PRIVACY
PROTOCOL.

1. Local Profile Identity

Near Chat creates a temporary profile (custom display name and chosen system avatar preset) exclusively for room identification during proximity peer discovery. This metadata is saved strictly on the local device, sent only to authorized room peers during active scans, and is never transmitted or uploaded to central servers. No account setups, social integration, or external registrations are used.

2. Zero-Retention Socket Storage

All text, image, voice, and receipt frames are exchanged directly between endpoints over point-to-point Wi-Fi Direct or Bluetooth connections. Bypassing the public web entirely removes security gaps. Frames are protected with the AES-256-GCM cipher. Keys are derived deterministically on the node via PBKDF2 (HMAC SHA-256, 100,000 rounds) from the user's room code.

Volatile RAM Allocation: To guarantee messaging confidentiality, chat logs and file arrays reside only in the app's volatile RAM. The moment you press exit or background close the active room session, the RAM pointers are deleted and permanently erased from the storage hardware.

3. Device Permissions & Usage

• / Bluetooth & Wi-Fi: Required by Google's Nearby Connections stack to establish socket links and scan BLE advertising parameters.
• / Location Services: Android OS requires location tracking privileges to execute local Bluetooth scans. Near Chat does not read, log, or share your GPS coordinates.
• / Camera: Required to scan a peer's QR code representation for automatic room joining. No images or videos are stored.
• / Media Storage: Used to attach and beam photographs from the local gallery and save downloaded peer assets.
• / Microphone: Access is needed to record voice note inputs before conversion and transmission over P2P raw socket channels.
• / Foreground Service: Required to support background connection sockets and avoid OS termination, using system alerts to inform of active mesh links.