Privacy notice — Samvaad

Published by RailTel Corporation of India Limited · Last updated 7 August 2026

Samvaad is an internal application of RailTel Corporation of India Limited. It answers questions from RailTel’s own records and shows the passage each answer rests on. This notice describes what it collects, why, what it does not do, and how to ask for your information to be deleted.

Who this is for

Samvaad is available to RailTel employees and authorised personnel who sign in with a RailTel account. It is not a consumer service and is not open to the general public. There is no Samvaad account: access comes from a RailTel employee account, which RailTel IT provisions and withdraws.

What we collect

Your identity, from your RailTel account

Your employee identifier, name, official email address, and the grade and designation recorded against you. The grade and designation are needed because entitlements and financial powers differ by them — an answer about a laptop ceiling is a different answer for different grades, and the application must know which applies to you before it answers at all.

The questions you ask

The text of each question is kept, with the time, your employee identifier, and whether the application answered or declined. You can read your own history in the application. An administrator responsible for the platform can read the questions put to it, across everyone, which is how questions the application answers badly are found and fixed. The answer itself is not stored with the question. You can ask for your history to be deleted — see deleting your information.

Ordinary technical records

The IP address, page requested and browser user-agent string, as any web server records.

What we do not collect

• No location data, contacts, photos, videos, files, calendar entries or messages.
• No advertising identifier, and no advertising or analytics trackers of any kind.
• No microphone or camera access.
• No payment information. Samvaad handles no money and has no in-app purchases.
• No crash-reporting or diagnostics collection. The application contains no such component.

How your information is used

Only to run the service: to establish who you are, to decide what you may be shown, to answer your question, and to improve the answers. It is not used for any commercial purpose, is not sold, and is not shared with advertisers, data brokers or any other company.

Who can see what

Samvaad checks permissions before it retrieves evidence, not after. A document you are not entitled to see does not reach the part of the application that composes answers, so it cannot be quoted to you even indirectly. Where a question cannot be answered from material you are entitled to, the application says so rather than answering from something else.

Requests that leave RailTel

Samvaad answers from RailTel’s own records. In one narrow case it may make a request to an external website: when a question asks whether a purchase can be approved but names no amount, it may look up a published price. When that happens:

• only the subject of the question is sent — not your identity, and not your question as typed;
• the request can only reach a short, explicitly configured list of permitted websites, and any redirect away from that list is refused rather than followed;
• what is found is shown separately from the answer, labelled with its source and the date it was read, and is never treated as a RailTel record.

Security

All traffic is encrypted in transit. On the web, your access token is held on the server and never placed in the page you receive, so nothing running in your browser can read it. In the Android application, credentials are held in the Android Keystore rather than in ordinary application storage. Access to the servers is restricted to authorised RailTel IT personnel.

How long we keep it

Sign-in sessions expire and are removed when you sign out. Server and question logs are retained under RailTel’s records-retention practice for internal IT systems; information held about you is removed when your RailTel account is withdrawn, and you may ask for it to be removed sooner at any time — see deleting your information.

Deleting your information

You do not need to close an account, and there is none to close. Samvaad has no account of its own — access comes from your RailTel employee account, which RailTel IT provisions and withdraws.

What is deleted, and what is kept

Your question history is a record of your own questions. You can read it yourself in the application; an administrator responsible for the platform can read the questions put to it, which is stated here because it is a disclosure and not a detail.

Data kept after a deletion request

Where an entry must be retained to meet a statutory, audit or information-security obligation, it is retained for the period that obligation requires and no longer. You will be told which obligation applies and for how long. Nothing is retained for any commercial purpose; RailTel does not sell user data and does not share it with advertisers or data brokers.

Deleting your data removes nothing the application needs to work: your identity is not part of the material Samvaad answers from. It answers from RailTel’s own office orders and manuals.

Children

Samvaad is an employment-related tool and is not directed at children.

Changes to this notice

If this notice changes materially the date at the top changes, and the change is announced inside the application. Continued use after that date means the current notice applies.

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