Privacy Policy

• We do not sell your data to anyone, and we do not use it to show you advertising.
• We collect only what it takes to run the messaging service, keep it secure and comply with the law.
• You can see, correct or have erased what concerns you, at any time.

An important point, said plainly: HelloMe does not offer end-to-end encryption today. Your messages travel encrypted between your device and our servers, but they are stored on our servers so that they can be delivered to all your devices. An authorised administrator can therefore technically access them, and an authority can ask us for them under the conditions described below. Bear that in mind for anything genuinely sensitive.

The data controller is GRACELAB OPEN TECH SARL, publisher of HelloMe. Its full details are given in the legal notice.

For any question about your data or to exercise your rights: support@gracelab.io.

What you give us to open and keep an account:

• Your phone number and the matching country, both required to create an account and to recover it.
• Your display name, and if you fill them in: your photo, your bio, your username and your email address.
• Your password and, if you sign in by phone, your six-digit PIN. Both are stored as an irreversible hash, never in plain text.
• The verification codes sent when you sign up or recover an account, for as long as they are valid.
• If you sign in with Google: the Google identifier, the name, the email address and the photo that Google passes on.
• The messages you send to support, and the reports you file.

What your use of the service produces:

• Your content: messages, voice notes, photos, videos, documents, shared locations, polls, status updates, reactions.
• Delivery information: to whom and when a message was sent, delivered, read, and whether a voice note was played.
• Your devices: device identifier, platform, app version, language, the IP address you connect from and the notification token.
• Your account activity: sign-in dates, last seen, the country inferred from the IP address, connected devices.
• Technical and security logs: IP address, browser or app type, the page or request called, the response code, the errors encountered.
• Calls: who calls whom, when, how long, the state of the call and whether it was a video call. The content of calls is not recorded.
• Your status updates: who saw them and when, along with the reactions received.
• Your address book, only if you turn on contact syncing (see below).

What we do not do: no ad network, no advertising tracker, no third-party analytics tool, no commercial profile, no selling of lists. We ask neither for your date of birth nor for your identity documents in order to use HelloMe.

Traffic between your device and our servers is encrypted using the standard protocols of the web and of mobile apps. On our servers, messages and files are kept so that they can be delivered to the recipients and found again when you change device.

The files you send — photos, videos, documents, voice notes — are stored on our servers and served to the members of the conversation.

A message deleted for everyone is removed from our servers. A message deleted for you only disappears on your side and stays with the other participants. Disappearing messages are deleted automatically when the period you chose runs out, unless a participant has kept them using the feature provided for that. Status updates disappear after twenty-four hours.

An advanced privacy mode can be turned on conversation by conversation: the assistance features and conversation export are refused there.

So that your phone rings when a message arrives, we pass a notification to the notification services of your device's operating system: Google's for Android, Apple's for iPhone and iPad, including to ring an incoming call.

That notification contains your device token, the sender's name and a preview of the message, so that you know who is writing to you without opening the app. You can hide that preview in your phone's settings, or turn notifications off.

Audio and video calls go through a specialist provider that carries the streams in real time. We give it a room identifier and a temporary token; the content of your calls is neither listened to, nor recorded, nor kept by us.

We do keep the call log: participants, date, duration, how the call ended and whether video was used, so that we can show your history and detect abuse.

Contact syncing is optional and requires your explicit agreement. Without that agreement, no number from your address book is sent to us.

If you turn it on, the app sends us the numbers in your address book, along with the name and email address attached to them where they exist, so that we can tell you which of your contacts already use HelloMe and let you invite the others. We keep these entries for as long as syncing stays on.

We ask you to sync only contacts who you can reasonably expect would agree to it: those people have no account with us and did not choose to have their number sent to us. You can withdraw your agreement at any time and ask for the imported entries to be erased by writing to support@gracelab.io.

So that we can offer to invite a contact through the channel they already use, the service may check with a messaging provider whether a number can be reached on certain platforms. Only the number is sent for that check, and the result is kept only temporarily.

These features are optional, switched off until you use them, and they never apply to a conversation set to advanced privacy.

When you use one, the text needed is sent to our language model provider, for as long as it takes to produce the answer:

• @bot mention: the latest messages in the conversation and your question. The answer is posted in the conversation and kept like any message.
• Catching up on a conversation, suggesting replies, drafting for you, correcting or translating: the latest messages in the conversation concerned, or the text you are writing.
• Learning how you write: up to a few hundred of your own past messages, excluding conversations set to advanced privacy. Only the resulting portrait — a few lines about your tone, your language and your habits — is kept; the messages sent are not.
• Conversation memory: the recent messages in a conversation, summarised into a few lines of facts that are kept for that conversation.
• Automatic replies while you are away: the latest messages, your writing portrait, the conversation memory and the instruction you wrote.

Our provider processes these texts on our behalf in order to produce the answer. The writing portrait, the conversation memories and the usage counters are kept on our servers; you can view and erase them at any time from Settings, "Answer for me".

If you turn on the transcription of a voice note or the translation of a message, the recording or the text concerned is sent to the matching provider for that one operation.

A message sent automatically on your behalf is marked as such in the conversation, on your side and on the other person's. We never let anyone believe a machine is a person.

Some companies install the HelloMe chat window on their own website. If you write in it, it is that company you are talking to: it decides what you are asked and what it does with it. We hold the conversation for them, on their instructions, and for nothing else.

• What you type into the window — name, address, number — is marked “claimed”: the company sees it as such, and it is never written onto anybody's account.
• No HelloMe account is opened in your name without your knowing. The chat rests on a carrier account that cannot be signed into and has neither password nor code.
• An e-mail address that already belongs to a HelloMe account is never attached to you on that basis alone.
• The company sees the page you opened the window from, your language, your approximate country and your browser: enough to answer you without making you repeat everything.
• If the company has turned the assistant on, an answer may be written by a machine outside opening hours. It is always marked as automatic.

How long it is kept depends on the company's plan: thirty days, a year or three years, after which the conversation is really deleted. If you gave an e-mail address, the transcript is sent to you when it closes.

You can ask for erasure from the window itself, without going through anybody: your messages, your conversations with that company and the carrier account are then deleted. For everything else — reaching your data, correcting it — go to the company, which is responsible for it.

First, the people you write to: your messages, your name, your photo and, depending on your privacy settings, whether you are online and when you were last seen are visible to them. What they do with your messages afterwards is no longer in our hands.

Then, a small number of technical providers acting on our behalf and under contract:

Finally, our team: access to production data is limited to the people who need it, in particular for moderation and support. Every administrative action is logged with its author, its date and its IP address.

We pass your data to no other third party, except in the cases provided by law described in the next section, or if the company is reorganised, in which case the acquirer would be bound by this policy and you would be told about it.

We may be required to disclose data to a competent judicial or administrative authority. We act on such a request only if it is in writing, gives its reasons, is based on an applicable law and comes from an authority with the power to make it.

The "Requests from authorities" page describes the procedure, what we are able to provide and the cases where we refuse.

Our servers and those of our providers may sit in a country other than yours: that is the case for the notification, call and assistance services, which operate from several regions of the world.

When a transfer outside your country takes place, we make sure it rests on an appropriate legal framework, such as standard contractual clauses or an adequacy decision, and that it is limited to what the service needs.

An account left unused for a long period may be closed and its data erased, so that information nobody uses any more is not kept.

• Communications are encrypted in transit between your devices and our servers.
• Passwords and PINs are stored as irreversible hashes, never in plain text.
• Sign-in attempts are rate limited, and a PIN or a verification code entered wrongly several times in a row blocks further attempts temporarily.
• Passwords, codes and tokens are stripped from technical logs before they are written.
• Administrator access is restricted, protected by a second authentication step and logged.
• You can see the devices connected to your account and sign one out at any time.

No system is infallible. In the event of a data breach likely to create a high risk for you, we inform the competent authority and the people concerned within the time limits set by law.

• Access the data we hold about you and obtain a copy of it.
• Have what is inaccurate corrected — most information can be changed directly in the settings.
• Obtain the erasure of your data, within the limits of what the law requires us to keep.
• Object to processing based on our legitimate interest, or ask for it to be restricted.
• Withdraw your consent, in particular for contact syncing and the assistance features: the withdrawal applies going forward.
• Receive your data in a machine-readable format, or ask for it to be sent to another service where that is technically possible.
• Set instructions about what happens to your data after your death.

To exercise a right, write to support@gracelab.io from the address linked to your account or quoting the number concerned. We may have to check that it really is you, through a code sent to the number or address on file. We reply within one month, extendable by one month where the request is complex.

If our answer does not satisfy you, you can refer the matter to the competent data protection authority: Instance de Protection des Données à Caractère Personnel (IPDCP), Lomé, Togo.

HelloMe is not intended for children under thirteen, nor for anyone below the age at which the law of your country allows consenting alone to this kind of service.

We do not ask our users their age, but if we learn that an account belongs to a child below that age, we close it and erase the associated data. A parent or guardian can write to us at support@gracelab.io to report it.

We update this page when the service changes. The date of the last update is shown at the top. For a significant change — a new purpose, a new provider, a longer period — we tell you in the app before it applies.

A question, a doubt, a request: support@gracelab.io. A person will reply.