Guide

Privacy mode

What your bot can see in groups, and how to change it.

The default: privacy on

A bot added to a group starts in privacy mode. It only receives messages that are clearly meant for it: messages that mention it, reply to one of its messages, or come from its own keyboard buttons. Ordinary group chatter never reaches it.

This is deliberate. Group members did not invite your bot to read their conversation; they invited it to do a job. Privacy mode is that job description, enforced by the platform.

Turning it off

Some bots genuinely need every message: moderation bots, logging bots, group games. The bot owner can disable privacy mode per group with setPrivacyMode:

curl

curl https://api.sprintelex.com/setPrivacyMode \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <owner-dashboard-session>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"bot_id": "<bot-id>", "group_id": "<group-id>", "privacy_mode": false}'

Users can see which mode a bot is in. If your bot needs privacy off, say why in its description. Bots that silently harvest group chat get reported, and three upheld reports in 30 days suspend the bot automatically.

What the bot actually receives

Even with privacy off, a bot never sees raw user identities. Senders arrive as per-bot scoped ids (u_ plus 16 hex characters): stable for your bot, meaningless everywhere else, and different for every bot. Two bots in the same group cannot compare notes about who said what.