Privacy — BotMekong and TovNa

Version 2026-09-15 · Plain English; French and Khmer follow. This page describes what the system does today — not what we would like it to do.

Who we are

BotMekong builds Telegram bots for small businesses in Cambodia, and TovNa (ទៅណា?), a free directory of places in Cambodian cities. Contact: contact@getbotmekong.com · Telegram @BotMekongSupport.

1. TovNa — the directory (what we keep about people who ask it questions)

• What we keep: your Telegram identifier (we need it to answer you) · a few facts about what you did — what you asked for (a kind of place, a cuisine, a dish, an area), which listing you opened, what was not found, when you were handed to a business's bot · how many times you asked. Never: the text of your messages, your name, your username, your phone number, your position. Your location, when you share it, is kept for 20 minutes to answer you, and nowhere else.
• How long: 90 days, then deleted. Your identifier lives as long as one fact does.
• "Forget me": send /forget — every fact about you is erased immediately, and the bot says so. No question, no delay.
• What they are used for: to answer the same person better, and to see what the directory cannot serve yet. Never sold, never shown to a business owner by name.
• The words we could not understand go to an anonymous pool — the sentence only, no identifier — for 30 days, so we can teach the bot new words. Nothing in that pool is tied to you.
• When you report a listing (Closed? · Wrong number · Hours changed · Wrong category): we keep the fact that your identifier made that report, so that several different people can confirm it before anything changes. /forget erases your reports too; a value that was already corrected on a listing stays, because it belongs to the listing.
• When you tap ✓ Looks right under a listing, or confirm someone else's report: we keep that fact tied to your identifier, for the same reason — one person counts once. Same 90 days, same /forget.
• Your language choice (Khmer, English or French, asked once, changed any time with /langue): kept with your identifier so we do not ask again. Same 90 days after your last visit, same /forget.
• Offers an owner has published are shown inside an answer, only when they match what you asked. We do not record who saw an offer. TovNa never sends a message you did not ask for.
• How you arrived (a card left in a shop, a QR code, our website, Facebook, TikTok, a shared listing…) is counted as one anonymous arrival per channel per day — a number, never who.
• Inline mode (@TovNaBot … typed in any chat): Telegram sends us only the words typed after @TovNaBot — never the chat, never the group's messages, never who else is there. We do not read or keep who is typing; the answer is the same for everyone. When a listing is sent into a chat we count one anonymous share, and when someone opens TovNa from it, one anonymous arrival — numbers per day, nothing else. The listing sent into the chat contains only public facts (name, area, address, a map link).

2. Business bots — what we keep about a business's customers

When you write to a business's BotMekong bot (a restaurant, a shop, a school):

• The bot keeps a short conversation window: the last 6 exchanges, for 30 days of reading. Older messages are no longer read, and they are removed when the conversation is next updated. A conversation that is never updated again is not yet deleted on a schedule; we say so here rather than hide it.
• Bookings and orders you place are kept by the business, with what you gave for them (name, phone, party size, what you ordered), because the business needs them to serve you. The business can delete them from its dashboard.
• Your phone number is masked in our technical logs.
• Schools are a red line: what a parent writes to a school's bot (children's names, ages, health notes) stays with that school; it is never used to rank, recommend or advertise anything, and never leaves the school's bot.

3. Business owners — their data is theirs

An owner's settings, menu, prices, hours, photos and customer records belong to the business. We hold them to run the bot and the dashboard. An owner can export or delete them by asking us; deleting the business deletes its users, customers, bookings and conversations.

Claiming a listing. When you prove a listing is yours (the code on the card, or the phone number already on the listing, confirmed from your own Telegram), we keep your Telegram identifier as the listing's owner, and an audit line for each change you make (the field, the old and new value, when — facts only).

The sign-up page (botmekong.com/tovna/register/) keeps what you typed — the name of the place, its kind, its area, its phone, your Telegram username — and a hashed claim code, for 7 days: if you do not confirm from your Telegram in that time, the entry is deleted. The page sets no cookie; to keep robots out it counts submissions per internet address for one hour and one day — a counter, nothing else.

Reaching an owner about their listing. We may send a business ONE text message about its own listing, with a way to say no. We never message people who are looking for a place. The message goes to the phone number already shown on the listing, once and only once; replying STOP (or asking us) puts that number on a list we never contact again. We keep, for that, only the listing and a hash of the number — never the message thread.

4. Where the data lives, and who else touches it

Our servers and our database are in Germany. Backups are encrypted before they leave our server and kept off-site by a storage provider. To understand what people write to us, an artificial-intelligence service reads the messages sent to a business bot — with your first name and the last few exchanges, so it can answer you — and, from TovNa, only the sentences its own dictionary could not read; it never receives your Telegram identifier. The facts about places come from public map and reference sources, which receive our questions about places and never anything about you. When we send a text message to a business, a Cambodian SMS provider carries it: it receives that phone number and that text, nothing else. Telegram carries the conversations, under its own privacy rules.

5. What we never do

No advertising messages, no selling of data, no profiling for third parties, no reading of your messages by a person except to fix a problem you reported. The one exception is written in § 3: a single text message to a business about its own listing, with a way to say no. Every place TovNa shows carries the date it was last checked and where the fact comes from.

6. Changes

When we start keeping a new kind of data, this page says so at the same time — never after.