Privacy

The controller of your personal data is Talkabout LLC:

Email: talkaboutlang@proton.me. See also our legal notice.

If you're in the European Union or the United Kingdom, contact us about anything in this notice at talkaboutlang@proton.me.

We follow Georgia's Law on Personal Data Protection and, because we offer Talkabout to people in the European Union and the United Kingdom, the GDPR and UK GDPR.

• Account: your name, email address and a hashed password.
• Profile: birthdate (to check you're 18 or older), country, languages and levels, interests, mood, bio, who you'd like to hear from, and an optional photo.
• What you do: messages and images you send, corrections, favourites, blocks, reports, appeals, feedback posts and votes, and your notification settings.
• Safety records: trust signals (for example how many people replied to you, blocks and reports about you, attempts to share contact details too early), and any moderation decision about your account.
• Technical data: for each signed-in session, the IP address and browser it started from; the days you were active; and short-lived request logs at our host.
• Where you came from: if you arrive through a tagged link, someone's invite link or from another website, the campaign tags, the invite code and that website's address, stored with your account when you sign up.
• Invites: your personal invite code, created the first time the app shows you your invite link, and included in your data download. If someone signs up through your link, their account records your code.
• Notifications: if you turn on push notifications on a phone or browser, that device's push address (at your browser maker's push service) and the keys to encrypt notifications to it; when we sent you a notification and whether you opened it; and whether you installed the app and answered the browser's notification prompt.

• To provide Talkabout: your account, profile, discovery, chats and corrections, and the data export and account deletion. Legal basis: performing our contract with you (GDPR Article 6(1)(b)).
• To keep people safe: checking you're an adult, limiting how many chats new accounts can start, holding back images and contact details until a conversation is established, reviewing reports and appeals, and acting against spam, scams and abuse. Legal basis: our legitimate interest, and yours, in a safe service (Article 6(1)(f)), and our contract with you.
• To keep Talkabout secure and working: session records and request logs. Legal basis: legitimate interest (Article 6(1)(f)).
• To understand which channels bring people in. Legal basis: legitimate interest (Article 6(1)(f)). You can object at any time.
• To tell you when someone writes to you while you're away, on the devices where you turned notifications on. Legal basis: your consent (Article 6(1)(a)), which you can withdraw at any time in Settings or in your browser.
• To comply with the law, for example answering a lawful request from an authority. Legal basis: legal obligation (Article 6(1)(c)).

Trust signals are calculated automatically and decide limits such as how many new chats you can start in a day, when you can share images, and whether your profile appears in discovery. They never warn, suspend or ban anyone on their own: warnings, suspensions and bans are decided by a person.

• Other members see your profile (your age, never your birthdate) and the messages you send them. Favourites are private unless they're mutual. Your email address is never shown. Feedback posts are visible to other members.
• Moderators can open any conversation. They do so to review reports and appeals, and every time a moderator opens one, it is recorded.
• We don't sell your data and don't show ads.

These companies process data on our behalf, under a data processing agreement:

• Cloudflare, Inc. (United States) hosts Talkabout: the app, database, photo storage, live chat and request logs. Cloudflare runs a global network, so data can be processed outside Georgia and the EU. Transfers rely on the EU–US Data Privacy Framework and standard contractual clauses.

Push notifications travel through your browser maker's push service (Google for Chrome and Android, Apple for Safari, Mozilla for Firefox, Microsoft for Edge), which stores the device address and delivers them. They're encrypted so the push service can't read them, and they never contain what anyone wrote: only who wrote to you.

• A session cookie keeps you signed in. It's necessary for the service and expires after 7 days without a visit.
• If you arrive through a tagged link or from another website, a cookie of our own remembers where you came from for up to 30 days, so it can be stored with your account if you sign up.
• A service worker keeps the offline page, fonts and icons on your device so the app starts quickly, and your browser's local storage remembers whether you put off the install and notification suggestions.

• Your account data, including your invite code, for as long as your account exists.
• A device's push address until you switch notifications off there or its push service tells us the address no longer works.
• When you delete your account, we immediately delete your profile, photos, languages, interests, favourites, blocks, notification settings, push devices and notification history, trust records, sessions, invite code, where you came from and your activity days, and replace your name and email with "Deleted user".
• The text of messages and corrections you sent stays in the other person's chat, shown as from "Deleted user", because it's part of their conversation too. Images you sent are deleted.
• Reports, feedback posts and moderation decisions stay attached to the deleted account so we can keep enforcing our rules; the text of your appeals is removed. If an account was banned, we keep a one-way hash of its email address to stop it signing up again.
• If someone gives a birthdate under 18, the account stays locked so it can't be used again.
• Request logs at Cloudflare, for up to 7 days.

You have the right to:

• get a copy of your data: "Download a copy of your data" in Settings
• correct it: edit your profile at any time
• have it erased: "Delete your account" in Settings
• take it elsewhere: the download is a machine-readable JSON file
• restrict our processing, and object to processing based on legitimate interest

For anything you can't do in the app, email us at talkaboutlang@proton.me. We answer within a month.

You can complain to Georgia's data protection supervisor, the State Audit Office of Georgia (personal data protection). If you live in the European Union or the United Kingdom, you can also complain to the data protection authority where you live or work. We'd appreciate the chance to fix things first.

Talkabout is for people aged 18 or older. We don't knowingly collect data about anyone younger.

When we change this notice, we update the date at the top. We tell members about significant changes before they apply.