Why Tacq doesn’t ask for your phone or email

When you sign up, Tacq asks for no phone number, no email, no real name. Your account is an anonymous Master ID generated on your device.

What this gives you:

• you can’t be found by number or scraped into a spam database;
• your most sensitive detail — your number — never enters the system, so it can’t be stolen, handed to a stranger, or sold;
• the other person sees only the nickname you chose, not your real details.

What to understand about storage and encryption:

• messages — in private chats and in groups alike — are encrypted on your device separately for each device of the people you talk to. The Tacq server (Google Firebase) passes them along without being able to read them. In private chats, a message together with its photos and files is deleted from the server as soon as your contact has received it, and one that is never received is deleted automatically after 30 days. In groups, messages together with their photos and files are deleted from the server after 30 days. The conversation history is kept on your devices;
• for anything especially private, one-to-one chats have secret modes: “Secret” also protects past messages in case a device key is ever stolen, and “Top secret” never passes through the server at all and is delivered straight to the other person. See Secrecy levels: Encrypted and Top secret;
• to deliver messages and notifications, the server works only with anonymous identifiers of the sender and the recipient and with the time of the message. It does not know who is behind those identifiers, and it does not see the content;
• calls work differently: audio and video travel directly between devices (WebRTC) and are end-to-end encrypted; a call is not recorded or stored. Even when a relay server is used for difficult networks, it passes already-encrypted data and cannot read it;
• overall, Tacq is about data minimization: Tacq doesn’t collect what could identify you.