TES Chat Privacy Policy

TES Chat (“the app”) is a messaging service operated by Turon Ecosystem (“we”). This policy describes what data the app handles and why.

What we collect

Account

Your phone number (your sign-in identity), your name, an optional username and an optional profile photo.

Messages and media

Messages you send and receive, including photos, videos, files, voice messages and video notes, are stored on our servers so they can be delivered to your devices and conversation partners. Messages are transmitted over encrypted connections (TLS). Messages are not end-to-end encrypted: the service can technically access message content, and we do not claim otherwise.

Contacts

If you allow contact access, the phone numbers and names in your address book are sent to our servers to find which of your contacts already use TES Chat. They are stored (not discarded after matching) until you remove them or delete your account, and are visible to nobody but you.

Location

Only when you choose to share your location in a chat. The app never reads location in the background. A shared location becomes part of the conversation like any other message. Map imagery is rendered by Yandex Maps; drawing the map sends the shared coordinates to Yandex. See Yandex’s privacy policy for their handling.

Search

Searching inside a chat, looking up a public group or channel, or looking up a user by @username sends your query to our servers to run the search. Queries are not stored as data: nothing builds a search history, and no search of yours is kept anywhere you could be shown it back. Like any web service, our servers keep operational request logs for running and securing the service, and a query can appear in one of those entries until the log rotates — no longer than 14 days.

Activity your contacts can see

The service stores and shows your conversation partners whether you have read their messages (read receipts), and can show your last-seen time and online state — who may see your last-seen and online status is yours to control: the “Last Seen & Online” switch in Privacy and Security covers both. Last-seen is overwritten on every disconnect (no history is kept); read state lives with the messages.

Device data

A push notification token for each device you sign in on, and the device model/platform/app version and IP address recorded when a session is created — stored on the session row and shown to you in Active Sessions so you can recognise your own devices.

Push notifications

Notifications are delivered through Expo’s push service, and through it Apple’s and Google’s, so notification payloads pass through all three. Every payload carries the identifiers your device needs to open the right chat in the right account. For a message, it also carries the sender’s (or group’s) name and the first 140 characters — that excerpt has to be sent to these services for your device to show a preview. For an incoming call, it carries the caller’s name and a reference to their profile photo instead. (On iPhones, call notifications go to Apple directly rather than through Expo.) The in-app show/preview switches apply only while the app is open. Muting a chat stops its notifications entirely: a muted chat sends no push at all, so nothing leaves the server for it.

What we do not collect

The app ships no advertising, no analytics and no crash-reporting SDKs. We do not sell or share your data with third parties for marketing. We do not use your data for tracking across apps.

How long we keep it

• Messages and media: kept until deleted. Deleting a message removes it from the service immediately, and it does not come back. Our servers are backed up, so a copy can survive in a backup for a short time after that before the backup is rotated out; backups exist to recover from failure and are never used to restore something you deleted.
• Contacts: until you remove them or delete your account.
• Push notification tokens: kept until you sign that device out or delete your account. If the sign-out cannot reach us — the device is offline, say — the token is pruned on our side once deliveries to it stop.
• Sessions: signing out revokes that session token server-side. If the sign-out cannot reach us — the device is offline, say — the token is not revoked and stays valid until it expires. An unused session expires on its own after 30 days of inactivity — a server-side window with no in-app setting (the only inactivity control in the app is “Automatically delete my account”, which is about the account, not sessions). A session records the device name, platform, app version and the IP address it signed in from — shown to you in Active Sessions so you can recognise your own devices.
• Operational server logs: records of requests and sign-in events — a sign-in event records your phone number — are kept no longer than 14 days, after which rotation removes them.
• Account: you can set your account to delete automatically after a period of inactivity you choose (in Privacy and Security). Deletion is immediate and irreversible: your phone number, username, name, avatar, presence, contacts, saved messages, sessions and push tokens are removed, and your number and username are released. Messages you already sent remain in your conversation partners’ chats, attributed to “Deleted Account” — removing them would erase one half of conversations that also belong to other people. Groups you owned pass to their longest-standing member.

Your controls

• Blocking: you can block any user in the app.
• Visibility: six privacy switches in Privacy and Security control who can see your phone number, profile photo, and last seen and online status — and who can call you, forward your messages with attribution, and add you to groups.
• App lock: passcode plus Face ID / fingerprint.
• Auto-delete: an inactivity window after which your account is removed.
• Data requests: on request we will give you a copy of the data your account holds, correct anything that is wrong, and delete your account and its data. Write to support@turonecosystem.com and say which of those you want; we may have to check that the request comes from the account holder before acting on it.

Where your data is stored

TES Chat’s servers are in Uzbekistan. Your account, your messages and their media, your contacts and your saved messages are stored there. Those servers are backed up by our hosting provider, as described under How long we keep it.

Three third parties receive something from us:

• Push notifications. They are delivered through Expo’s push service and, through it, Apple’s and Google’s — so a notification payload passes through servers outside Uzbekistan on its way to your device.
• Map imagery for a shared location. Drawing the map sends those coordinates to Yandex.
• The code that signs you in. When you sign in, your phone number — and nothing else — is passed to our SMS provider, Eskiz, to deliver the login code by text. Eskiz is the same Uzbek company that hosts our servers, so this one does not leave the country.

Only the first two leave Uzbekistan; nothing else about your account is sent abroad. The app is offered in Uzbekistan, and its API, media storage and realtime connection all run on the same servers described here.

Children

TES Chat is not directed at children under 13.

Changes

We will update this page when the policy changes and note the date above.

Contact

TES Chat is operated by Turon Ecosystem, which is the controller of the data described above. Write to us at support@turonecosystem.com.