What this covers
This explains what information we collect about you when you use biselam, what we use it for, who we share it with and how long we keep it. RadKod is responsible for your personal data. Your rights under Turkish law are covered separately in the KVKK notice.
In short: we don’t show ads, we don’t sell your data, we don’t track you across other apps, and the app doesn’t use analytics tools.
What we collect
What you give us:
- Account: username, email address and password. We don’t store your password as plain text but in a form that can’t be reversed (a hash). If you sign in with Apple or Google, the ID that account gives us.
- Profile: date of birth, gender, photos, bio, tags, voice intro and the songs you add to your profile. Your date of birth isn’t shown to others; only your age is.
- What you share: messages, photos, videos and voice recordings, stories, poll votes, reactions and messages you star.
- What you send us: reports and the feedback you send from Settings.
- Consent: the version of the terms of use and privacy policy you accepted at sign-up, and when you accepted them.
- Question box: if you turned it on, the anonymous questions people ask you on your biselam.me/<username> page.
What comes from using the app:
- Who you interact with: people you follow, like and block, hellos you send and receive, profiles you visit, stories you watch.
- When view-once media was opened and whether a screenshot was taken while it was open.
- Calls: who called whom, in which chat, voice or video, and when the call started, was answered and ended. The audio and video of a call aren’t recorded.
- Location: country and city only. Details below.
- Device: operating system, app version, your device’s notification keys for delivering notifications and calls (push and VoIP tokens), and when you last used the app.
- Purchases: coin packs and your Plus subscription, and where you spent your coins.
- Safety: reports about your account, moderation decisions, and the events that set your reach level.
- IP address: used to prevent abuse (for example, many sign-up attempts in a short time) and to find your country if you don’t allow location; it appears in server logs.
We don’t access your contacts, your advertising ID or other apps on your phone.
If you ask someone a question in their question box without an account: we keep the question text and when it was sent. We don’t take your name, email or cookies; the question reaches them anonymously. To prevent abuse, we keep an irreversible fingerprint (keyed hash) of your IP address for 30 days; we don’t store the IP address itself.
What we use it for
- To open your account, verify your sign-in, and email you about your account (such as verification and deletion codes).
- To show your profile, stories and messages to the people you choose.
- To connect voice and video calls to the other person.
- To decide who to show you in Discover and in the Bi Selam deck. Your country, city, age, gender and tags are used for this.
- To send notifications.
- To verify your purchases and keep your coin balance.
- To find content that breaks the rules, review reports, and prevent harassment and spam.
- To meet a legal obligation.
We don’t use your data for advertising and we don’t sell it to anyone.
What other users see
Your username, photos, age, gender, city, bio, tags, songs, voice intro, sign-up date and online status are public on your profile. You can hide counters such as likes and followers one by one under Badges in Edit profile. When “Show my profile” is off, you don’t appear in Discover or search. Your username, profile photo and bio are public on your biselam.me/<username> page, including to people without the app. While your question box is on, the questions you answer also appear there with your answer. This page is open to search engines: your username, photo, bio and answers may show up in search results. We don’t have a page that lists users; your profile is only found through its shared link. When you withdraw an answer or turn your box off, it comes off the page right away; when it drops out of a search engine’s own cache depends on that search engine.
When you write masked, the other person only sees your alias. Masks come off if you both want.
Nobody sees who watched your stories; you only see the view count. You can turn off last seen and read receipts; if you do, you won’t see other people’s either.
Location
We only ask for location while the app is open, and at low accuracy. Your phone sends its location to the server, the server finds the nearest city and saves only the country and city. Coordinates aren’t saved and are removed from server logs.
If you don’t allow location, we find your country and approximate city from your IP address. We use a database on our own server for this; your IP address isn’t sent anywhere else. If your city was found from your phone’s location, your profile shows “From location” next to it.
Location information (EXIF) inside the photos and videos you upload is removed during upload.
How long we keep it
- We keep your data while your account is open. When you delete your account, your profile, photos, stories and messages are deleted immediately. In chats with others, your messages go, and what the other person wrote stays on their account.
- Evidence for a closed report (copies of the reported messages) is deleted after 1 year.
- Purchase records of a deleted account aren’t deleted until the legal retention period is set.
- When an account that was closed for breaking the rules is deleted, an irreversible fingerprint (keyed hash) of its email address and Apple/Google account is kept to prevent signing up again with them. This fingerprint isn’t linked to any other information.
- Stories stay up for 24 hours. Their photo or video is deleted from the server 2 days after they come down; if a story was reported, it stays until the review ends.
- View-once media is deleted 1 day after it’s opened.
- When you delete a message with “Delete for everyone”, it disappears for both sides right away. Its text and media are kept for 90 days in a separate place only the moderation team can access, and can become evidence for a report made during that time. If the chat has an open report or was reported in the past year, they’re kept longer. When the period ends, the text and media are deleted.
- “Delete for me” only removes the message from your view; it stays for the other person and on the server. A message you report is removed from your view in the same way.
- Call records are deleted when the chat or account they belong to is deleted.
- Questions in your question box stay until you delete them or delete your account. The asker’s IP fingerprint is deleted after 30 days.
- A data copy you download is deleted after 7 days.
Database backups are kept for 7 days and then deleted automatically. A deleted account’s data may stay in backups until then. Server logs are kept in a limited space; older entries are deleted as new ones arrive.
How we protect your data
All connections between the app and the server are encrypted (TLS). Your sign-in key is kept in the Keychain on your phone. The copy of your messages on your phone is deleted when you log out.
Your messages aren’t end-to-end encrypted. They’re kept readable on our server so that we can review them when they’re reported. We chose this on purpose, to be able to protect you when you talk to someone you don’t know.
Your control over your data
- With “Download my data” in Settings, you can get a copy of your account details, profile, photos, messages and coin history as a single file.
- You can change your profile details in Edit profile.
- You can delete your account with “Delete account” in Settings.
- You can turn off location, camera, microphone, photos and notification permissions in your phone’s settings at any time.
- Last seen, read receipts, masked messages, appearing in Discover and who can call you are changed in Settings.
The KVKK notice explains your rights under Turkish data protection law and how to apply to us.
Age limit of 18
biselam isn’t for people under 18, and we don’t knowingly collect data from anyone under 18. If we find out that someone under 18 has opened an account, we close it.
Changes
When we update this text, the date at the top of the page changes. We announce important changes in the app.
Contact
You can send privacy questions from the “Send feedback” screen in Settings. For requests under KVKK, use the application route in the KVKK notice.