Privacy & Source Protection

State Journalist (స్టేట్ జర్నలిస్ట్) is a Telangana crime journalism magazine. People come to us with information about wrongdoing, and some of them are taking a risk by doing it. This page tells you honestly what happens to what you send us — including the things we cannot promise.

1. What the helpline form collects

When you submit the public helpline form, we receive:

• Your name — optional. Leave it blank if that is safer for you.
• Your phone number — required, so we can reach you back.
• Your district or mandal — required, so we know where the matter is.
• What kind of help you need — the category you pick.
• Your message — whatever you choose to write.

That's all. We do not collect your location, we set no cookies, and we run no analytics or advertising trackers on this site. Simply reading the magazine online collects nothing about you.

2. What we do with it

Your submission goes to the State Journalist newsroom inbox and is read by our editorial team. We use it to decide whether we can look into your matter, and to contact you about it. We do not use it for anything else, and we never sell or trade it.

3. What we can promise — and what we can't

We can promise

• We will not publish your identity without your explicit agreement.
• We will not hand your details to the person or organisation you are complaining about.
• We will not sell, rent or share your information for marketing.
• We will delete your details on request (see §6).

We cannot promise

• Technical anonymity. Your message passes through our form provider and an email service. Those companies, and your own phone or internet provider, hold their own records.
• Immunity from a court. Indian law offers journalists no absolute privilege to refuse to name a source. We would resist such an order as far as we reasonably could, but we will not lie to you about the risk.
• That we can act on everything. We are a small team and we receive more than we can investigate. Silence from us is not a judgement on whether you were wronged.

4. Who else can see it

• Formspree — receives the form submission and forwards it to our inbox. Their privacy policy.
• Google (Gmail) — hosts the newsroom inbox where your message lands.
• Google Fonts — the typefaces on this site load from Google's servers, so Google receives your IP address when the page loads. We are working on serving these ourselves instead.

Nobody else. Our editorial team does not circulate submissions outside the newsroom.

5. How long we keep it

We keep submissions for as long as the matter is live, and afterwards only where there is a genuine journalistic reason — for example, if it forms part of a published investigation that we may need to defend. Anything we have no reason to keep, we delete.

6. Getting your information removed

Email statejournalist@gmail.com and ask us to delete what you sent, and we will — unless the material is part of a story already published, in which case we'll explain what we can and cannot remove. Under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 you may also ask what we hold about you and have errors corrected.

7. Accessibility

We want this site to be readable by everyone in Telangana, including people using screen readers or keyboard-only navigation. Our form fields carry proper labels and we check colour contrast against the WCAG 2.1 AA standard. If any part of this site is hard for you to use, write to us and we'll fix it — and we will always take your information over the phone instead.

8. Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle your information we'll update this page and the date at the top.