Privacy Policy
Dial98 is a phone service. To connect a call we have to know who is calling, who they are calling, and for how long — that is unavoidable. What follows is the honest list of everything we hold, why we hold it, and how to make us delete it. We do not sell your data, we do not run advertising trackers, and we do not share your call history with anyone who is not needed to place the call.
1. Who we are
Dial98 is operated by Semicolon Marketing Ltd, a company registered in British Columbia, Canada (business number 747336022). We are the data controller for everything described here.
Contact for any privacy question, access request or complaint: info@semicolon.live.
2. What we collect and why
| Data | Why we have it |
|---|---|
| Email address and the display name you choose | It is your login. We also use it to reach you about your balance, a failed payment, or a service problem. We do not send marketing email unless you ask us to. |
| Password | Stored only as a salted hash. Nobody at Dial98 can read it or recover it for you. |
| Phone numbers you dial | We cannot route a call without the destination number. It is also what your call history in the app is made of. |
| Your caller ID number, if you set one | This is the number shown to the person you call in Iran. You choose it; you can clear it at any time in the app. |
| Call metadata — start time, answer time, duration in seconds, the rate applied and the amount charged | This is the bill. Per-second billing means we have to record the seconds. It is also how we investigate "the call dropped" or "I was charged twice". |
| Call recordings | Calls placed through Dial98 may be recorded on our own telephone switch, and the recording is played back to you in the app's call history. Recording happens on our servers, not on your phone. See section 4 — read it before you use the service. |
| Wallet and payment records — top-ups, deductions, running balance | You are buying prepaid credit; this is the ledger. Canadian tax law requires us to keep financial records. |
| Contacts you save inside Dial98 | Only the ones you type into the app yourself. Dial98 does not read your phone's address book and does not ask for that permission. |
| Device and network information — IP address, app version, coarse device type, error logs | Security and fraud prevention (calling services are a constant target for stolen-card fraud), plus diagnosing call-quality problems. IP addresses are handled as approximate location only; we do not collect GPS. |
What we do not collect
- Your phone's contact list, photos, files, SMS or call log. The app does not request those permissions.
- GPS or precise location.
- Advertising identifiers. Dial98 contains no ad SDK and no third-party analytics SDK.
- Anything about the person you call, beyond the number you dialled.
3. Microphone
Dial98 asks for microphone access for one reason: it is a telephone. The microphone is used while a call is connected and at no other time. Audio is streamed over an encrypted connection to our switch, which passes it to the phone network.
4. Call recording — please read
Calls placed through Dial98 may be recorded by our telephone switch so that you can play them back later from the app's call history. This means:
- The recording is made on our servers in Sweden, not on your device.
- Only you can retrieve it. Recordings are served only to the authenticated account that made the call.
- Recording laws differ by country. In many places, including parts of Canada and Iran, recording a conversation without telling the other party may be unlawful. You are responsible for telling the person you call that the call may be recorded, and for obtaining any consent your local law requires.
- If you do not want your calls recorded, email info@semicolon.live and we will disable recording on your account.
- Deleting a call from your history, or deleting your account, deletes the recording.
5. Who else sees your data
We use as few third parties as we can, and none of them receives your data for their own purposes.
- DIDWW — our wholesale telecom carrier. To connect a call we must pass them the number being dialled and the caller ID being presented. This is how every phone call on earth works; the destination network needs to know what to ring. They do not receive your email address or your account balance.
- Our own servers, rented from a hosting provider and located in Sweden. Your account, ledger, call history and recordings live there. Nobody but Semicolon Marketing Ltd has access.
- Stripe — when paid top-ups launch, card payments will be processed by Stripe. Card numbers go to Stripe directly and are never stored on Dial98 servers; we keep only the amount, the date and a payment reference.
- Law enforcement — only where we are legally compelled by a valid Canadian order, and only the specific records demanded.
We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it with advertisers, data brokers or analytics companies. There are none in this product.
6. How long we keep things
| Data | Retention |
|---|---|
| Account profile (email, name, caller ID) | Until you delete your account. |
| Call history and call metadata | 24 months, then anonymised. |
| Call recordings | 90 days, then deleted automatically. Sooner if you delete the call or your account. |
| Wallet and payment records | 7 years, because Canadian tax law requires it. After account deletion these rows are kept in anonymised form — the amounts and dates remain, everything that identifies you is stripped. |
| Server and security logs (including IP) | 90 days. |
| Support email | 24 months. |
7. Security
Traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted with TLS. Call audio is carried over encrypted transport (DTLS-SRTP) between your phone and our switch; from our switch onward it travels the ordinary phone network, which we do not control and which is not encrypted end to end — that is true of every service that connects to a real telephone. Passwords are salted and hashed. Access to the production servers is restricted to key-based administrator logins.
No system is perfect. If we ever discover a breach affecting your data, we will tell you and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada as required by PIPEDA.
8. Your rights
Whatever country you are in, we will honour these:
- Access — ask us for a copy of everything we hold about you.
- Correction — fix anything that is wrong; your name and caller ID are editable in the app.
- Deletion — delete your account and its data. See below.
- Objection / restriction — tell us to stop a specific use, such as call recording.
- Portability — get your call history and ledger as a machine-readable file.
- Complaint — if we get it wrong, you may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, or to your own data-protection authority if you are in the EU or UK.
Write to info@semicolon.live from your account's email address. We answer within 30 days.
9. Deleting your account
You can delete your account yourself, in two ways:
- In the app — Settings → Delete my account.
- On the web — dial98.com/delete-account.
Deletion removes your profile, password, caller ID, saved contacts, call history and recordings. Anonymised financial rows are retained for the tax period described in section 6; they no longer identify you. Any unused credit is forfeited on deletion.
10. Children
Dial98 is not for children. You must be 18 or older to hold an account. We do not knowingly collect data from children; if we learn we have, we delete it.
11. International transfers
Dial98 is a Canadian company with servers in Sweden and calls terminating in Iran. Using the service necessarily transfers the data described above across those borders. By using Dial98 you agree to that transfer. Where required, we rely on standard contractual clauses with our providers.
12. Changes
If we change this policy in a way that materially affects you, we will email the address on your account and update the date at the top before the change takes effect.
13. Contact
Semicolon Marketing Ltd
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
info@semicolon.live