This Privacy Policy sets out how we, Chat21.org. (“Chat21”), use and protect your personal data that you provide to us, or that is otherwise obtained or generated by us, in connection with your use of our cloud-based messaging services (the “Services”). For the purposes of this Privacy Policy, ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’ refers to Chat21, and ‘you’ refers to you, the user of the Services.
Chat21 has two fundamental principles when it comes to collecting and processing private data:
This Privacy Policy forms part of our Terms of Service, which describes the terms under which you use our Services. This Privacy Policy should therefore be read in conjunction with those terms.
This Privacy Policy explains the following:
If you live in a country in the European Economic Area (EEA), the Services are provided by Chat21, which for the purposes of applicable data protection legislation is the data controller responsible for your personal data when you use our Services. Chat21 designated Frontiere21 SRL (Galatina, via Brindisi 1, Italy), as a representative to whom you may direct any issues you have relating to our processing of 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.
Chat21 is a communication service. You provide your basic account data (which may include email, profile name, profile picture and about information) to create a Chat21 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 on Chat21 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 brother can have the public name ‘Marty McFly’ while appearing as ‘Bro’ to you and as ‘Dad’ to her sons (or the other way around, depending on how these relationships are structured).
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.
Chat21 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.
The only cookies we use are those to operate and provide our Services on the web. We do not use cookies for profiling or advertising. The cookies we use are small text files that allow us to provide and customize our Services, and in doing so provide you with an enhanced user experience. Your browser should allow you to control these cookies, including whether or not to accept them and how to remove them. You may choose to block cookies with your web browser, however, if you do disable these cookies you will not be able to log in to Chat21 Web.
If you signed up for Chat21 from the UK or the EEA, your data is stored in data centers of Google . These are because we rely on firebase.google.com for messages storing and transmission. We do not share your personal data with Firebase.
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.
Chat21 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.
Chat21 supports communities which we have to police against abuse and Terms of Service violations. To improve the security of your account we may collect metadata such as your IP address, devices and Chat21 apps you've used, history of username changes, etc. If collected, this metadata can be kept for 12 months maximum.
To prevent phishing, spam and other kinds of abuse and violations of Chat21’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.
We may also store some aggregated metadata to create Chat21 features that work across all your devices.
Unlike other services, we don't use your data for ad targeting or other commercial purposes. Chat21 only stores the information it needs to function as a secure and feature-rich cloud service.
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 Chat21, 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.
We may share your personal data with: (1) our parent company, Frontiere21 SRL, located in Italy. We will implement appropriate safeguards to protect the security and integrity of that personal data. This will take the form of standard contract clauses approved by the European Commission in an agreement between us and our relevant group companies.
If Chat21 receives a court order that confirms you're a terror suspect, we may disclose your IP address and email address to the relevant authorities. So far, this has never happened.
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.
If you wish to exercise any of these rights, kindly contact us using the details in section 10 below.
If you would like to delete your account, you can do this on the deactivation page. Deleting your account removes all messages, media, contacts and every other piece of data you store in the Chat21 cloud. This action must be confirmed via your Chat21 account and cannot be undone.
By default, if you stop using Chat21 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 Chat21 cloud.
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 www.chat21.org/privacy. Please check our website frequently to see any updates or changes to our Privacy Policy, a summary of which we will set out below.
Important changes made to this Privacy Policy will be notified to you via Chat21.
If you have any questions about privacy and our data policies, please contact us at info@frontiere21.it.
Chat21 is an open source project. You can examine more information on our: