Rugram Privacy Policy


Welcome! We value your privacy. This Privacy Policy (the “Privacy Policy”) is intended to inform you about our practices regarding the collection, use and disclosure of your personal data that you may submit to us when you use our Rugram mobile application https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rugram.android which serves as communication tool through which you can communicate with other users including through messages, voice and video messages, stickers and sound stickers. This Privacy Policy should be read alongside, and in addition to the Terms & Conditions. Please read the Privacy Policy carefully!


Last updated: August 30, 2021


Introduction

Thank you for using Rugram! Rugram allows you to send audio, video, voice, text messages and files, and conduct voice calls, so that you can communicate safely, securely, anonymously — and easily.

This document, our Privacy Policy, governs how Rugram (“we”, “us”, “Rugram”) handles our users’ (“you,” “your,” etc.) data both in the Rugram app itself (the “Rugram App” or “Rugram Messenger”). Our Privacy Policy is incorporated into and is subject to the Rugram Terms of Service, so please read both documents carefully. Your use of the Services indicates your consent to this Privacy Policy and our Terms of Service. If you do not want to be bound by these agreements, you may not use our Services.

Rugram has one fundamental principles when it comes to collecting and processing private data — We only store the data that Rugram needs to function as a secure and feature-rich messaging service. This Privacy Policy forms part of our Terms of Service, which describes the terms under which you use our Services and which are available at https://rugram.app/terms/. This Privacy Policy should therefore be read in conjunction with those terms.

Please contact us if you have any questions at rugramrugram@gmail.com


Legal Ground for Processing Your Personal Data

We process your personal data on the ground that such processing is necessary to further our legitimate interests (including: (1) providing effective and innovative Services to our users; and (2) to detect, prevent or otherwise address fraud or security issues in respect of our provision of Services), unless those interests are overridden by your interest or fundamental rights and freedoms that require protections of personal data.


What Personal Data We Use

Basic Account Data: Rugram is a communication service. You provide your mobile number and basic account data (which may include profile name, profile picture and about information) to create a Rugram account.

To make it easier for your contacts and other people to reach you and recognize who you are, the screen name you choose, your profile pictures, and your username (should you choose to set one) on Rugram are always public. We don't want to know your real name, gender, age or what you like.

We do not require your screen name to be your real name. Note that users who have you in their contacts will see you by the name they saved and not by your screen name. This way your mother can have the public name 'Johnny Depp' while appearing as 'Mom' to you and as 'Boss' to her underlings at work (or the other way around, depending on how these relationships are structured).

Your E-mail Address: When you enable 2-step-verification for your account or store documents using the Rugram Passport feature, you can opt to set up a password recovery email. This address will only be used to send you a password recovery code if you forget it. That's right: no marketing or “we miss you” bullshit.

Your Messages

Cloud Chats: Rugram is a cloud service. We store messages, photos, videos and documents from your cloud chats on our servers so that you can access your data from any of your devices anytime without having to rely on third-party backups. All data is stored heavily encrypted and the encryption keys in each case are stored in several other data centers in different jurisdictions. This way local engineers or physical intruders cannot get access to user data.

Secret Chats: Secret chats use end-to-end encryption. This means that all data is encrypted with a key that only you and the recipient know. There is no way for us or anybody else without direct access to your device to learn what content is being sent in those messages. We do not store your secret chats on our servers. We also do not keep any logs for messages in secret chats, so after a short period of time we no longer know who or when you messaged via secret chats. For the same reasons secret chats are not available in the cloud — you can only access those messages from the device they were sent to or from.

Media in Secret Chats: When you send photos, videos or files via secret chats, before being uploaded, each item is encrypted with a separate key, not known to the server. This key and the file’s location are then encrypted again, this time with the secret chat’s key — and sent to your recipient. They can then download and decipher the file. This means that the file is technically on one of Rugram’s servers, but it looks like a piece of random indecipherable garbage to everyone except for you and the recipient. We don’t know what this random data stands for and we have no idea which particular chat it belongs to. We periodically purge this random data from our servers to save disk space.

Public Chats: In addition to private messages, Rugram also supports public channels and public groups. All public chats are cloud chats. Like everything on Rugram, the data you post in public communities is encrypted, both in storage and in transit — but everything you post in public will be accessible to everyone.

Phone Number and Contacts: Rugram uses phone numbers as unique identifiers so that it is easy for you to switch from SMS and other messaging apps and retain your social graph. We ask your permission before syncing your contacts.

We store your up-to-date contacts in order to notify you as soon as one of your contacts signs up for Rugram and to properly display names in notifications. We only need the number and name (first and last) for this to work and store no other data about your contacts.

Our automatic algorithms can also use anonymized sets of phone numbers to calculate the average number of potential contacts an unregistered phone number may have on Rugram. When you open the 'Invite friends' interface, we display the resulting statistics next to your contacts to give you an idea of who could benefit most from joining Rugram.

You can always stop syncing contacts or delete them from our servers in Settings > Privacy & Security > Data Settings.

If you are using Android, Rugram will ask you for permission to access your phone call logs (READ_CALL_LOG). If you grant this permission, Rugram will be able verify your account by transmitting a phone call instead of asking you to enter a code. Rugram uses this permission only to confirm receipt of the confirmation call by verifying the number in the call log.

Location Data: If you share a location in a chat, this location data is treated like other messages in cloud or secret chats respectively.

If you are using Android, Rugram will ask you for permission to access location in the background. If you grant this permission, you will be able to send your location, which will be displayed in real time, i.e. if the user moves, then the geolocation changes. You can also choose how long it will last: from 15 minutes to 8 hours max.

If you share your Live Location in any chat or turn on ’Make Myself Visible’ in People Nearby, Rugram will use your data to display your location to those users with whom you are sharing it, even when the app is closed – for as long as you keep these optional features activated.


Cookies

Cookies are files with a small amount of data that are commonly used as anonymous unique identifiers. These are sent to your browser from the websites that you visit and are stored on your device's internal memory.

This Service does not use these “cookies” explicitly. However, the app may use third party code and libraries that use “cookies” to collect information and improve their services. You have the option to either accept or refuse these cookies and know when a cookie is being sent to your device. If you choose to refuse our cookies, you may not be able to use some portions of this Service.

Third parties libraries that use “cookies” may collect personally identifiable information about an individual user's online activities over time and across different Internet services when a user uses the Service. Links to resources that use cookies:

Google Analytics:

Google AdMob:

Google Play Services:

Firebase Analytics:

Firebase Crashlytics:

Yandex:


Keeping Your Personal Data Safe

Storing Data: If you signed up for Rugram from the UK or the EEA, your data is stored in data centers in the Netherlands. These are third-party provided data centers in which Rugram rents a designated space. However, the servers and networks that sit inside these data centers and on which your personal data is stored are owned by Rugram. As such, we do not share your personal data with such data centers. All data is stored heavily encrypted so that local Rugram engineers or physical intruders cannot get access.

End-to-End Encrypted Data: Your messages, media and files from secret chats, as well as the contents of your calls and the data you store in your Rugram Passport are processed only on your device and on the device of your recipient. Before this data reaches our servers, it is encrypted with a key known only to you and the recipient. While Rugram servers will handle this end-to-end encrypted data to deliver it to the recipient – or store it in the case of Rugram Passport data, we have no ways of deciphering the actual information. In this case, we neither store nor process your personal data, rather we store and process random sequences of symbols that have no meaning without the keys which we don’t have.

Retention: Unless stated otherwise in this Privacy Policy, the personal data that you provide us will only be stored for as long as it is necessary for us to fulfill our obligations in respect of the provision of the Services.


Processing Your Personal Data

Our Services: Rugram is a cloud service. We will process your data to deliver your cloud chat history, including messages, media and files, to any devices of your choosing without a need for you to use third-party backups or cloud storage.

Safety and Security: Rugram supports massive communities which we have to police against abuse and Terms of Service violations. To improve the security of your account, as well as to prevent spam, abuse, and other violations of our Terms of Service, we may collect metadata such as your IP address, devices and Rugram apps you've used, history of username changes, etc. If collected, this metadata can be kept for 12 months maximum.

Spam and Abuse: To prevent phishing, spam and other kinds of abuse and violations of Rugram’s Terms of Service, our moderators may check messages that were reported to them by their recipients. If a spam report on a message you sent is confirmed by our moderators, your account may be limited from contacting strangers – temporarily or permanently. You can send an appeal using @Spambot. In case of more serious violations, your account may be banned. We may also use automated algorithms to analyze messages in cloud chats to stop spam and phishing.

Cross-Device Functionality: We may also store some aggregated metadata to create Rugram features (see section 5.5 below) that work across all your devices.

Advanced features: We may use some aggregated data about how you use Rugram to build useful features. For example, when you open the Search menu, Rugram displays the people you are more likely to message in a box at the top of the screen. To do this, we calculate a rating that shows which people you message frequently. A similar rating is calculated for inline bots so that the app can suggest the bots you are most likely to use in the attachment menu (or when you start a new message with “@”). To turn this feature off and delete the relevant data, go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Data Settings and disable “Suggest Frequent Contacts”.


Bot Messages

Ecosystem: Rugram has an API that allows third-party developers to create bots. Bots are apps that look like special Rugram users: you can talk to them from your chat list, add them to groups or use a special “inline” interface to access their features. By performing any of these actions, you will be sending some of your data to the respective third-party bot developers.

How Bots Can Receive Data: You can send data to bot developers when you interact with their bots in one of these ways:

What Data Bots Receive: In any of the above cases, the developers of an automated user (bot) can get your public account data: your screen name, username and profile picture(s).

Bots can also receive the following data when you interact with them.

Bots Are Not Maintained by Rugram: Other than our own bots, no other bots or third-party bot developers are affiliated with Rugram. They are completely independent from us. They should ask you for your permission before they access your data or you make it available to them.


Third Party Payment Services

Payment Information: Rugram does not process payments from users and instead relies on different payment providers around the world. It is the payment providers that handle and store your credit card details. Neither Rugram nor the merchants on the platform (bot developers) have access to this information. Although we work with payment providers they are completely independent from Rugram. Please study their relevant privacy policies before making your data available to them.

Credit Card Information: When making a purchase, you enter your credit card details into a form supplied by the payment provider that will be processing the payment, and this information goes directly to the payment provider's server. Your credit card information never reaches Rugram's servers. We do not access and do not store your credit card information. When you save your credit card info, it is saved on the respective payment provider's servers and the payment provider gives Rugram a token that you can reuse for future payments. It is not possible to reconstruct your credit card info from the token.

Shipping Information: When you enter shipping information in the process of placing an order, we send it directly to the merchant bot developer. We can store your shipping information for you if you choose to save it for future purchases. We will delete this information immediately if you ask us to.

Clearing Payment Information: You can clear all payment information associated with your account at any time by going to Rugram Settings > Privacy & Security > Data Settings and selecting ‘Clear Payment & Shipping Info’. If you choose to remove your payment information, we will delete your stored shipping info and payment tokens from all providers and ask the payment providers to remove your credit card information that they store.

Payment Disputes: Due to the fact that Rugram doesn't store any credit card details or transaction information, it is impossible for us to handle complaints or cashbacks – any disputed payments are the responsibility of the bot developers, payment providers, and banks that participated in the exchange.


Who Your Personal Data May Be Shared With

Other Rugram Users: Other users of our Services with whom you choose to communicate with and share certain information, who may be located outside the EEA. Note that by entering into the Terms of Service and choosing to communicate with such other users of Rugram, you are instructing us to transfer your personal data, on your behalf, to those users in accordance with this Privacy Policy. We employ all appropriate technical and organizational measures (including encryption of your personal data) to ensure a level of security for your personal data that is appropriate to the risk.

Law Enforcement Authorities: If Rugram receives a court order that confirms you're a terror suspect, we may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities. So far, this has never happened. When it does, we will include it in a semiannual transparency report.


Your Rights Regarding the Personal Data You Provide to Us

Your Rights: Under applicable data protection legislation, in certain circumstances, you have rights concerning your personal data. You have a right to: (1) request a copy of all your personal data that we store and to transmit that copy to another data controller; (2) delete or amend your personal data; (3) restrict, or object to, the processing of your personal data; (4) correct any inaccurate or incomplete personal data we hold on you; and (5) lodge a complaint with national data protection authorities regarding our processing of your personal data.

Data Settings: You can control how your data is used (e.g., delete synced contacts) in Settings > Privacy & Security > Data Settings (using one of our mobile apps). Sadly, if you're generally not OK with Rugram's modest requirements, it won't be possible for us to provide you with our Services. You can delete your Rugram account by proceeding to the deactivation page.


Deleting data

Accounts: Deleting your account removes all messages, media, contacts and every other piece of data you store in the Rugram cloud. This action must be confirmed via your Rugram account and cannot be undone.

Messages:

Self-Destructing Messages: Messages in Secret Chats can be ordered to self-destruct. As soon as such a message is read (2 checks appear), the countdown starts. When the timer expires, both devices participating in a secret chat are instructed to delete the message (photo, video, etc.). Media with short timers (less than a minute) are shown with blurred previews. The timer is triggered when they are viewed.

Account Self-Destruction: By default, if you stop using Rugram and do not come online for at least 6 months, your account will be deleted along with all messages, media, contacts and every other piece of data you store in the Rugram cloud. You can go to Settings to change the exact period after which your inactive account will self-destruct.


Changes to this Privacy Policy

We will review and may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Any changes to this Privacy Policy will become effective when we post the revised Privacy Policy on this page https://rugram.app/privacy/. Please check our website frequently to see any updates or changes to our Privacy Policy.