Privacy Policy

Whispr is a messaging service provided by Techversed ("we", "us"). We are responsible for the personal information processed through the service. You can reach us at support@techversed.team.

This policy covers the Whispr apps (including the Android app and the web app) and the servers behind them. It does not cover mini apps or websites run by others, which have their own policies.

Whispr accounts are created by the service's administrators; there is no public sign-up. Administrators enter the details your account starts with, such as your username, display name and phone number.

Account and profile

• Your username, display name, phone number (if your administrator added one), password and account role. Your password is stored only as a secure hash.
• What you add to your profile: profile photos and videos (we keep your previous profile photos too), bio, profile colours and emoji status.
• Your online status and when you were last seen, your privacy settings, your notification settings and the users you block.
• If you turn on two-step verification: its secret (encrypted) and your recovery codes (stored only as hashes).
• Which version of our Terms of Service you accepted, and when.

Messages and content

• The messages you send and receive, and what they contain: text, photos, videos, voice and video messages, files, stickers, GIFs, polls, checklists, articles, contact cards you choose to share and reactions.
• The chats, groups and channels you belong to, your role in them, and settings such as pinned or muted chats, folders, drafts and scheduled messages.
• Your Saved Messages and saved GIFs.
• Link previews: when a message you send contains a web link, our servers fetch that page (from our servers, not from your device) to build a preview, and store the preview and its image. You can send a message without a preview.

Contacts and nicknames

Whispr does not upload your phone's address book. Your "contacts" are the private names and photos you choose to give other Whispr users, which only you see.

Calls

For voice and video calls we keep call records: who called whom (or which group), whether it was voice or video, when it started, was answered and ended, and who took part. Calls are not recorded.

Location

• When you share a location, we store the point you send (coordinates and, if you pick one, a place name and address) with the message. For live location we store your position as it updates, with your heading and any proximity alert you set. Each update replaces the previous one, so we do not keep a trail of where you went; the last position stays in the chat after sharing ends.
• While the location picker is open, the point at the centre of the map (at first, your current position) and any place you search for are sent to our servers to look up addresses, before you decide to send anything. We do not store these lookups with your account, though like other requests they can appear briefly in our server logs.
• The Android app uses your device's location only for these features, and only after you start them. It does not ask for background ("all the time") location access: a live location you start keeps updating while the app is in the background through a foreground service that shows a notification with a Stop button for as long as it is being shared, and it stops when the duration you chose ends.

Devices, sessions and sign-in

• For each signed-in device ("session"): its IP address, the browser or app it uses (user agent, app name and version), when it signed in and was last used, and an approximate location (city and country). We work out the approximate location from the IP address with a database on our own servers; no third party is asked.
• When you sign in, we send a login alert to your Whispr service chat naming the device and its approximate location (or IP address).
• If you sign in by scanning a QR code, the new device's user agent and IP address are kept briefly with the sign-in request.
• Like most web services, our servers log requests, including IP addresses, user agents and the addresses requested.

Notifications

If you allow notifications, we store the push token or web-push subscription of each device so we can deliver them. A notification normally contains the sender's name, the chat's name and the first 140 characters of the message; you can turn message previews off in Notifications settings.

Crash reports (Android)

The Android app uses Firebase Crashlytics to send us a report when the app crashes: the crash log, and diagnostics about the device and app such as the device model, operating system version, app version and the time of the crash.

Device permissions (Android)

The Android app asks for permissions only for the features that need them: the camera and microphone for photos, videos, voice messages and calls; your photos, videos and audio files when you choose ones to send; notifications, including full-screen alerts for incoming calls; location for location sharing; Bluetooth and call management to route call audio; and permission to install an app file you received, used only when you tap to open one. Nothing is uploaded until you send it.

On your device

The apps keep a copy of your chats and media on your device so they load quickly. On Android, the in-app browser also keeps your browsing history, site settings and site icons on the device only (bookmarks are saved to your Saved Messages). Signing out deletes these copies from the device. Android's cloud backup and device-to-device transfer of the app's data are turned off.

When you contact us

If you email us, we keep the correspondence and what you tell us, to handle your request.

We use this information to:

• provide the service: deliver messages, calls and notifications, show your profile to others according to your privacy settings, and keep your chats in sync across your devices;
• keep it secure: protect accounts (for example with login alerts and the list of active sessions), prevent spam and abuse, and fix problems using logs and crash reports;
• moderate it: review reports, enforce our Terms of Service and Child Safety Standards, and act on content that breaks them;
• meet legal obligations, such as preserving and reporting child sexual abuse material and responding to valid legal requests;
• communicate with you about your account and changes to the service.

Where privacy law asks us for a legal basis, we rely on performing our contract with you (providing the service), our legitimate interests (security, abuse prevention and moderation), our legal obligations, and your consent (for example for location sharing, notifications, or sharing your details with a mini app), which you can withdraw at any time.

Other Whispr users

The people in a chat, group or channel see what is sent there. Other users can see your profile; your privacy settings control who sees your phone number, last seen time and bio, whether forwarded messages link to your account, and who can call you, send you voice messages or add you to groups.

Administrators

Service providers

Companies that run parts of the service for us see the information they need for that job; the next section lists them.

Authorities

We disclose information when the law requires it, to respond to valid legal requests, to report child sexual abuse material, or when we believe it is necessary to protect someone's safety.

• Hosting and storage. Our servers, database and file storage run on infrastructure we rent from hosting providers, with files kept in S3-compatible object storage. They store data for us and may not use it for their own purposes.
• Google Firebase Cloud Messaging delivers notifications to the Android app. Google receives the device's push token and the notification's content (sender's name, chat name and message preview, unless you turn previews off).
• Your browser's push service (for example Google, Mozilla, Apple or Microsoft) delivers notifications to the web app. The notification's content is encrypted for your browser before it is sent, so the push service cannot read it.
• Google Firebase Crashlytics receives crash reports from the Android app, with device and app diagnostics. According to Google, Crashlytics keeps crash data for 90 days.
• LiveKit Cloud carries voice and video calls. The call's audio and video pass through LiveKit's media servers, encrypted in transit, along with your IP address and the participants' identifiers. Calls are not recorded.
• Mapbox provides the maps in the Android app. When the app shows a map, or the preview of a location someone shared, your device loads it from Mapbox, which receives your IP address and the coordinates or area shown. This means the coordinates of a location you share reach Mapbox from the device of everyone who views it in the Android app. The app turns Mapbox's optional usage telemetry off the first time it shows a map (that first map load may still send one basic event with device model and OS, without location), and you can opt in or out at any time from the map's "i" (attribution) button. Mapbox also counts active devices for billing. If our servers are set to use Mapbox for address lookups, they send it the coordinates or search text, not your identity.
• OpenStreetMap: our servers use OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service to turn coordinates into addresses and to search places, so Nominatim receives the coordinates or search text, not your identity or IP address. The iOS app loads its map images from OpenStreetMap's tile servers, which receive your IP address and the area shown.
• GIPHY powers GIF search. Our servers send your search words to GIPHY, without your identity. The GIFs themselves load directly from GIPHY's servers, which therefore receive your device's IP address.
• Websites you link to receive a request from our servers (not from you) when we build a link preview.
• The in-app browser (Android) loads pages directly from the websites you open, which receive your IP address. Text you type in its address bar is sent to the search engine you choose (Google unless you change it) to suggest searches, and Android's Safe Browsing checks pages against Google's list of unsafe sites.

We do not give any of these companies your messages for their own use, and none of them receives your data for advertising.

Bots can send messages and buttons, and can open mini apps: web apps made by their developers, who may be third parties, and which the service's administrators make available. The first time you open a mini app, Whispr asks for your consent. If you agree, the mini app receives your Whispr user ID, display name and username, and, when you open it from a chat, the type of that chat and an identifier for it. Anything you enter in a mini app goes to its developer and is governed by their privacy policy, not this one. See the Terms of Service for Mini Apps.

Whispr contains no advertising and no analytics or advertising SDKs, and we do not build advertising profiles. We do not sell your personal information or share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.

• All connections to Whispr are encrypted in transit with TLS (HTTPS).
• Passwords are stored only as Argon2id hashes; sign-in tokens are stored hashed; two-step verification secrets are encrypted.
• On Android, the app's sign-in tokens are encrypted on your device with a hardware-backed key.
• Files sent as documents are scanned for malware on our servers, and a file found to be infected cannot be downloaded or forwarded.
• Access to administrator tools is limited to administrators, and their access to chats is logged.

Messages are not end-to-end encrypted: they are stored on our servers in a form that administrators can read. No system is perfectly secure; if a security incident affects your information, we will notify you and the authorities where the law requires.

• Account and profile: for as long as your account exists, including your previous profile photos.
• Messages and media: until they are deleted. Deleting does not erase them: when a message is deleted (including "delete for everyone"), a chat's history is cleared, an auto-delete timer runs out or a group is deleted, the content is hidden from users but stays in our database, where administrators can still read it. We do not currently erase it automatically. The exception is view-once media, whose file is erased once it has been opened.
• Call records and shared locations: kept with your chats; we do not currently delete them automatically.
• Sessions: a session ends after a period without use that you can choose (180 days unless you change it), or when you sign out. The session's record (IP address, device and approximate location) is currently kept after it ends. Push tokens are deleted when the session ends.
• Server logs are rotated and overwritten after a short time; our internal sync log is deleted after 7 days.
• Link previews are cached by web address and kept.
• Administrator audit records are kept.
• Crash reports: 90 days in Firebase Crashlytics.
• When your account is deleted: your profile, push tokens, contacts and Saved Messages are deleted and you are signed out everywhere, but messages you sent to other people are kept indefinitely (with their attachments), hidden from everyone, and the records of your past sign-ins are kept for security. Our account deletion page has the details.

• Privacy settings (Settings → Privacy and Security) control who sees your phone number, last seen time and bio, and who can call you, send you voice messages or add you to groups.
• Notifications: turn message previews off in Notifications settings, or turn notifications off in your device or browser.
• Location is only sent when you share it; you can stop a live location at any time and revoke the location permission in your device settings.
• Mapbox telemetry is off by default in the Android app; you can change it from the "i" button on a map.
• Mini apps receive your details only if you agree.
• Sessions: see and end your active sessions from Settings, and choose when inactive ones end.
• Profile: change your display name, photo and bio in the app. To change your username or phone number, contact your administrator or us.
• Delete your account in the app or by email: see how to delete your account.

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, restrict or object to the processing of your personal information, to receive a copy of it, and to withdraw consent. To exercise these rights, email support@techversed.team; we may need to confirm your identity first. You may also complain to your local data protection authority.

Whispr is only for people aged 18 and older and is not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18; if we learn that an account belongs to someone younger, we close it. If you believe a child is using Whispr, contact support@techversed.team. Our Child Safety Standards explain how we fight child sexual abuse and exploitation.

We and our service providers may process your information in countries other than the one you live in, where data protection law may differ. Where the law requires it, we use appropriate safeguards for these transfers.

We will update this policy when what we collect or how we use it changes. The effective date at the top shows the current version, and we will tell you in the app about significant changes.

Techversed. Email: support@techversed.team.