This Privacy Policy sets out how we, Yoody Tech LLC (“Yoody”), 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 Yoody, and ‘you’ refers to you, the user of the Services.
Yoody follows a simple set of 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 and which are available at https://yoodychat.com/tos.html. This Privacy Policy should therefore be read in conjunction with those terms.
This Privacy Policy explains the following:
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.
YoodyChat is a communication service. Use of the service requires creation of a YoodyChat account. Creation of an account can be accomplished minimally without providing anything other than a screen name which will be seen by other messaging participants. In particular, we do not need or want to know your phone number. However, in order to allow use of the account on devices other than the one on which it was created, you must provide an email address so we can authenticate usage of the account.
Neither your screen name nor your email address, avatar or any other information you add to your profile are public. As the goal of YoodyChat is to provide messaging in a way that protects your privacy, only data explicitly chosen to be viewable to others will be accessible to them. Your screen need not be your actual name and need not be unique. We don't want to know your real name, gender, age or what you like to eat for breakfast.
Again, we do not require your screen name to be your real name. When you establish contact with another user, they will see the screen name you have assigned to your account. When contact is established, each user has the option to change (locally) the name of the contact as it will appear on their device. So users who have you in their contacts will see you by the name they saved and not by your screen name. This way your mother can have as her screen name “World’s Coolest Gal” while appearing as 'Mom' to you and as 'Boss' to her underlings at work (or the other way around, depending on how these relationships are structured).
If you want to use your account on a different device, we need some way to identify who you are- since ordinarily we don’t require any login you could use to access your account. So should you decide to do that you’ll need to provide an email address and password. We will send you an email to verify the address belongs to you, but aside from that verification, we will never send you an email. Not for marketing purposes, not for news, not for anything.
YoodyChat is a cloud service. Any messages, photos, really anything you send to another user, we store in the cloud so that you can access them anywhere. Yoody is designed for privacy of your identity. No system is hack-proof. Your messages are stored on our servers and in the unlikely event the systems were compromised an attacker could read them. If properly authorized law enforcement representatives present valid, legal requests for your messages, we will dutifully hand over that data. If you are hiding communication from the government or trying to conceal illegal activity, YoodyChat is not for you. In general we highly recommend you do not send sensitive, confidential information, there are plenty of other messaging systems designed with end-to-end encryption and if that’s what you need, please use one of them.
The only cookies we use are those to operate and provide our Services on the web. At launch time we do not yet provide the YoodyChat application on the web but it is in our roadmap to do so in the future. 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 disable these cookies you will not be able to log in to YoodyChat on the web when that service becomes available.
Messaging and account data is hosted with Amazon Web Services, an industry-standard cloud-hosting provider. Careful attention has been paid to ensure only our servers can access your data. But again, YoodyChat is not designed to provide hardened security. If you need that please consider another app which provides end-to-end encryption.
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.
Yoody 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.
The fundamental design principle of YoodyChat messaging is: only individuals or businesses you have explicitly authorized to communicate with you can do so. This is what sets it apart from all the other great and feature-rich messaging apps available today. Unfortunately this does not mean that nefarious people or groups will not try to subvert our systems and do just that. We need to be prepared with the tools to seek out and monitor attempts to use our systems in contradiction to its intended use and the Terms of Service. To improve the security of your account, as well as to prevent spam, abuse, and other violations of our Terms of Service, we may collect metadata such as your IP address, and devices you've used, history of username changes, etc.
To prevent phishing, spam and other kinds of abuse and violations of YoodyChat’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 temporarily or permanently disabled. We may also use automated algorithms to analyze messages to stop spam and phishing.
Yoody will not use your data for targeted ads or other commercial services.
When you contact another YoodyChat user, the only information they have access to is the screen name you have chosen and any avatar you have set for your account.
If Yoody receives a court order that confirms you're a terror suspect, we may disclose your IP address, screen name or other data we have received to the relevant authorities.
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 (see section 8 below) 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 via email at support@yoodytech.com.
Sadly, if you're not OK with YoodyChat's minimum requirements, it won't be possible for us to provide you with our Services. You can delete your YoodyChat account by sending a request to remove your account to support@yoodytech.com.
If you would like to delete your account, you can do this by sending a request via email to support@yoodytech.com. Deleting your account removes all messages, media, contacts and every other piece of data you store in the YoodyChat cloud. This action must be confirmed via your YoodyChat account and cannot be undone.
Individual messages cannot be deleted. If you wish to delete a message, you must delete the entire chat. Once deleted, they are also not retained in the cloud.
By default, if you stop using YoodyChat and do not come online for at least 6 months, your account may be deleted along with all messages, media, contacts and every other piece of data stored in the YoodyChat 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 yoodychat.com/privacy.html. Please check our website frequently to see any updates or changes to our Privacy Policy, a summary of which we will set out below.
If you have any questions about privacy and our data policies, please contact support@yoodytech.com.