Why ORBII Asks Your Date of Birth
ORBII will not track anyone under 18, and Indian law is the reason. Here is what the DPDP Rules require, what we changed, and why a 17-year-old still gets every safety feature.
When you set up ORBII, we ask for your date of birth. Not a box that says “I am 18 or older”. An actual date.
That is a small extra bit of friction, and we added it on purpose. Here is the reasoning, in plain terms.
What the law actually says
India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 came with detailed Rules notified in November 2025. Rule 10 is the one that matters here. It says a Data Fiduciary, which is what ORBII is, must not track, monitor, or behaviourally profile a child, where a child means anyone under 18. There is no parental-consent workaround for tracking specifically. Consent unlocks some processing of a child’s data. It does not unlock tracking.
The penalties attached to the children’s provisions run up to ₹200 crore. But the number is not really the point. The rule exists because continuously logging a teenager’s movements is a genuinely serious thing to do, and the law decided that no adult should be able to authorise it on their behalf.
What a tick box is worth
Almost every app handles this with a checkbox: “I confirm I am 18 or older.”
Nobody reads it. Everybody taps it. And if a regulator ever asks how you established a user’s age, “they ticked a box” is close to no answer at all. It protects the company on paper and protects nobody in practice.
So we replaced it. ORBII asks for a date of birth, validates it properly, and computes your real age against your actual birthday. Alongside it we record which version of the privacy notice you were shown, in which language, and when. That record is append-only, so it cannot be quietly edited later.
What changes if you are under 18
Continuous location tracking does not start. Circle location sharing, today’s location trail, and Voice Quest voice donation are all unavailable, and cannot be switched on by anyone.
That last part matters. The block does not live on a settings screen where a different screen might route around it. It sits inside the single function that starts location tracking, so there is no path through the app that reaches tracking without passing it. A parent cannot enable it. A college that bought the licence cannot enable it. We cannot enable it.
What does not change
Every safety feature still works.
Voice SOS still listens for your distress word. The SOS button still works. Your trusted circle still gets alerted with your live location during an emergency. 112 is still one tap away.
We want to be explicit about this because the easy compliance move would have been to block under-18s from the app entirely. That would have been simpler for us and worse for them. A 17-year-old walking home at night is exactly who this app is for, and Rule 10 was never written to take her SOS away. It was written to stop companies building movement profiles of children.
So that is the line we drew. A minor loses the tracking. She does not lose the help.
During an active SOS, her live location absolutely does reach the people she chose, because that is emergency response, not monitoring, and it lasts as long as the emergency does.
The rest of what we changed
The date of birth was one piece of a larger pass over how ORBII handles consent:
- An append-only consent record. Every permission you grant and every one you withdraw is logged with the purpose, the notice version, the language, and the timestamp. Withdrawals are recorded exactly like grants. You can request a copy of yours at any time.
- Location history deleted at midnight. The purpose of your trail lasts one day, so the retention lasts one day. More on that here.
- Voice donation is opt-in, adult-only, and withdrawable. Nothing records in the background.
- A rewritten privacy policy that describes what the app actually does, including the parts that are less flattering to us.
Why we are writing this down
Most companies treat privacy law as something to survive quietly. On a safety app that instinct is backwards. The whole product rests on a woman believing that what we say the app does is what the app does.
So if we ask you for something, we would rather tell you why. And if the honest answer is “the law says we are not allowed to do this for you”, we would rather say that than build a workaround.
Read the full Privacy Policy, or see how ORBII handles security.
Frequently asked questions
Can a 17-year-old use ORBII?
Yes. Voice SOS, the SOS button, alerts to your trusted circle and one-tap 112 all work exactly as they do for an adult. What is switched off is continuous location tracking and location history, because the DPDP Rules 2025 forbid tracking a child.
Can a parent turn on tracking for their under-18 daughter?
No. The block is enforced inside the app at the point where tracking would start, so no screen and no account can override it, including a parent's.
Why not just use a tick box for age?
Because anyone taps a tick box without reading it, and it is weak evidence that we ever really asked. A date of birth is a genuine declaration, and we log which version of the privacy notice you were shown when you gave it.
