Terms of Use & Privacy Policy

Last updated: November 2026 · Applies to PalliTalk and Blogit by Henri GIL.

These general terms govern access to and use of the PalliTalk mobile application, the web client at web.pallitalk.app, and the marketing pages hosted at pallitalk.app. They may be updated at any time without prior notice.

Article 1. Legal Information

The PalliTalk mobile application, and the websites pallitalk.app and web.pallitalk.app, are published by:

Henri GIL
Publication Director: Henri GIL

Article 2. Definitions

Terms used in this document follow their ordinary meaning in the context of mobile applications and online services. "App" refers to the PalliTalk mobile client and to the web client at web.pallitalk.app. "User" refers to any person accessing or using the app.

Article 3. Purpose

PalliTalk allows users to:

• Exchange real-time messages, photos, voice notes and short video stories with friends and small groups.
• Share their live location with chosen friends on a map (optional, and never stored as a history — see “Location — Shared Live With Friends, Never Stored” below).
• Send messages directly device-to-device over Bluetooth when there is no internet, and use end-to-end encrypted Secret Chat for private conversations.

Article 4. Hosting

The app's backend services and websites are hosted by Vultr (www.vultr.com). Push notifications are delivered via Apple's Push Notification service (APNs) and Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM).

Article 5. Contact

For any inquiry regarding the app, the websites or this document, please contact us at: [email protected].

Article 6. Acceptance of Terms

Access to and use of the app and websites are subject to acceptance of these terms. By installing, registering for or otherwise using the app, the user accepts these terms in full.

Article 7. Access and Navigation

Use of PalliTalk is restricted to persons aged 13 years or older. Users below the applicable age are not permitted to create an account.

Article 8. App Management

The publisher reserves the right to suspend, restrict or interrupt access to all or part of the app for maintenance, security, performance or any other reason, without notice.

Article 9. Services Reserved for Registered Users

Most features require the user to create an account. Users may at any time edit their profile, sign out, or delete their account from inside the app (Settings → Account → Delete account). Account deletion permanently removes the user's profile, messages, media and any associated data from our servers, subject to backups that are rotated out within a reasonable retention window.

Article 10. Responsibilities

The information and content displayed by the app are provided as-is. We make best efforts to ensure the app's availability, accuracy and reliability, but do not guarantee uninterrupted service or absence of errors. Users are responsible for the content they publish and for the consequences of any interaction initiated through the app.

By using the app, users acknowledge that they do so at their own risk and that the publisher cannot be held liable for any inaccuracies, omissions, loss of data or outcomes resulting from such use, except as required by applicable law.

Article 11. Intellectual Property

All content embedded in the app and websites — including code, design, graphics, icons, trademarks and text — is protected under intellectual property laws and remains the exclusive property of the publisher or its licensors. Reproduction or redistribution without prior written authorisation is prohibited.

Article 12. Liability Regarding User-Generated Content

Users are solely responsible for the content (text, images, voice notes, videos, location data) they publish or share through the app. The publisher disclaims any responsibility for inaccuracies, illicit content, or harm resulting from such user-generated content, and reserves the right to remove any content that violates these terms or applicable laws.

Article 13. Notifications

Official notifications regarding the app may be delivered via push notification, in-app message, or to the email address associated with the user's account.

Article 14. Applicable Law & Mediation

These terms are governed by French law. All disputes will be resolved primarily through amicable mediation; failing that, the competent French courts shall have exclusive jurisdiction.

Article 15. Editor Liability

The publisher shall not be held liable for any service downtime, force majeure event, third-party outage (including hosting, push notification or content delivery providers), or technical incompatibility between the user's device and the app.

Article 16. General Terms of Sale

Should the app offer paid subscriptions or in-app purchases, those are billed and renewed automatically according to the policies of the platform store (Apple App Store or Google Play). Cancellation, refund and renewal terms follow the rules of the relevant store.

Privacy Policy

We take your privacy seriously and collect only what is necessary to operate the app.

Our Privacy Promise

PalliTalk is built privacy-first — this is a core design principle, not an afterthought. Here is what that means in plain language:

• No advertisements. PalliTalk has no ad network, no sponsored content, and no advertising identifiers of any kind.
• No tracking or analytics that follow you. We do not embed third-party analytics SDKs (no Google Analytics, no Meta Pixel, no Amplitude, no Mixpanel). We do not track you across apps or websites.
• No selling or sharing your data with marketers. Your personal information is never sold, rented, or traded to advertisers or data brokers — ever.
• No third-party profile building. We do not construct advertising profiles, interest graphs, or behavioural models from your usage. Your data is used to run the app for you, and nothing else.

Minimal Data Collection

We collect no personal data beyond what is strictly needed to create your account and deliver your messages. There is no marketing profile on you. We do not collect your browsing history, your contacts beyond what you explicitly share with the app, your app-usage patterns for commercial purposes, or any data unrelated to operating the features you use. If a piece of data is not required to make the app work for you, we do not collect it.

Message & Media Retention — 7 Days

Your messages and media are stored on our servers for only 7 days, then permanently and automatically deleted. We keep nothing long-term. After 7 days, that content is gone from our systems with no possibility of recovery. This is enforced at the infrastructure level — it is not a policy we could override.

Secret Chat — End-to-End Encrypted Secure Mode

Secret Chat is our end-to-end encrypted secure mode. Every message and every media file sent in Secret Chat is encrypted on your device before it leaves — our servers only relay ciphertext and can never read your content, and the server copy is deleted as soon as the message is delivered. You can set Secret Chat messages to automatically delete after they're read (or after a time you choose), so sensitive conversations leave no lasting trace. On-device copies are stored encrypted and protected by your device passcode / Face ID. This is the highest level of privacy the app offers.

Offline Peer-to-Peer Messaging via Bluetooth (PalliTalk app)

When you and a friend are nearby with no internet connection — airplane mode, the metro, a music festival, a dead zone — PalliTalk can deliver messages directly device-to-device over Bluetooth. These messages travel peer-to-peer and never touch our servers. Because they bypass the internet entirely, they are more private than standard messages and work even without a signal.

Location — Shared Live With Friends, Never Stored

Location is only ever used to share your live position with the friends you choose — so they can see you on the map while you are sharing. It is completely optional and off until you turn it on, and you can turn it off at any time.

Crucially, we do not save your location. We do not keep a history of where you have been, we never sell or share it with anyone, and we do not use it for advertising. Your live position is relayed to your friends in real time and held only for as long as you are actively sharing — the moment you stop sharing or go offline, it is dropped. There is no location trail to look back on, by design.

Data We Collect

• Account information — email or phone number, username, hashed password (Argon2id; we never store plaintext passwords), and the device identifiers used to manage your sessions.
• Profile information — display name, optional bio, profile photo and any settings you choose to share with friends.
• Messages and media — text messages, photos, voice notes, short video stories, stickers and reactions you send through the app, stored on our servers so they can be delivered to recipients.
• Location data (only when you turn on location sharing) — when you grant permission, your location is used to share your live position with the friends you choose and to power map and proximity features in the moment. We do not build or keep a history of where you have been: your position is held only long enough to relay it to your friends and is dropped when you stop sharing or go offline. See “Location — Shared Live With Friends, Never Stored” below. PalliTalk’s web client never collects location.
• Photos you send to photo features — only when you choose to use one; see “Face Data & Face ID” below for what is processed, where, and for how long.
• Device data — push notification tokens (APNs / FCM), device model and OS version for diagnostics, and basic crash logs.

How We Use the Data

• To create and maintain your account and authenticate you across devices.
• To deliver your messages, media and notifications to the intended recipients.
• To share your live location with the friends you choose, when you turn on location sharing — and never to build a history of where you have been.
• To detect abuse, enforce these terms and protect the safety of our users.

Third-Party Services

We do not sell or trade your personal information. The app relies on a small set of operational service providers:

• Apple Push Notification service (APNs) and Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) — to deliver push notifications to your device.
• GIPHY — when you search for an animated GIF inside a chat, your search query is sent to GIPHY's API to return matching results.
• Vultr — our infrastructure provider, where the backend and media storage run.
• OpenAI — when you use a photo feature (face sticker pack, weather avatar, Styles, Perfect Shot, face shape / personal colour / body type reports), the photo you choose is sent to OpenAI's API to be edited or analysed. See “Face Data & Face ID” below.
• LiveKit — used for the optional voice room / "walkie" feature.

These providers process the data strictly on our behalf, only as required to operate the corresponding feature.

Data Retention

We keep your account data for as long as your account is active. Messages and media in standard chats are automatically and permanently deleted after 7 days. Ephemeral and snap messages are removed shortly after delivery. Secret Chat is end-to-end encrypted and its server copy is deleted as soon as the message is delivered; you can set Secret Chat messages to auto-delete after they're read. When you delete your account, your profile, messages and media are removed from our active systems immediately.

Your Control

• You can review, edit or delete your account at any time from inside the app.
• You can grant or revoke permissions (camera, microphone, photos, location, push notifications, contacts) at any time through your device's system settings.
• You can export or request a copy of your data by writing to [email protected].

Face Data & Face ID

What face data we process

The app uses Apple's Vision framework (VNDetectFaceRectanglesRequest, VNDetectFaceLandmarksRequest, person segmentation) and the camera's face metadata (AVCaptureMetadataOutput, face type) on your device. It does not use ARKit face tracking, TrueDepth depth data, face meshes or blend shapes. It does not compute face templates, embeddings or any identifier of a person. Concretely:

• Beauty retouch (camera live preview, photo and video editing) — 76 facial landmark points (contour, eyes, brows, nose, lips) used to draw the retouch on your device. They are held in memory only; only your slider settings are saved.
• Day Vlog photo post — the normalised centre point of each detected face (two numbers, faceX and faceY) used to frame the photo. These two numbers are sent to our server together with the photo.
• Day Vlog locked-story selfie check — a yes/no answer to “is a face in the frame?” Held in memory only.
• Face sticker pack and weather avatar — the largest face box, used to suggest a square crop. The cropped selfie photo you submit is uploaded (see below).
• Styles (photo restyle, hair and outfit tools) and Perfect Shot — whether a face is present, a face box for a hair crop, and retouch landmarks. The detection results stay on your device; the photo you choose is uploaded.
• Face shape, personal colour and body type reports — no face detection on your device; the photo you choose is analysed by OpenAI.
• Face Draw game — the nose position, used as a brush position. Memory only; only the drawing strokes are sent to the other player.
• Screen Watch (optional chat privacy guard) — face boxes, head angle and gaze from the front camera, up to 3 times per second, to detect a second person looking at your screen. Frames are never stored or uploaded.

How we use it

Only to run the feature you started: drawing a retouch, framing or cropping a photo, ordering styles, steering a game brush, or warning you that someone else is looking at your screen. Every feature is started by you. We do not use face data for advertising, analytics, profiling, or to identify or recognise anyone.

Where it is processed and stored

• On your device: beauty retouch landmarks, selfie check, Face Draw, Screen Watch and all face detection results are processed in memory on your device and are not stored or uploaded.
• On our servers (Seoul API server and our Frankfurt media worker): the two numbers faceX/faceY of a Day Vlog photo, stored with that post's record; and photos you submit to a feature above, while it is processed.
• At OpenAI (API): the photo you submit to Face sticker pack / weather avatar, Styles, Perfect Shot, and the face shape / personal colour / body type reports. The app sends the photo itself, not facial measurements. The face sticker pack screen asks for your consent before upload.

Sharing and third parties

We do not sell face data and do not share it with advertisers or data brokers. The only third party that receives anything face-related is OpenAI, which receives the photo you choose for the image-editing and analysis features listed above, solely to produce your result. Under OpenAI's API data policy, API data is not used to train OpenAI's models and may be retained by OpenAI for a limited period (up to 30 days) for abuse monitoring; see openai.com/policies/api-data-usage-policies. Your Day Vlog photo and its two face-position numbers are visible to the people you share that vlog with.

Retention and deletion

• Memory-only data (landmarks, selfie check, Face Draw, Screen Watch) is discarded when the feature closes or the app is quit.
• Day Vlog: the faceX/faceY numbers live in the post's server record for about 26 hours; the vlog media is deleted after 2 days.
• Face sticker pack / weather avatar: your selfie is deleted from our servers as soon as the pack is finished; an order that fails is purged within 14 days at most.
• Styles: the uploaded photo is kept in server memory only for the job; results are held in temporary storage until delivered, with a sweep within 24 hours and a limit of 2 days.
• Perfect Shot: results are kept in temporary storage for 7 days.
• Face shape, personal colour and body type reports: the photo is not stored in our database.
• Deleting early: you can delete a sticker pack or a style result from the app at any time, and you can delete your account from Settings at any time.

Your choices

Every feature above is opt-in and started by you. You can refuse or revoke camera and photo access in iOS Settings at any time, and simply not use a feature. Screen Watch is a setting you turn on. To ask us to remove something, write to [email protected].

Face ID (device unlock)

The app calls Apple's LocalAuthentication framework (LAContext.evaluatePolicy(.deviceOwnerAuthentication)) to unlock private surfaces such as the private Journal, hidden chats and secret messages. Apple's Secure Enclave performs the match; the app only receives success or failure and never receives an image, template or any representation of your face. You can turn Face ID off for the app in iOS Settings → Face ID & Passcode → Other Apps; the app then falls back to your device passcode.

HealthKit

The app does not integrate with Apple's HealthKit framework. We do not access, collect, store or share any HealthKit data.

Contact

For any question regarding these terms or this privacy policy, please contact us at [email protected].