Privacy Policy - Ham Chatting

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Last Updated: August 2026 · Pre-release / in active development

Plain-language summary. Ham Chatting is an off-grid push-to-talk intercom for the phones around you. It is NOT a radio and it does not use the amateur bands. There is no server, no account, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking of any kind: your voice, your messages and your callsign travel directly between the phones on your own Wi-Fi network and go nowhere else. Unixeer never receives them, and technically cannot — there is nothing for them to be sent to.

1. Information stored on your device

Kept only on your phone, in the standard platform store (SharedPreferences on Android, NSUserDefaults on iOS). None of it is sent to any Unixeer server, because there is no Unixeer server.

Callsign — shown to the other stations on your channel, on the roster and beside your messages, and used to pre-fill the Support form. A callsign is required to join a channel so that people can be identified on the net; no licence is required, and any short name works.
Maidenhead grid locator — optional, and used only to pre-fill the Support form.
Email address — optional, and used only to pre-fill the Support form.
Preferences — your voice-quality choice, theme, font scale and whether weekly tips are shown.
Station identity — a random per-installation identifier held in the platform keystore (iOS Keychain / Android EncryptedSharedPreferences). It is how other stations recognise your device rather than your callsign, so that two phones belonging to one operator are told apart. You can generate a new one at any time in Settings.
Channel passwords — held in the platform keystore while you are using them, and never written to an ordinary file.

2. Microphone

The microphone is used for one thing: carrying your voice to the other phones on your channel while you are holding the push-to-talk button. It is opened only while the floor is granted to you and closed the instant you let go — the app does not listen between transmissions. Nothing is recorded to a file and nothing is sent to Unixeer.

The app keeps a rolling two minutes of received audio in memory so you can replay what you missed. It lives only in memory, it is overwritten continuously, and it is gone the moment the app closes.

3. Camera

The camera is used only to scan a channel join code, and only while that scanner is on screen. No image is stored, kept or transmitted. If you refuse camera access, everything still works — you type the code instead.

4. What travels over the network, and where

Voice, text messages and station names travel as UDP datagrams directly to the other phones on the same Wi-Fi network, and to nowhere else. Stations find each other with Bonjour/mDNS on that same local network. The app has no backend, opens no connection to the internet, and works with the internet unplugged — which is the point of it.

Traffic on a password-protected channel is encrypted end to end with XChaCha20-Poly1305, with the key derived from the channel password using Argon2id. The CALL channel is deliberately unencrypted: it is the meeting place. Because none of this is radio, encryption here is ordinary app behaviour and is not subject to on-air rules.

5. Not a radio

Ham Chatting never transmits on the amateur bands and cannot key a radio. No amateur licence is needed to use it, which is deliberate: unlicensed family, helpers and visitors are meant to be able to join a field-day team on equal terms.

6. What we do NOT collect

No account, no sign-in, no email verification.
No analytics, telemetry, crash reporting or advertising SDK of any kind.
No location. The app never asks for it and never reads it.
No contacts, photos, or files.
No recording of your voice or anyone else's.
No message history sent anywhere — the message log lives in the app and is gone when the app closes.

7. Diagnostics you choose to send

The Extra page can open your email app with a diagnostic report pre-filled: the app version, your callsign, which network you are on, who the app can see, and what it has tried. Nothing is sent unless you press send in your own email app, and you can read and edit every word of it first.

8. Children's privacy

The app collects nothing from anyone, of any age. It is designed for amateur radio operators and the people with them at a site.

9. Data retention and deletion

Everything is on your device. Settings → Reset clears your details and preferences; Settings → New station identity replaces your device identity. Deleting the app removes everything, including the keystore entries. There is nothing held elsewhere for us to delete on your behalf.

10. Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the updated date at the top of this page changes with it and the new version is published here.

11. Contact

Questions about privacy? Email [email protected]. We typically reply within a few days.