Group Chat Security

At UTurn, we take your privacy and safety seriously. While one-on-one direct messages use end-to-end encryption to stay completely locked between devices, group chats are handled differently to keep the platform safe from misuse.

Here is exactly how your group messages are secured and why we use this approach.

Secure, But Not End-to-End Encrypted

When you send a message in a group chat, it is encrypted while it is moving. This means your text, photos, and videos are scrambled and protected while traveling from your device to our servers, and then on to the other group members.

• Protected in Transit: Your messages cannot be intercepted or read by outsiders while they are being sent across the internet.
• No Permanent Storage: Messages are not stored on our servers long-term. We do not keep permanent logs of your group chat history.
• Member Access Only: Your messages are only visible to the people who are actually members of the group at the time the message is sent.

Because group chats are not end-to-end encrypted, messages are briefly processed by UTurn’s system before being delivered to the recipients.

Why Group Chats Work Differently

We believe in being completely transparent about our architecture. We chose to deliberately exclude end-to-end encryption from group chats to ensure we can maintain a safe environment and keep completely illegal, predatory behavior off our network.

While we aggressively defend personal privacy, end-to-end encryption on multi-user groups makes it technically impossible to intervene against bad actors. Without a processing gate, criminal networks could use group chats to coordinate child sexual abuse material (CSAM), severe exploitation, or human trafficking without any fear of detection.

By allowing our system to process group messages, we can act immediately and decisively to destroy these groups and protect victims, while still respecting the day-to-day privacy of law-abiding users.

This balance allows us to protect your personal privacy while enforcing a hard, zero-tolerance boundary against severe criminal abuse.

Your Privacy Protections

Even though group chats do not use the same device-to-device locking system as private messages, your data is still heavily protected:

• We do not keep your group chat messages after they are delivered to the members.
• We do not actively monitor, scan, or read your group messages unless we are legally required to investigate reported abuse.
• We never use your messages for advertising, tracking, AI training, or sharing with third parties.

You can chat freely and privately in your groups. If you ever see suspicious, harmful, or abusive activity, you can use the report button inside the group to alert our trust and safety team immediately.

Looking for Total Device-to-Device Privacy? If you want conversations that are completely locked at the device level where absolutely no one else can read them, use our one-on-one direct messages instead.