Privacy notice

Effective 7 September 2026.

eRegister Pilot Evaluation is an internal application operated by CodeAstra to run and evidence the eRegister pilot at three stations in Salem Division, Southern Railway. It is not a public service. There is no sign-up: accounts are created by an administrator for named members of the project team, and every page except this one and the terms of use requires a session.

This notice describes what the application records, why it records it, and who can see it. It covers the application itself, not eRegister, which is a separate system operated by the Railway.

Who the records are about

Two different groups of people appear in the records, and they are treated differently:

The people who use the application

The project team — interns doing field work, CodeAstra staff, and Railway officers with read-only access. They hold accounts and sign in.

The people the pilot is about

Station Masters and Railway officers at the pilot stations. They are the subjects of the evaluation, not users of it: their feedback and the observations made of their work are recorded here, but they hold no account and cannot sign in.

What is recorded

Account and sign-in

• Name, email address, phone number, designation and role.
• The application holds no password of its own. Signing in is done through Google, and on your first successful sign-in Google's permanent identifier for your account is stored against your record so that later sign-ins can be checked against it.
• For each session: the IP address and browser user-agent string it started from, and when. This is what lets an administrator see where an account has been used.

Sign-in with Google

Google is the only way to sign in. The application requests only your basic profile information — the openid, email and profile scopes. From those it receives your name, email address, profile picture and Google account identifier, and uses them for one purpose: to match you to an account an administrator has already created and let you in.

The application requests no other Google scopes. It does not read, write or store your Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Contacts or any other Google service data, and signing in grants it no access to them. If you were not given an account, signing in with Google will not create one.

eRegister Pilot Evaluation's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Location, at check-in and check-out only

When an intern checks in to or out of a station, the browser is asked for a single position and the latitude and longitude are stored with the visit. This is a one-shot capture at each end of a visit. The application does not track anyone continuously, has no background location access, and records nothing between check-in and check-out.

It is recorded for one reason: a check-in is meant to be evidence that someone was at the station rather than a claim that they were. A check-in more than 500 metres from the station's recorded position is still saved, but flagged for staff to look at.

Field records

• Visits, observations, Station Master feedback, issues and their updates, incidents, support given, timing measurements and questionnaire responses — including ratings and free-text comments attributed to the Station Master who gave them.
• Directory entries for the Station Masters and Railway officers the pilot deals with: name, employee code, phone number, role and experience level.
• Attachments uploaded as evidence — screenshots, error logs, photographs, documents and links. These are stored on the application's own server, not with a third-party file service. Users are instructed not to attach personal or sensitive operational information, and attachments should be limited to what the evidence actually needs.
• An audit log of who created or changed a record, what changed, and when. It exists so that the evaluation's conclusions can be traced back to their evidence.

Why it is recorded

Only to run the pilot and to answer its question — whether eRegister is ready for wider rollout — with evidence rather than impressions. Records are used to coordinate field work, to track and resolve issues raised by station staff, and to compile the evaluation report given to Salem Division, Southern Railway.

Nothing here is used for advertising, profiling, or automated decisions about individuals. The records are about how a system performed, not about rating the people who used it.

Cookies

The application sets one cookie, session_id. It is signed, marked HttpOnly so scripts cannot read it, and holds nothing but a reference to your session. It is what keeps you signed in.

There are no analytics cookies, no advertising cookies and no third-party trackers.

Who else is involved

• Google Fonts. Pages load typefaces from fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com, so Google receives your IP address and browser user-agent when a page loads. This happens on this page too.
• Google Sign-In. Every sign-in goes through Google, as described above, so Google knows when you signed in to this application.

Records are shared with Salem Division, Southern Railway as the pilot's sponsor, in the evaluation report and its supporting evidence. They are not sold, rented, or shared with anyone else except where the law requires it.

How it is protected

• All traffic is served over HTTPS; the application refuses plain HTTP.
• There is no password to steal from this application. Sign-in is delegated to Google, so whatever protects your Google account protects this one.
• Access is limited by role. An intern can see and change only their own field records; master data is restricted to administrators.
• Every change is written to the audit log.

No system is perfectly secure, and this one makes no claim to be. It is a pilot tool holding operational records, and it should not be used to hold anything more sensitive than that.

How long it is kept

Records are kept for the duration of the pilot and for as long afterwards as the evaluation report needs to stay defensible — its conclusions are only as good as the evidence behind them, so the evidence is retained with it. Accounts of people who leave the project are deactivated rather than deleted, so that the records they created keep their attribution.

Asking about your records

You can ask what the application holds about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be removed, by writing to hi@codeastra.com. This applies whether or not you hold an account — a Station Master whose feedback is recorded here can ask on the same terms.

Some records cannot simply be deleted without undermining the evaluation they support. Where that is the case, we will say so, explain why, and agree what can be done instead.

Children

The application is a workplace tool for named members of a project team. It is not directed at children and no account is issued to anyone under 18.

Changes

If this notice changes, the effective date at the top changes with it. Because the population of users is small and known, material changes are also told to them directly.

Contact

CodeAstra is responsible for the records described here. Write to hi@codeastra.com.