Child Safety Standards

1. Our commitment

Bamsawali (वंशावली) is a community genealogy platform for Nepali families, operated by brihatech. Families are our subject matter, and that means children appear throughout the records our members keep. We treat the safety of those children as a condition of running the service at all.

We prohibit child sexual abuse and exploitation in every form, absolutely and without exception. There is no context — cultural, historical, artistic, satirical or private — in which such content or conduct is acceptable on Bamsawali. Accounts involved in it are terminated, the material is removed and preserved for the authorities, and we report it to law enforcement.

These standards apply to the Bamsawali mobile app, the website at www.bamsawali.com, and the Samaj administration portal. They apply to every member, every Samaj administrator, and every person who uploads anything to the platform.

2. What is prohibited

The following are forbidden on Bamsawali. Each one is grounds for immediate and permanent removal of the account, without warning and without appeal in the clearest cases.

• Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) — any image, video, drawing, generated image or text that depicts a minor in a sexually explicit manner, or that sexualises a minor. Uploading, storing, linking to, requesting or distributing it is prohibited.
• Sexualisation of minors — presenting a child in a sexual way, including through captions, framing, cropping, or commentary on a photograph that is otherwise ordinary.
• Grooming — any attempt to build a relationship with a child in order to sexually exploit or abuse them, on or off the platform.
• Sextortion — threatening to reveal intimate imagery of a minor in order to extract money, further imagery, or compliance.
• Trafficking and solicitation — advertising, recruiting, arranging or soliciting a minor for sexual purposes, including through the language of marriage or betrothal.
• Child marriage arrangement. Bamsawali records marriages as historical and civil facts. It must never be used to arrange or promote the marriage of a person under the legal marriage age in their jurisdiction.
• Using a child’s record to reach them. A genealogical entry for a minor exists to record kinship. Using the details in it to contact, locate or pursue a child is prohibited.

3. Children on Bamsawali

Bamsawali accounts are not intended for children. Registration requires a phone number verified by one-time code, or a Google account, and we do not knowingly create accounts for children under 13.

Children nonetheless appear in the platform as genealogical records: an adult recording their household naturally adds their sons and daughters. Those entries are not accounts. They carry no credentials, and the adult member who created them — together with the Samaj that holds the tree — remains responsible for what they contain.

A parent or guardian may ask us at any time to correct or remove a record describing their child, or a photograph of them, by writing to [email protected]. No Bamsawali account is needed to make that request, and we do not require the requester to justify it.

4. How we reduce risk by design

The largest child-safety risks on social products come from strangers being able to find, contact and privately message children. Bamsawali is deliberately built without those capabilities.

• There is no private messaging. Bamsawali has no direct messages, no chat between members, and no public comment threads. There is no channel through which one member can contact another inside the app. The only conversational surface is the AI assistant, which talks to the member and to no one else.
• There is no stranger discovery. Members see the people in their own Samaj’s tree and in their own personal tree. There is no global directory, no public profile search across the platform, and no recommendation of unrelated people.
• We collect no location data. The app does not request or store device location, so a record cannot be used to find where a child is.
• Guests see demonstration data only. Someone browsing without an account cannot reach real family records.
• Membership is gated by a Samaj. Access to a community’s tree is approved by that Samaj’s administrators, who are accountable members of the community rather than anonymous accounts.
• Photographs are attributable. Every uploaded image is tied to the account that uploaded it and to the Samaj whose record it sits on, so material can be traced and removed at source.
• Avatars by default. Members are offered illustrated avatars rather than being pushed to upload a photograph, so a family tree can be complete without any child’s image being uploaded at all.

5. Reporting abuse

Anyone can report suspected child sexual abuse or exploitation to us. You do not need a Bamsawali account, and you do not need to be related to the people involved.

In the app

• Raise a dispute on a record. Any person record — including a photograph attached to it — can be disputed from within the app. The dispute reaches the administrators of the Samaj that holds the record, and child-safety disputes are escalated to us.
• Contact your Samaj administrators. They can remove a record or a photograph from the community tree immediately, and are instructed to escalate anything involving a child to brihatech without delay.

By email, from anywhere

Write to [email protected] with the subject line “Child safety”. This mailbox is monitored, reaches brihatech directly rather than a Samaj, and is open to members, non-members, parents, guardians, child-protection organisations and law enforcement alike. Tell us where the content or behaviour is — a name, a Samaj, a screenshot or a link is enough — and we will take it from there.

6. How we respond to a report

A report that concerns a child is treated as the highest priority work on the platform. We aim to triage every child-safety report within 48 hours of receiving it, and to act on clear cases immediately.

• Remove. Content that violates these standards is taken down from the app and from our storage as soon as it is identified.
• Suspend. The account responsible is suspended while we investigate and terminated if the report is substantiated. All of its sessions are revoked, and we block the phone number and Google account from re-registering.
• Preserve. We preserve the material and the associated account, upload and access records for law enforcement, separately from the live service and inaccessible to members, for as long as the law requires or an investigation needs.
• Report. Apparent child sexual abuse material is reported to the appropriate authorities — the Nepal Police Cyber Bureau, and the US National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) where the material or the provider falls within its reporting regime.
• Inform. We tell the reporter that we have acted, without disclosing details that would compromise an investigation or the privacy of the child.
• Notify the Samaj. Where a Samaj administrator created, approved or ignored the material, we act against that administrator’s access as well as against the account.

We do not require a police report, a court order or a legal threat before we remove material involving a child. We remove first.

7. Child sexual abuse material

Child sexual abuse material has no place on Bamsawali and no lawful use on it. Our handling of it is deliberately narrow and mechanical:

• We do not knowingly host, transmit, index or serve CSAM. Any instance we become aware of is removed on discovery.
• No employee, contractor or Samaj administrator is permitted to redistribute, download for personal retention, or share such material for any purpose, including verification. Review is limited to what is strictly necessary to confirm a report and to preserve evidence.
• Confirmed material is reported to the authorities named above, with the account details, upload timestamps and technical records associated with it.
• Accounts that upload it are terminated permanently. We do not offer a second chance, and we do not restore the account on appeal.
• Uploaded photographs sit on identified person records inside a Samaj’s tree rather than in an anonymous public feed, which means every image has an owner, a community and an audit trail attached to it.

8. Legal compliance

brihatech complies with all applicable laws on child safety and child sexual abuse and exploitation in the jurisdictions in which Bamsawali operates. These include, without limitation:

• The Act Relating to Children, 2075 (2018) of Nepal, which prohibits sexual abuse and exploitation of children and requires reporting.
• The Electronic Transactions Act, 2063 (2008) of Nepal, governing unlawful electronic material and its publication.
• Nepal’s laws on the prohibition of child marriage and on human trafficking and transportation.
• The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and its Optional Protocol on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography, to which Nepal is a party.
• Applicable reporting obligations toward NCMEC, and the child-safety requirements of the app stores through which Bamsawali is distributed, including Google Play’s Child Safety Standards policy and its CSAE policies.

We cooperate fully with valid requests from law enforcement and from recognised child-protection organisations, and we preserve records on request while such a request is being formalised.

9. Review and accountability

These standards are owned by brihatech, not by any individual Samaj. A Samaj may set stricter rules for its own community; it may not set looser ones.

• We review these standards at least annually, and whenever the product gains a capability that changes the risk to children — a new way for members to reach one another, to publish content, or to upload media.
• Samaj and Kul Samiti administrators are given these standards when their access is granted, and are required to escalate child-safety matters to brihatech rather than resolving them within the community.
• The date at the top of this page reflects the version currently in force. Earlier versions are superseded on publication.

10. Child safety point of contact

Our designated point of contact for child sexual abuse and exploitation matters — for members, parents and guardians, child-protection organisations, app stores and law enforcement — is:

Related documents: our Privacy Policy explains what information Bamsawali holds and who can see it, and the account deletion page explains how to have data removed.