewhere. The standard above applies even where the local law asks for less.

You may use any consent tool that meets this standard, such as a consent management platform that follows the IAB Transparency and Consent Framework, Google’s User Messaging Platform, or your own screen. The SDK collects nothing until your App has told it that consent was given.

Withdrawing consent must be as easy as giving it, and must be possible at any time from inside the App. When an End User withdraws consent, your App must tell the SDK, so that collection stops.

Keep records that show when and how each End User consented.

2.2 Location permission

The SDK needs the operating system’s location permission. Ask for it only after consent, in the way Android and iOS require, and explain why your App asks. Do not make the rest of your App unusable for an End User who refuses, unless location is essential to what the App does.

2.3 Privacy policy

You must include the text at gharialdata.com/disclosure in the privacy policy of each App. By “privacy policy” we mean the document at the privacy policy address you declared in the App’s listing on Google Play, the Apple App Store or another store.

Keep the text up to date and keep the link to gharialdata.com/privacy working. You may translate the text if the meaning stays the same.

2.4 Age of users

You must not use the SDK in an App that is directed to children, or that is likely to be used mainly by them. For this purpose a child is anyone under 18 in India, under 16 in the European Economic Area unless the country sets a lower age, and under 13 in the United Kingdom. Where the law of the End User’s country sets a higher age, that age applies.

If you learn that an End User is a child, you must make sure the SDK collects nothing more from that End User.

2.5 Technical requirements

You must:

  • Integrate the SDK as described at docs.gharialdata.com.
  • Release each new version of the SDK as soon as you reasonably can, and within 30 days at the latest. When we mark a version as urgent, release it within 7 days. Data from a version we no longer support is not paid: see Section 6.2 of the Terms.
  • Use each app key only in the App it was issued for.
  • Not modify, decompile or reverse engineer the SDK, or change how it behaves.
  • Not send anything through the SDK other than what the SDK collects itself. In particular, never send names, email addresses, phone numbers, government identifiers, or financial, health or biometric data.

2.6 App stores

You must:

  • Distribute each App only through legitimate channels, such as Google Play, the Apple App Store or another reputable store.
  • Follow the developer policies and review rules of each store, including the Google Play Developer Program Policies and the Apple App Store Review Guidelines.
  • Keep the privacy declarations in each listing accurate for the data the SDK collects, such as Google Play Data safety and Apple App Privacy. The documentation explains what to declare.

2.7 Requests from End Users

If an End User asks you to access, correct or delete data collected through the SDK, or makes any other data protection request about it, and you cannot resolve it with the data you hold, send it to privacy@gharialdata.com within 5 business days.

2.8 Real users, honest numbers

We pay for real people who use your App and have agreed to share their location. You must not, and must not allow anyone else to:

  • Inflate, manipulate or misrepresent the numbers the SDK measures, such as daily active users.
  • Use bots, emulators, device farms, automated scripts or other artificial means to generate activity.
  • Falsify where End Users are, for example with VPNs, proxies, mock locations or altered devices.
  • Buy, rent or exchange traffic or installs to raise your numbers, or pay or reward End Users for installing the App, giving consent or granting location.
  • Start the App, or keep it running, without the End User’s knowledge so that it counts as active.
  • Obtain consent or location permission through pressure, tricks or misleading screens, or record a consent the End User did not give.
  • Generate activity yourself, or through your staff, relatives or contractors.
  • Send through the SDK the data of people who have not given valid consent.
  • Get round any technical measure that protects the integrity of the data.

Each of these is Invalid Activity under the Terms. We check for all of them, and we do not pay for the data they produce.

2.9 One account, your own apps

  • Hold one account. Accounts of the same person, household or group of companies count as one.
  • Add only Apps that you own or control, under your own developer account on the app store.
  • Use your own identity, your own documents and a bank account in your own name.
  • Do not open a new account after we have closed or refused one.

3. Apps that cannot use the SDK

You must not use the SDK in an App that:

  1. Is directed to children, or is likely to be used mainly by them (see Section 2.4).
  2. Contains or promotes child sexual abuse material, sexually explicit material or adult entertainment.
  3. Promotes, glorifies, finances or recruits for terrorism or violent extremism, or is published by, or made for, an organisation that does.
  4. Promotes any ideology or movement, religious, political or other, that calls for violence or hatred against people, or for denying them their rights, because of their sex, religion or beliefs, caste, race, ethnic origin, nationality, disability, sexual orientation or age.
  5. Demeans women or girls, or promotes their harassment, abuse, exploitation, forced or child marriage, or exclusion from education, work or public life.
  6. Promotes violence of any other kind.
  7. Promotes or helps with anything illegal, including copyright infringement and computer misuse.
  8. Infringes the copyright, trade mark or other rights of anyone else.
  9. Deceives people, impersonates a person or organisation, or misleads End Users about who made the App or what it does.
  10. Imitates or wraps another company’s app without permission.
  11. Contains malware, spyware or code that harms devices or collects data in secret.
  12. Harasses, threatens or bullies anyone, or invades their privacy.
  13. Is mainly about a sensitive subject, where the fact of using the App, together with location, could reveal something sensitive about a person. This covers apps mainly about health conditions, mental health, addiction, reproductive or sexual health, religious practice, sexual orientation or gender identity, political activity, immigration status, or support for victims of violence.
  14. Has been removed from a major app store for breaking its policies, or that you have good reason to think is about to be removed.
  15. Is distributed mainly outside legitimate app stores.
  16. Has no real audience of its own: a copy of another app, one of many near-identical apps made from the same template, or an app whose only evident purpose is to carry SDKs.
  17. Asks for the location permission without a reason an End User would understand from what the App does.
  18. Is made mainly for an audience in the United States. Gharial does not collect or pay for data from devices located there.

4. How we check, and what happens after a breach

We may review your Apps and the data they produce to check that you follow these Guidelines. You must answer our reasonable questions.

If we reasonably find that you have broken these Guidelines, we may, depending on how serious it is:

  • Ask you to put it right within a reasonable time.
  • Suspend the SDK in one or more Apps, or suspend your account.
  • Withhold, reverse or recover the Fees linked to the breach.
  • End the Agreement under the Terms.

We will tell you the basis for our decision and give you a fair chance to answer before it becomes final, unless the conduct is unlawful or so serious that we must act at once.

5. Changes

We may update these Guidelines. We will tell you about a material change at least 30 days before it takes effect, by email or on the Dashboard, unless the law requires us to act sooner.

6. Contact

Questions about these Guidelines: legal@gharialdata.com. Data protection: privacy@gharialdata.com.