Privacy Policy

Last updated 20 September 2026

Ding Dong Messenger is a messaging app built so that a stranger has no way to reach you. This page explains exactly what we store, what we never store, how long we keep it, and how to delete it. It is written to be read, not to be skipped.

The short version. We store your email address, the name and handle you choose, and the messages you send, so that the app works. We do not sell anything about you, we do not show ads, and there are no advertising or analytics trackers in the app. There is no user search and no directory, so nobody can look you up. You can delete your account, and everything in it, from inside the app at any time.

Who this applies to

Ding Dong Messenger is for people aged 13 and over. You must be at least 13 to create an account. If you are under 13, please do not sign up. If we learn that an account belongs to somebody under 13, we will delete it.

When you sign up, the app asks for your date of birth so that it can check you are old enough. Your birthday is never sent to us and never stored. The check happens on your own phone, and all that leaves it is whether you were old enough — never the date itself. We do not know your birthday and cannot show it to anybody, because we never received it.

If you are a parent or guardian and believe your child under 13 has created an account, email us at support@dingdongusa.com and we will remove it.

What we collect

Everything below is something the app cannot work without. We do not collect anything "just in case".

When you create an account

Your email address. It is how you sign in, how you get a password reset, and how we confirm a real person is behind the account. We send a code to it before the account is created at all.
Your display name and handle. Your handle looks like name-a1b2c3 and is how friends add you.
Your password. We never store the password itself. We store a one-way Argon2id hash of it, which cannot be turned back into your password — not by us, not by anyone who stole the database.

When you use the app

Your messages, in one-to-one chats and in groups, including reactions and whether a message was unsent.
Your dings — who you rang and when.
Your friends, friend requests and the note somebody writes when they ask to add you.
Who you have blocked. This is never shown to the person blocked.
Reports you send us about a person or a message, so we can look into them.
When you were last active, and whether you have chosen to share that. If you turn "Last seen & presence" off, other people stop seeing it.
A push notification token for each device you sign in on, so we can deliver notifications to it.

Technical information

Your IP address is seen by our servers when the app makes a request, and is used briefly to apply rate limits — the thing that stops somebody guessing passwords or flooding the service. It is held in memory for that purpose and is not written into a profile about you.
Diagnostic records. The app keeps a short rolling log on your own device — what screen an action came from, whether a request succeeded, and an identifier that lets us match it to our server logs. It never contains the content of your messages. It stays on your phone unless you choose to send it to us from Settings → About → Diagnostics.

What we do not collect

No advertising or analytics trackers. The app contains no third-party advertising SDK and no analytics SDK.
No location. We never ask for it and never receive it.
No contacts. We do not read your address book. There is no way to upload contacts, because there is no way to search for people at all.
No selling, ever. We do not sell, rent or trade your personal information, and we do not share it for advertising.

How your messages are protected — said plainly

Ding Dong is not end-to-end encrypted, and we will not tell you otherwise. Your messages travel between your phone and our servers over an encrypted connection (HTTPS/TLS), so somebody on the same Wi-Fi cannot read them. But they are stored on our server in a form we could technically read, protected by access controls rather than by encryption that locks us out too.

We are telling you this because the alternative — claiming a protection we do not yet provide — would be a lie that matters. If that changes, this page changes with it.

In practice this means you should treat Ding Dong the way you would treat any ordinary messaging app: fine for talking to your friends, not the place for something you would be harmed by if it were ever exposed.

Who else sees anything

We use a small number of services to make the app work. They see only what they need to do their job:

Amazon Web Services hosts our servers and database.
Amazon SES sends our emails — the sign-up code and the password reset. It sees your email address.
Apple Push Notification service delivers notifications to your device. Where a notification shows a message preview, that preview passes through Apple in order to reach your phone. This is how push notifications work on every iPhone app.

We will also disclose information if we are legally required to, or where we believe in good faith that it is necessary to prevent serious harm to somebody.

How long we keep things

These are the actual schedules our servers run, not aspirations:

Your account and messages are kept until you delete your account.
Sign-in sessions are deleted 7 days after they expire.
Delivered dings are deleted after 24 hours.
Deleted groups are fully removed 7 days after deletion.
Abandoned sign-ups — an address that started sign-up and never finished — are deleted after 7 days.
Password reset codes expire after 20 minutes, and sign-up codes after 24 hours.

We keep encrypted backups of the database so that an accident does not lose everybody's account. A deleted account may persist in a backup for a short period before that backup is rotated out.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account from inside the app, in Settings. You do not have to email anybody and you do not have to explain why.

Deleting your account removes your profile, your handle, your friendships, your invite codes, your device tokens and your messages from our active systems. Where you sent a message into a group, the message may remain visible to that group, in the same way that a sent email stays in the recipient's inbox.

Your choices and your rights

Last seen & presence can be turned off in Settings. It hides when you were last around and whether you have read a message. It never stops anybody from reaching you.
Blocking is invisible to the person blocked — they are not told, and they cannot tell the difference between being blocked and the account not existing.
Notifications can be turned off for the app in iOS Settings at any time.
Access, correction and deletion. Depending on where you live you may have the right to ask for a copy of your information, to correct it, or to have it deleted. Email support@dingdongusa.com and we will help.

Security

Passwords are hashed with Argon2id. Connections use HTTPS. Sign-in tokens are short-lived and rotate. Our application database account can read and write rows but cannot alter or drop tables, so a stolen connection string cannot destroy the service. No system is perfectly secure, and we will tell you if something happens that affects you.

Where your information is held

Our servers are in the United States. If you use Ding Dong from outside the United States, your information is transferred to and stored there.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top of this page. If a change materially affects what we do with your information, we will say so in the app rather than relying on you to come back and check.

Contact

Ding Dong Messenger is an independent app, operated by its developer. For anything at all — a privacy question, a deletion request, or a report about somebody's behaviour — email support@dingdongusa.com. A real person reads it.