Safety on Random Chatss

t.me/randomchatssextra

This document aims to provide an idea of how "safe" is @RandomChatssBot and @RandoChatsBot. Some general informations might apply to other chatting bots on telegram, but the specific details might change from bot to bot.

Last update: April 28 2024

User privacy on telegram bots

From the official Telegram Privacy Policy - Bots:

Bots are third-party apps that look like special Telegram users: you can talk to them from your chat list, add them to groups or use a special “inline” interface to access their features. By performing any of these actions, you will be sending some of your data to the respective third-party bot developers.

This means that when you interact with a bot in telegram, your messages and some of your info are shared to the bot, to enable it to perform the actions you are using it for.

While messages are encrypted when they travel through the internet, they are decrypted on the bot's server to allow it to "understand" them and perform actions accordingly, for chatting bots it's important to note that messages are not end-to-end encrypted: meaning that they are not only "understandable" for you and your partner, but they can be understood also from the bot ('s developer).

What a bot does with your messages is entirely dependent on what it is coded to do: a meme generator bot might use your prompt to create a meme, a chatting bot might just forward your messages to your chatting partner.

For the reasons mentioned before, it is important to trust the bot and who made it: if you are afraid some of your informations can be exploited, it's probably best not to share them.

You can read Random Chatss Bots privacy policy with the /privacy command in the bot

Safety when talking to strangers online

While anonymous chatting bot can enable people to talk and feel more freely, maybe letting someone express themselves without fear and long lasting harassment, the pseudo-anonymity can be a double-edged sword: people can abuse the feature to be harmful and disrespectful.

When talking to strangers online is always important to be careful: if you do not trust someone, it's probably better not to share private and intimate details about yourself.

While we try to ban those people to maintain a welcoming and nice place for everyone, is also worth noting that moderation is a really hard task, even more when trying to preserve privacy and anonymity of users.

We encourage you to report people who break the rules with the /report command in the bots.

It is also worth noting that messages sent to the partner can not be edited or deleted for the partner too at the time being.

If someone is pretending to be you and/or sharing your private informations in the bot please reach the support and we will try to help you as soon as possible banning those people.

While this is not something that happen very often, we have received a few reports from victims where someone was pretending to be them and sharing their username/phone numbers as a way to harass them. Behaviours meant to do harm to others are extremely forbidden.

In the future we will try to share more informations about how to stay safe online and what to do and what not to do if you happen to be a victim. In the meanwhile, if something had to happen to you, we suggest you not to act moved by your fear, not close the chat or delete messages and immediately talk with the support and with a friend or family member that can help you. We also suggest you to search online for some informations on how to act and to reach to some organizations that work on such issues and contact the authorities.

How we handle moderation

Reports

If you happen to chat with someone who broke the rules of the bot (you can read them with the /rules command or a deeper explanation at this link) you can report that user with the /report command:

• You can report a user typing /report and providing a reason. It is important to put a good and descriptive reason for why you are reporting someone.

• You can report a message replying to that message with /report. This will forward the message being reported to a moderator.

It is important to note that you can only report your current chat partner or, in case the chat has been ended, the last partner you were in a chat with.

To preserve privacy and anonymity the reports will not show your user id to moderators or your profile but only an encrypted identifier. Moderators will also be able to access the history of reports from and about you.

Reports are kept for two weeks only inside a telegram chat with an autodistruction time of two weeks.

To ensure privacy and anonymity as much as possible, moderators are extremely forbidden to share anything about reports and as we already discussed are provided only with few and encrypted informations about reports.

Automatic spam detection

We make use of some automatic spam and sponsor detection algorithms. Those algorithms work by analyzing messages that are sent to chat partners. Analyzed messages are not stored in any way on the server, but the algorithms may save some or all of the hashed content of some of your messages to be able to compare them with other messages.

The hashed content is impossible to reverse into the original content. (wikipedia - hash functions)

Those algorithms are not failure proof and may occasionally temporarily ban people by mistake or mistakenly flag messages as spam/sponsor. When a user gets banned because of a decision taken by the algorithm, only the last message the user sent before getting temporarily banned or the flagged message may be forwarded to the moderators for a check.

If you get temporarily banned check our rules to make sure you haven't broken any, and consider not sharing links to every new chat partner as it might get flagged as sponsor.

In any case, if you feel you have been banned by mistake you can reach to the support team of the bot that will check and, if a mistake happened, unban you.

Automatic harmful content detection

Due to the difficulty of moderating private chats, and the rise of people exploiting the bot, we now also make use of some automatic message detection to detect people sending harmful content. The list of things we check is not publicly available and it is kept to the bare minimum in order to try and preserve user privacy even in case of mistakes. If a user sends a message containing some content we check for, the detected message might get forwarded to a moderator for a check.

In some cases, our algorithms might permanently or temporarily ban a user automatically.

If you think the bot made a mistake you can write to the support for a check.

Chat with moderators

To enforce bot rules and ease moderation we have a group of volunteer moderators who use the bot as a normal user and have the ability to temporarily ban people who break the rules.

Such moderators do not have any special access to the bot and can not see who you are or your chats or any information about you and should not ask you to share anything personal or lead you into breaking the rules of the bot as their sole purpose is to chat quickly with users to check they are not breaking the rules of the bot.

Every temporary ban given by a moderator is checked by an admin to make sure they are not abusing their power. You can recognize a temporary ban issued from a chat with a moderator by the reason stating "warn from a moderator". If you think you have been temporarily banned unfairly you can contact the bot support and an admin will check.

If you have any doubt about this, you can ask clarifications to the bot support.

How secure is the bot source code

In short: not sure. The bot is not written by professionals nor by a company and the software is provided as is. While we haven't got any bug reports that leaked user informations so far (to our knowledge), bugs are something that every piece of software is subject to. If you happen to find a bug please report it immediately to the support.

For full disclosure, the bot is hosted on a vps (virtual private server), meaning the source code runs in a virtual server running on another company's hardware. The vps provider should not interfere or look into the code or informations being stored on the server, but technically, they could.

We are taking steps to improve code and security, but you should be aware of the possible security flaws the code or system could have.

How do we make money

We do not make any money from the bots nor we accept donations to cover servers costs at the time being.

All the informations you provide in your account will only be used to let the bot do its job and all the messages from you and your partner are stored only on telegram servers. While the bot acts as a middleman between you and your chat partner, it does not save any messages.

We do not sell or share your data with anyone.

Any questions left?

If you have any more questions, you can reach the support team at @Randomchatssupportbot