Privacy Policy

Effective date: 7 October 2026

This policy explains what personal data legalfree.in ("Legal Free", "we", "us") collects, why we collect it, how long we keep it and what rights you have.

Who we are

Legal Free is run by Adv. Alok Kumar, Advocate, Delhi High Court & District Courts, who decides how personal data on this website is used.

For any question about this policy or about your personal data, write to care@legalfree.in.

In short

• You can read the whole site without an account and without giving us any personal data.
• The only personal details we ask you for are those in our three forms, and we use them only to deal with what you sent.
• We do not store your IP address, browser details or location with your message.
• We erase the personal details of a form message 400 days after it arrives, or earlier if you ask.
• Google Analytics is used only if you click Accept in the cookie banner.
• We do not sell personal data and do not use it for marketing.

What we collect through the forms

The website has three forms. Each form shows a short privacy notice above the boxes you tick.

Ask a Lawyer (/ask.php)

• Your name (optional), your e-mail address and your state or union territory (optional).
• The title of your question and the question itself.
• Your consent to our use of these details (required), your confirmation that you are 18 or older (required), and your separate permission to publish your question (optional).

Purpose: to read your question and, where we can, to reply to you by e-mail. If you give the separate permission, we may publish your question, edited where needed, with an answer on this website. A published question never includes your name or contact details.

Contact (/contact.php)

• Your name (optional), your e-mail address, a subject (optional) and your message.
• Your consent to our use of these details (required).

Purpose: to read your message and reply to you by e-mail.

Call-back request (/pay.php)

• Your name (optional), your mobile number, your e-mail address (optional), your state or union territory (optional) and a message (optional).
• Your consent to our use of these details (required).

Purpose: to call you back about your request on the mobile number you gave, or to write to you if you also gave an e-mail address.

What is stored with every message

With every message we also store the date and time it arrived, whether you used the English or the Hindi version of the site, the version of the privacy notice you were shown and which boxes you ticked. We keep this so that we can show what you agreed to.

We do not store your IP address, your browser details or your location with a message.

E-mails to care@legalfree.in

If you write to care@legalfree.in, Cloudflare Email Routing forwards your e-mail to our mailbox, which is provided by Google (Gmail). We use your e-mail only to reply to you and to deal with your request.

Why we may use your details

We use the details you send in a form because you consent to it: you tick the consent box before you send the form. You give these details voluntarily, and we use them only for the purpose described for that form.

Who can see your details

Form messages are stored in our database at Cloudflare, which hosts this website. They can be read only in the website's admin area, which only the site owner can sign in to. When we reply by e-mail, the reply is sent from our mailbox, which is provided by Google (Gmail), so your e-mail address, the subject of your message and our reply are kept there. When we call you back, we call from our own phone.

When a new message arrives, we receive a short e-mail notice. It says only which form was used, a message number and the time; it does not contain your message or your contact details.

We do not sell, rent or give your details to anyone else. The only exceptions are the service providers named in this policy, which process data for us, and a disclosure that the law requires.

Security check on the forms (Cloudflare Turnstile)

The three forms use Cloudflare Turnstile to check that a person, not an automated program, is sending them. Turnstile runs only on the form pages. For this check, Cloudflare processes technical information from your browser and device, and our server sends Cloudflare your IP address with the check's token to confirm the result. We do not store your IP address.

To prevent abuse, the number of messages that can be sent from the same network within a minute is limited. For this we use a coded value calculated from part of your IP address; we do not store it.

How long we keep your details

We erase the personal details of a form message (name, e-mail address, mobile number, state, subject, message and our own notes on it) automatically 400 days after the message arrives. If you ask us to, we erase them earlier, unless the law requires us to keep them for longer.

After erasure we keep only a record that a message arrived: which form was used, its dates and status, the version of the privacy notice and which boxes were ticked. Nothing in that record identifies you.

Cloudflare keeps a restore history of our database for 30 days, so erased details can remain in that history for up to 30 days. Copies we make ourselves, such as backups, are kept securely, used only to restore the website or for the purposes in this policy, and deleted when no longer needed, at the latest after one year.

E-mails you send to care@legalfree.in, our e-mail replies to form messages and your answers to them are kept in our mailbox only as long as they are needed for the purpose for which you wrote.

Information collected automatically

Hosting (Cloudflare)

The website runs on Cloudflare (Cloudflare, Inc.), which hosts the pages, the database and the files. Like any web host, Cloudflare processes your IP address and the technical details your browser sends with each request, in order to deliver the pages and protect the website against attacks. If Cloudflare's security features block or challenge a request, Cloudflare may keep a short record of it, such as the IP address and the address requested; such records are used only to protect the website.

We do not keep a log of your visits. Apart from the list of addresses that were not found (see below), the only technical records we keep are the website's own short log lines, for example that a form was stored or that a scheduled task ran. They never contain what you typed into a form, e-mail addresses or IP addresses, and Cloudflare deletes them after 7 days.

Page view counter

When you open an article, a question and answer, a legal format or a video, your browser sends us a small signal so that we can count how often the page is read. The signal contains only the type and number of the page. We store only the total count for each page, nothing about you. To prevent abuse, the number of signals from the same network is limited in the same way as for the forms; the coded value is not stored.

Site search

The words you type into the search box are used only to find matching pages. We do not store them and do not send them to Google Analytics. Cloudflare keeps a copy of a results page in its cache for up to 5 minutes, so that the same search is answered faster.

Addresses that were not found

When someone asks for a page address on legalfree.in that does not exist, we record that address (including any text after the "?"), when and how often it was requested, whether the request seemed to come from an automated program, and the name of the website that linked to it (its host name only, not the full address of the linking page). We do not record an IP address or browser details with it.

We use this list only to find and fix broken links. An address requested only once is deleted after 180 days. An address requested more than once is kept without a fixed time limit, because it shows a link that needs fixing.

Cookies and browser storage

The website does not set any cookie while you simply read a page. The following items are stored in your browser only after you click something:

• bci_ack (cookie of this site): remembers that you clicked "I Agree" on the Bar Council of India notice, so that the notice is not shown again. Kept for one year.
• lang (cookie of this site): remembers the language you chose with the English/Hindi switch. Kept for one year.
• consent (cookie of this site): remembers whether you accepted or rejected analytics cookies. Kept for 180 days.
• theme (browser storage of this site): remembers whether you chose the light or the dark display. Kept until you clear your browser's data for this site.
• _ga and _ga_ followed by an identifier (Google Analytics cookies, set on this site's domain): only after you click Accept in the cookie banner. Google keeps them for up to two years after your last visit; they are deleted from this site when you choose Reject.

The first four items only make your own choices work. You can delete all of these items at any time in your browser settings.

Your analytics choice

On your first visit, a banner asks whether we may use Google Analytics. Nothing from Google is loaded until you click Accept. If you click Reject, nothing is loaded and the site works the same. You can change your choice at any time with "Cookie settings" at the foot of the page.

Google Analytics

If you click Accept, we use Google Analytics 4, a service of Google LLC, to count visits and see which pages are read, so that we can improve the website. Google receives information such as the pages you visit, the website that referred you, the type of device and browser you use, and your IP address, and it sets the cookies listed above.

We do not send Google the words you type into the site search or the tag values in page addresses, and we do not use Google Analytics to identify you. Google deletes the detailed data about visits after the retention period set in our Google Analytics account (2 or 14 months); reports that show only totals are kept longer.

Read how Google uses information from sites that use its services and Google's privacy policy. You can also block Google Analytics on all websites with the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on.

YouTube videos

Video boxes show a picture or a plain poster; nothing is loaded from YouTube until you click play. Then the video player is loaded from youtube-nocookie.com, and YouTube (Google) may store data in your browser and receive information such as your IP address, under Google's privacy policy.

Advertising (if and when it is shown)

The website does not show advertisements at present. We may show advertisements from Google AdSense in future. If and when advertising is shown, the following applies:

• Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this website or to other websites.
• Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visits to this website and/or other websites on the Internet.
• You may opt out of personalised advertising in Google's Ads Settings. You can also opt out of some third-party vendors' use of cookies for personalised advertising at www.aboutads.info.
• Visitors from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland are asked for their consent through a Google-certified consent platform.
• Before advertisements are switched on, we will update this policy, including the cookie list above, and name any other ad networks that may serve ads here, with links to their policies and opt-out pages.

Children

Legal Free is a general information website and is not directed at children. If you are under 18, please do not send us personal details through the forms; ask a parent or lawful guardian to write to us instead. If we learn that a child has sent us personal details without the consent of a parent or guardian, we will erase them.

Data from the earlier website

Requests and accounts sent through the earlier version of this website, before it moved to its new system, were not copied into the new website. They stay with the earlier website's hosting only for a short period after the move, so that the move can be undone if needed. After that, the site owner keeps a single encrypted copy offline, uses it only to deal with questions about those requests, and deletes it when it is no longer needed; the copies at the earlier hosting are deleted. You can ask about this data, or ask us to erase your data, at care@legalfree.in.

Data processed outside India

Cloudflare and Google run their services on networks of data centres in many countries, so personal data may be processed and stored outside India.

Security

The website is served only over encrypted connections (HTTPS). Form messages are stored in Cloudflare's database, and the admin area can be opened only by the site owner after signing in through Cloudflare Access. The new-message notices we receive contain no message text and no contact details.

If a personal data breach occurs, we will inform the people affected and the Data Protection Board of India as the law requires.

Your rights

You can ask us to:

• tell you what personal data of yours we hold, how we use it and with whom it has been shared;
• correct, complete or update it;
• erase it;
• stop using it, by withdrawing your consent;
• deal with a complaint (grievance) about how we handle it; and
• record a person (a nominee) who may exercise these rights for you if you die or become unable to act.

Write to care@legalfree.in from the e-mail address you used in the form, or tell us the mobile number you gave, so that we can find your message and check that the request comes from you. We will reply within 30 days.

Withdrawing consent

You can withdraw your consent at any time, as easily as you gave it: send an e-mail to care@legalfree.in and say which form you used. We will then stop using your details and erase them. Withdrawal does not affect what was done before it, but we will no longer be able to reply to your message.

If you gave permission to publish your question, you can withdraw that permission too. We will then not publish the question, and if it has already been published, we will remove it from the website.

To withdraw consent to analytics cookies, use "Cookie settings" at the foot of any page and choose Reject.

Grievance officer and complaints

Grievance officer: Adv. Alok Kumar, care@legalfree.in.

If you are not satisfied with our answer to your grievance, you can complain to the Data Protection Board of India.

Language

This policy is in English. If you would like to read it in Hindi, write to care@legalfree.in.

Changes to this policy

When we change this policy, we will publish the new version on this page and change the effective date at the top.