Legal

Privacy policy

Last updated: October 15, 2026

This policy explains how your personal data is processed when you use the Banterhall mobile app and the banterhall.com website. It is our privacy notice under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and our information notice (aydınlatma metni) under Turkey's Personal Data Protection Law No. 6698 (KVKK).

In short:

• We process what your account, messages and halls need. We don't advertise, we don't sell your data, and we use no advertising or analytics trackers.
• You sign in with Google or Apple; we don't ask for your email address, a password or your date of birth.
• Voice rooms are never recorded.
• Turkish law requires us to keep who connected from which IP address and when. We keep this encrypted for 1 year and open it only for an official request.
• You can delete your account from inside the app; your personal data is erased 30 days later.

01Scope and controller

The controller is {{CONTROLLER_NAME}}, {{CONTROLLER_ADDRESS}} ({{TAX_DETAILS_IF_ANY}}). In this policy "Banterhall", "we" and "us" mean this person or company.

For any privacy question or request: [email protected].

This policy covers the Banterhall iOS and Android app, the banterhall.com website (invite pages included) and the servers the app talks to. When you open a link someone shared, the site you visit has its own policy.

02What we collect

2.1 What you give us

• Account details: your username, display name (optional) and when you stated "I'm 16 or older" at sign-up. We don't ask for an email address, a password or a date of birth.
• Sign-in: you sign in to Banterhall with your Google or Apple account. Google or Apple gives us only that account's id at their end and a short-lived signed note proving the sign-in really came from you; we keep only which provider you use and that id. We don't ask Apple for your name or email address. Google's sign-in window may say your basic profile (name, email, picture) will be shared, because Google's sign-in always includes it; we don't read or keep it. What you give Google or Apple while signing in is covered by their own privacy policies.
• Profile photo (optional): if you add one, it is shown to signed-in users wherever you appear in the app. We re-encode the image on our server, which removes location and camera details (EXIF). When you change or remove it, the old one is deleted; the one exception is a photo someone reported: a copy is kept as evidence, visible only to the Banterhall team, for 1 year after the report is closed, then deleted. Hall icons added by hall managers are handled the same way; a reported hall's name and icon at the time are kept for the same period.
• What you share: messages you write in halls and direct messages (DMs), edits, reactions, replies and mentions; photos and files you upload (their name, size and type included); halls, rooms, roles and invite links you create.
• Your preferences: language, who may send you DMs and friend requests, notification settings (including quiet hours and your phone's time zone), hall and room notification levels.
• Your connections: friends, friend requests, people you block, the halls you are in and your roles there.
• What you tell us: the reason and note you give when you report a message, a person or a hall; emails you send to our support and privacy addresses (your email address stays with that correspondence and is never joined to your account).

2.2 What arises as you use the app

• Sessions: for each session, your phone's model (e.g. "iPhone 15"; if the phone doesn't give its model, this can be the name you gave the device), and when the session started and was last used. Only hashes of session tokens are stored.
• Legal traffic records: when you sign up, sign in, your session is refreshed and the app connects to our server: your user id, IP address and the time (at most one record per session and address an hour). The IP address is stored encrypted. Details in sections 5 and 6.
• Push registration: the notification token Apple or Google gives your phone, and the phone's platform (iOS/Android), to send you notifications. It goes with the session.
• Presence: whether the app is open, and when you were last seen. Only people in halls you share and your friends see whether you are online; only your friends see "last seen".
• Read state: the last message you read in each room (for unread counts).
• Voice rooms: which voice room you are in, whether your microphone is on and whether you are speaking; held only while you are in the room. No history is kept.
• Moderation records: timeouts, kicks and bans in a hall; warnings or suspensions from our team and their reasons; the audit log of hall moderators' actions.

2.3 What we don't collect

• Your location, contacts, photo library (only the files you pick and send reach us), or advertising id.
• We use no advertising, analytics, behaviour-tracking or crash-reporting tools; the app and the website set no cookies or tracking pixels.
• The website loads its fonts from its own server, so your visit is not reported to third parties such as Google.

2.4 What stays on your phone

To open quickly, the app keeps some data on your phone only: the newest 50 messages of up to 20 rooms you opened last (at most 3 MB), an image cache, your trusted sites list, recently used emoji and rooms, and per-person volume settings. Your session token is kept in the phone's secure storage (iOS Keychain / Android Keystore). All of this is deleted when you sign out. On Android, the last lines of notifications still on screen also stay on the phone, to group them, until the notification is dismissed or you sign out.

03How we use it, and the legal bases

Push notifications and the microphone also depend on the permission your phone asks for; you can withdraw it at any time in your phone's settings.

Automated processing: if the hall owner turned it on, a simple word filter stars banned words; it runs in every room of the hall and never in DMs. No automated decision with legal or similarly significant effects is made about you: a person always decides on warnings and suspensions.

04Voice and messages

• Voice rooms are not recorded. Audio goes through our own server (LiveKit) only to the other people in the room and is never written anywhere. While your microphone is off, nothing is sent.
• Messages are not end-to-end encrypted. The connection between your phone and our server is encrypted (TLS); messages are stored on our server so you can see them on another device too. Our team doesn't routinely read messages; only when a message or a person is reported does it see that message, with up to 3 messages before and after it for context.
• If the word filter starred a word, the original text is kept; only our team sees it, while reviewing a reported message. It goes when the message is deleted or edited to clean text.
• The earlier version of an edited message is not kept. A deleted message's text, reactions and files are erased at once; "Message deleted" stays in its place.
• Photos are re-encoded on our server, which removes all EXIF data, location included. Other files (videos, PDFs, etc.) are stored as uploaded; if they contain data such as a location, that stays too.
• Link previews: our server fetches the preview (title, description, image) of the first link in a message, so the linked site never sees your IP address. A preview is cached for 24 hours and removed within a day once no message uses it.
• Notification content: with "Show message in notification" on, the sender's name, the hall and room names and the first 180 characters of the message pass through Apple's or Google's notification servers to reach your phone. With it off, only a generic text such as "New direct message" is sent.

05Sharing and international transfers

We don't sell your data or share it for advertising. What you share is shown only to the people who should see it under the hall and DM settings. To run the service we work with these service providers (processors):

For users in Turkey, storing data on servers in the EU is a transfer abroad, made under KVKK art. 9 on the basis of {{TRANSFER_BASIS: standard contracts announced by the Board, notified to the Authority}}. Transfers outside the EU (to the US) rely on the providers' EU–US Data Privacy Framework certification and/or the European Commission's standard contractual clauses.

Where the law requires it, we disclose the relevant data in response to official requests from competent courts, prosecutors or public authorities made in due form. Unless legally prevented, we tell you about it.

06How long we keep it

If an authority asks us to preserve the data of an account (legal hold), the deletion of that account, the removal of its files and the expiry of its traffic records wait for as long as the request requires.

07Deleting your account

You can delete your account inside the app: Settings → Delete account. If you own a hall, first transfer it to someone else or delete it.

• To confirm, you type your username and sign in with Google or Apple once more. If you used Apple, we also withdraw the app's access in your Apple account.
• As soon as you ask, your account is frozen and you are signed out on every device. Signing in again within 30 days cancels the deletion.
• After 30 days, these are erased: your username, display name, your Google / Apple id, when you stated your age, last-seen and suspension details, sessions, push registrations and notification settings, hall memberships, friendships, friend requests, blocks, read states and notices shown to you. Every photo and file you uploaded is deleted.
• The text of your messages in halls and DMs stays, shown as "Deleted user", so other people's conversations stay intact. These messages can no longer be linked to you. You can delete any message you don't want to stay, one by one, before deleting your account.
• What remains: the legal traffic records described above (1 year), report records and the audit log (for the periods in section 6) and backups (at most 35 days).

08Security

Connections are encrypted with TLS. We keep no passwords: at sign-in we check Google's or Apple's signed note against the keys they publish, and accept each note only once. Session tokens are stored as hashes; session tokens are short-lived and change on every refresh, and reusing a stolen one closes that session. The database is not reachable from the internet. IP addresses in the legal traffic records are additionally encrypted. Backups are kept encrypted in a separate place. Uploaded files open only through personal links valid for minutes or an hour. No system is perfectly secure; if a data breach happens, we notify the authority and you within the time the law sets.

09Your rights

Under GDPR art. 15–22 and KVKK art. 11 you have the right to:

• know whether and why your data is processed, and get a copy of your data (as machine-readable JSON),
• have wrong or incomplete data corrected (you can change your username, display name and profile photo yourself in the app),
• have your data erased (by deleting your account in the app, or by writing to us),
• restrict processing, and object to processing based on legitimate interests,
• know the third parties your data is transferred to, and receive your data to move it elsewhere,
• object to a result against you that comes solely from automated analysis,
• claim compensation for damage caused by unlawful processing,
• withdraw a permission (notifications, microphone) at any time.

Write to [email protected] and tell us your username. As we keep no email address, we may ask you for an extra step to confirm the account is yours. We answer free of charge within 30 days. If you are not satisfied, you can complain to the data protection authority of the EU country where you live, or in Turkey to the Personal Data Protection Board (kvkk.gov.tr).

10Children

You must be at least 16 to sign up for Banterhall; you state this when signing up, and we don't take a date of birth. If we learn that someone under 16 opened an account, we close it; parents who notice this can write to [email protected]. Adult (18+) content is not allowed on Banterhall; reported content is removed.

11Changes

We may change this policy. If a change is significant, we tell you in the app before it takes effect. The "Last updated" date at the top always shows the current version; we can send you earlier versions on request.

12Contact

• Privacy and data requests: [email protected]
• Reporting a security issue: [email protected]
• Everything else: [email protected]
• Postal address: {{CONTROLLER_ADDRESS}}