Privacy Policy

Effective: 7 October 2026

1. Who we are

LinkToGroups is owned and operated by OSYNOVA TECHNOLOGIES LIMITED, a private limited company registered in Nigeria (D-U-N-S® number 352297710), with its place of business in Ughelli, Delta State, Nigeria ("LinkToGroups", "we", "us"). Our company website is osynovatech.com.

You can reach us at [email protected] or through the contact form on the site. Our full postal address is provided on request to anyone who needs it for formal legal correspondence.

OSYNOVA TECHNOLOGIES LIMITED is the data controller for the personal data described here. For any privacy question or request, email [email protected] with "Privacy" in the subject line.

2. What this policy covers

This policy covers our website, our mobile apps, our Telegram bot and Telegram Mini App, and our API. It does not cover the third-party communities you reach through us: once you join a group or channel on another platform, that platform and the community's operators handle your data under their own policies.

3. Data you give us

• Account — your display name, email address (if you sign up with one), your password (stored only as a one-way cryptographic hash) and your interface language. Optionally, a short bio, a website and a country.
• Listings — everything you enter about a community, and any image you upload.
• Contact form — your name, email address and message.
• Payments — wallet top-ups are processed by Stripe. We receive a payment reference, the amount and whether it succeeded. Your card details go directly to Stripe; we never receive or store your full card number.

4. Signing in with Google

If you choose "Sign in with Google", Google shares with us only your basic profile: your Google account identifier, your name, your email address and whether Google has verified it. We request no other access — not your Gmail, Drive, Contacts, Calendar or any other Google data.

• How we use it — only to create your LinkToGroups account, to sign you in, to recognise you on later visits, to link a Google sign-in to an existing account with the same verified email address, and to send you service messages about your account and listings.
• How we store it — the Google account identifier, name and email address are kept on your account record. We do not store Google access tokens or refresh tokens.
• Sharing — we do not sell Google user data, use it for advertising, or transfer it to anyone except the service providers in section 13 who help us run the service, or where the law requires. We do not use Google user data to train artificial-intelligence or machine-learning models.
• Removing it — you can remove LinkToGroups' access at any time from your Google Account (myaccount.google.com/permissions), and you can ask us to delete the data we hold (see section 17).

LinkToGroups' use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

5. Signing in with Telegram, and our Telegram bot

• Telegram Mini App — when you open LinkToGroups inside Telegram, Telegram sends us signed information about you: your Telegram user ID, first and last name, username and language setting. We use your Telegram user ID as your sign-in identity, keep your username so we can show it, and use your username or name as your initial display name, which you can change. We do not receive your phone number, your contacts or your messages in other chats, and we do not store your Telegram profile photo.
• Our Telegram bot — when you send it a command, we receive that message and your basic Telegram profile in order to answer it. We process the message to reply and do not keep the message itself. If you signed in with Telegram, the bot also sends you service messages about your listings. You can stop them at any time by blocking the bot.
• Connecting an existing account — if you connect Telegram to an account you created another way, we store your Telegram user ID and username on that account.

6. Push notifications in our mobile apps

If you allow notifications on your device, our app registers a push token with us — a random identifier issued for this installation of the app — together with the notification topics you choose, your device platform (iOS or Android), the app's language and version, and when the app was last opened. If you are signed in, we also record which account is using the device.

To deliver notifications we pass the push token and the notification content to Expo (650 Industries, Inc.), which delivers them through Apple Push Notification service on iPhone and Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging on Android. You can change your topics or turn notifications off in the app or in your device settings at any time. Registrations of devices that can no longer receive notifications are deleted automatically.

7. Data we collect automatically

• Technical data — IP address, browser or app user-agent and a session identifier, recorded to keep you signed in and to detect and prevent abuse.
• Usage data — which listings are viewed and clicked, and the country a request came from, recorded against a random visitor identifier rather than your name. The country is derived from your IP address by our network provider, Cloudflare; we do not store a precise location.
• Search terms — what visitors type into our search box, aggregated per term so we can see what people want and cannot find. It is not linked to your account. Please do not type personal information into the search box.
• Broken-link reports — these can be filed without an account. When one is filed we record the IP address, user-agent and visitor identifier, so the reporting system cannot be abused to suppress listings.

8. Data we obtain from platforms

Where a platform makes it available, we read publicly visible information about a listed community — title, description, avatar, member count — to keep listings accurate. We do not collect information about the members of those communities.

9. Why we use it, and our legal bases

• To provide the service — accounts and sign-in, publishing listings, wallet top-ups and promotions, service messages by email, Telegram or push. Basis: performance of our contract with you.
• To keep the directory trustworthy — moderation, link verification, fraud and abuse prevention, rate limiting. Basis: our legitimate interests and those of other users.
• To send push notifications on the topics you choose — Basis: your consent, which you give by allowing notifications and can withdraw at any time.
• To measure and improve — aggregate analytics and search demand. Basis: legitimate interests.
• To meet legal obligations — for example tax and accounting records, or responding to lawful requests.

We do not sell your personal data, we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, and we do not use it to build advertising profiles.

10. Automated decisions

Some moderation is automated. A listing that attracts reports beyond a threshold, or that repeatedly fails link verification, can be flagged, hidden or disabled before a person has reviewed it, and an owner's trust level is recalculated automatically. These decisions concern listings rather than people, they are reversible, and you can ask for human review by contacting us.

11. Machine translation

Editorial content — blog posts, these policies, and category and platform labels — is written in English and translated automatically into the other languages we offer. To do that, we send that text to a third-party AI provider (currently OpenAI or Anthropic). Only this editorial content is sent: your account details, your listings and your messages are not.

12. Cookies and device storage

See our Cookie Policy for what we store on your browser or device, and why.

13. Who we share data with

We share personal data only with providers who help us run the service, under contract and only for that purpose:

• Hosting — the cloud servers that run our website, apps' back end and database.
• Cloudflare — content delivery, security and bot protection on public forms, storage of listing images, and the country lookup described above.
• Stripe — payment processing for wallet top-ups.
• Resend — delivery of our emails.
• Google — Sign in with Google, and push delivery to Android devices.
• Telegram — Telegram sign-in and our Telegram bot.
• Expo and Apple — push delivery to our mobile apps.
• An AI translation provider — editorial content only, as described in section 11.

We may also disclose data where the law requires it, or to establish, exercise or defend legal claims. If the business is ever sold or reorganised, data may transfer as part of it, subject to this policy.

14. International transfers

We operate from Nigeria and serve users worldwide, and several of our providers process data in other countries, including the United States and the European Union. Where data leaves a country that restricts transfers — including under the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 and the EU and UK GDPR — we rely on an appropriate legal basis, such as the provider's contractual commitments or standard contractual clauses.

15. How long we keep it

• Account data — while your account is open. When it is deleted, we remove it within 30 days, except what is listed below.
• Listings — while published; removed listings are retained for a limited period so a moderation decision can be reviewed or appealed.
• Raw usage events — pruned after seven days. Only aggregated daily totals are kept beyond that.
• Reports — kept while the listing exists and for a period afterwards, so repeat abuse can be identified.
• Push registrations — until you turn notifications off, uninstall the app, or stop opening it for an extended period (currently 90 days).
• Contact-form messages — for as long as needed to deal with your enquiry and any follow-up.
• Payment and wallet records — for as long as tax and accounting law requires, currently up to six years.

16. Your rights

Depending on where you live — including under the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023, the EU and UK GDPR, and US state privacy laws — you may have the right to obtain a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to how we use it, receive it in a portable form, and withdraw consent where we relied on it. We will not treat you differently for exercising these rights.

You can update most of your profile from your account settings. For anything else, email [email protected]. We may need to confirm your identity first, and we aim to respond within one month. You also have the right to complain to a data protection authority — in Nigeria, the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (ndpc.gov.ng) — or the authority where you live.

Please note that anonymous reports are recorded against an IP address rather than an account, so we may be unable to connect such a record to you without further information.

17. Deleting your account

You can delete your account and the personal data linked to it at any time from your account settings, or ask us to do it for you. Delete Your Account explains how, what we remove, and what we must keep.

18. Children

LinkToGroups is not intended for children. You must be at least 16 to hold an account, and 18 to view listings marked for adults. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 16. If you believe a child has given us personal data, contact us and we will delete it.

19. Security

Passwords are stored hashed, traffic is encrypted in transit, sign-in data from Google and Telegram is cryptographically verified, administrative actions are logged, and access to production data is limited to staff who need it. No service can promise perfect security, but we take it seriously and will notify you and the relevant authority of a breach where the law requires.

20. Changes

We may update this policy. The effective date at the top of this page shows when it last changed, and material changes will be signposted on the site or in the app.

21. Contact

OSYNOVA TECHNOLOGIES LIMITED, Ughelli, Delta State, Nigeria — [email protected].