Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 14, 2026

This policy explains what Ask Bubu (“the app”, “we”) sends from your phone, what it keeps, and what it does not. It applies to the app on Android and iOS, and to this website.

Ask Bubu has no accounts and never asks for your email address or phone number. It sends crash reports and usage statistics that say nothing of who you are, as described below, and you can turn them off.

What stays on your phone

  • Your name, if you give one. It is only used to greet you. It is never sent anywhere.
  • Your chats. The last 100 are kept on your phone so you can open them again. You can delete one by pressing and holding it, or all of them in Settings. Deleting the app deletes them.
  • Your saved places, such as “home” or “office”, if you save any. You can remove one by pressing and holding it. See below for when they are sent.
  • Your bookmarks: the buses at a stop that you have starred. They are never sent as a list; the app asks our server for the arrivals at those stops, as it would for any stop.
  • Your settings.

What is sent to our server

  • Your question, as text, so that it can be answered. The server keeps a conversation in its memory for up to 30 minutes after your last question, so that a follow-up such as “what about bus 10?” makes sense. It is not written to disk, and it is gone after those 30 minutes or when the server restarts.
  • Your location, only if you have allowed it. It is sent with each question, to find the stops and stations near you, and held with the conversation, in memory, for the same 30 minutes; it is never written to disk. It is also sent on its own when you open the app, when you come back to it, and when you have moved more than about 120 metres, so that the top of the chat can say where you are. Nothing is kept of that. You can turn all of this off in Settings, or in your phone’s settings.
  • A random number for each chat, made on your phone when a chat begins, so that the server can tell one conversation from another for those 30 minutes. It says nothing about you or your phone, and a new chat has a new one.
  • Your saved places, if you have any, together with a question, so that “next bus at my home” can be answered. Like the question, they are held in memory with the conversation for up to 30 minutes and are never written to disk on the server.
  • A report, if you press and hold an answer and choose “Report a wrong answer”. The question, the answer and the time are stored so that we can fix the mistake. No name, internet address or coordinates are stored with them, and a report cannot be traced to the phone that sent it. The answer is stored as it was shown, so if it named the stop or street you were near, the report holds that name.

Our server counts requests from each internet address for a short time, in memory, to stop abuse. It does not keep a log of who asked what.

What may be sent to others

  • Speech. When you dictate or use voice mode, your phone turns speech into text. On phones that can do this on the device, the sound never leaves it. On others, the phone’s own speech service (Apple’s on an iPhone, Google’s on Android) processes the sound under that company’s privacy policy. We never receive the sound, only the text of your question.
  • An address you ask about. If you ask about an address we do not recognise, the assistant asks whether it may look it up. If you agree, that address (the text only) is sent to OneMap, the Singapore Land Authority’s address search. If you decline, it is not.
  • The country you are in. At the edges of Singapore and outside it, the app asks your phone which country you are in, to say so at the top of the chat. Your phone answers with its own location service (Apple’s on an iPhone, Google’s on Android), which receives the coordinates under that company’s privacy policy. In the middle of Singapore this is not asked.
  • Map tiles. When an answer shows a map, your phone fetches the map’s tiles directly from OpenFreeMap. Like any web server, it sees your internet address and which part of the map was asked for. We send it nothing else.
  • Crash reports and usage statistics. Unless you turn “Share usage and crash reports” off in Settings, the app sends Google Firebase (Crashlytics and Analytics) a report when it crashes (what went wrong in the app, the phone’s model and system version) and short usage records: which screens are opened, what kind of question was asked (by its kind of answer, such as “bus arrivals”), whether it was typed, spoken or tapped, and what failed. They carry a random number Firebase makes for this installation of the app. They never carry the words of a question or an answer, a place, your location or your name, and no advertising identifier is collected. Google processes them for us under its terms for Firebase.

Live bus and train information comes from the Land Transport Authority’s DataMall. Our server asks it about stops and services, never about you.

What we do not do

We do not sell your information, track you across apps or websites, or build a profile of you.

How long things are kept, and deleting them

Nothing on our server is tied to you, so there is no record of yours to look up or delete. A conversation, with any location and saved places sent with it, is forgotten 30 minutes after its last question. Reports are kept so that mistakes can be fixed, and hold nothing that says who sent them. Everything else is on your phone: delete a chat by pressing and holding it, everything in Settings, or all of it by deleting the app.

Security

Everything the app sends to our server travels over an encrypted connection (HTTPS).

This website

This website sets no cookies and has no analytics. If you switch between light and dark, that choice is kept in your browser and nowhere else. The company that hosts the site may keep ordinary server logs, as any web host does.

Children

The app is for everyone and collects nothing that identifies a person. It is not directed at children.

Changes

If this policy changes, the new version will be published here with its date.

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