Privacy

Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to anyone. There are no adverts on TrustFirst, so there is nobody to sell it to.

Typed messages in a one-to-one chat are end-to-end encrypted: encrypted on your device and decrypted on theirs. We hold the scrambled version and cannot read it, which also means we cannot recover it for you.

Group chats, photos, voice notes, videos, files and shared locations are not encrypted yet. They are kept in private storage that the people in the conversation can open, and that we could open too. We do not, unless something is reported to us. The Terms, section 9, set out exactly what is and is not encrypted.

A verification document is deleted the moment your application is decided. See Verification documents for exactly what happens to it.

Download a copy of your data, or delete your account and its data, at any time from Settings.

Your name, username, email address, date of birth and profile picture. Whatever you post, which includes clips, photos, captions, comments and live streams. For a child account, the linked parent or guardian's details.

Your date of birth is used to work out whether you are old enough to be here and which features apply to you, not to advertise to you.

Device and browser type, IP address, which parts of the app you use, what you interact with, and crash reports when something breaks.

Crash reports are scrubbed before they are sent: we strip out message contents, tokens and personal fields, and we do not record your screen.

• It goes into private storage only a reviewer can open. It is never public and never linked from your profile.
• It is deleted the moment your application is approved or rejected. Reviewing it is what destroys it.
• If nobody reviews it, it is deleted automatically after 7 days.
• We keep only the outcome: whether you are verified, and when. We never store your ID number or a copy of the document.
• We ask you to cover your ID number before photographing it, so even the file we hold briefly contains as little as possible.

They only receive what they need to do their job, and none of them may use it for their own purposes.

• Supabase: accounts, database and private file storage
• Cloudflare R2: where public media is stored and served from
• Render: hosting for the application itself
• LiveKit: live video and guest audio or video
• Google Cloud Vision: automated safety checks on images
• Sentry: crash reports, with personal fields stripped first
• Giphy: the GIF picker, and only while you have it open
• Email and AI providers: sign-in codes, and Eddie
• Google Firebase: push notifications, such as asking you to approve a sign-in
• Yoco: card payments, if you add money or buy anything

Some features fetch what they need straight from another service, so that service sees your internet address and what was asked for:

• OpenStreetMap: maps and place search, when you share or tag a location
• Open-Meteo: the weather where you are, when you add a weather sticker
• ipapi.co: your rough location from your internet address, to suggest your dialling code at sign-up and to note roughly where a sign-in came from
• LRCLIB: song lyrics, when you add music

Their own privacy policies apply to what they receive.

We will hand over information when South African law obliges us to. We cannot hand over what an end-to-end encrypted message says, because we do not have it in a readable form. The rest of a conversation, including group chats, photos and voice notes, we could be obliged to hand over.

Anything you post publicly is public: your profile, clips, comments and live chat. Live chat is saved so somebody joining late can follow the conversation, so treat it as public.

While it is off, nothing new is sent to an AI provider. Conversations from before are kept, but you cannot open them in the app, so to have them deleted, delete your account or write to us and we will delete them.

Eddie is an AI assistant. What you send it is passed to an AI provider to produce a reply, so do not put anything in it you would not want leaving your device. Your conversation is kept so you can scroll back, and you can delete it.

Eddie has no access to your direct messages.

• Images and GIFs in comments are checked for adult or violent content. Anything flagged is blurred for everyone behind a tap, so nobody is shown something graphic without choosing to look.
• Face verification, if you use it, checks that a real live face is present and not a photo of a photo. It is not facial recognition and we do not build a face database.
• We store the result of these checks, never a second copy of your image.

• Coins are a virtual item with no cash value and cannot be turned back into money.
• When you send a gift, the creator receives 80 percent of its value and TrustFirst keeps 20 percent to run the platform.
• Your wallet balance is real money and is kept separate from coins.
• We keep a record of these transactions, because we have to.

If you ask to join a live as a guest, the host sees your username and picture so they can decide. If they accept, your camera and microphone are shared with everyone watching until you leave.

From Settings: download a copy of your data, correct your profile, or delete your account. Deleting your account removes your data from our systems, including the email address and password you signed in with and every file you uploaded.

Two things survive deletion: payment records the law makes us keep, and reports you made about someone else, which we keep without your name so we can still act on them. Nothing else does. An account with payment records is closed by hand: write to us.

Used to keep you signed in, remember preferences such as dark mode, and let the app work offline. There are no advertising or third-party tracking cookies. You can clear it all from your browser or device settings.

The full account (the two cookies there are, everything else kept on your device, and what clearing it costs you) is on the cookies and storage page.

Write to contacttrustfirst@gmail.com first and we will try to put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa.