There is a bot in your group. Here is what it can and cannot do.

Somebody who runs your community added Vestry to it. You did not sign up for anything and you are not our customer, so this page is written for you rather than for them, and it is not trying to sell you anything.

Does it read everything?: If the bot is an administrator of your group, then yes: Telegram delivers every message in that group to it. That is how Telegram works, not a setting the group's owner or Vestry chose. Telegram's own documentation says that a bot promoted to administrator always receives all messages.; If the bot is an ordinary member instead, Telegram delivers only commands, messages that mention it, and replies to it.
Can it read what was said before it joined?: No. A Telegram bot is never given anything sent to a chat before it was added. Whatever your group discussed last year is not available to it and cannot be made available to it.; Everything it knows about your community starts on the day it arrived, plus any answers an administrator has written into it by hand.
What does it keep?: Messages from the group, for a bounded window that the group's operator sets, between fourteen and ninety days depending on their plan. When a message reaches the end of that window it is deleted, and so is everything derived from it: the search entry, any summary, and the ability to quote it in a future answer.; It also keeps the display name of whoever wrote a message, because an answer that quotes you should say that it was you. It does not receive or keep your phone number or your contact list. Telegram does not give those to bots.
What leaves Telegram?: When the assistant is asked something and decides it is allowed to answer, it sends the question and the handful of messages it found relevant to a third-party AI model provider, which writes the reply. Nothing from any other community is included, and nothing is used to train that provider's models.; Everything else stays where it is. The assistant does not broadcast your group's contents anywhere, and it has no way to answer someone in a different community using something you said in this one.
When does it speak?: Only under a setting the group's administrators chose. It can be silent, it can answer only when someone mentions it, or it can be allowed to answer an unaddressed question. Even at that last setting it has to have found something in this group that supports an answer, and it has to have waited long enough for a person to reply first.; When it cannot find support, it says so instead of guessing. Every reply it posts carries a pointer back to the message it came from, so you can check the answer against a human.
How do I know what it is doing right now?: Send /vestry about in the group. It replies with what it is currently delivered, how long messages are kept, who administers it, and how to reach them. It also announces itself when it is added, and whenever its permissions change.; The people who administer your group can see a full log of everything the assistant said, every time it decided to stay silent, and every setting anyone changed.
Can I ask for my messages to be left out?: Yes, and the request goes to the people who run your community, because it is their group and their decision to make. Vestry records the request and gives them the controls to act on it: excluding a person, purging a chat, or deleting the whole workspace.; If you delete a message in Telegram and Telegram tells the bot, the copy is removed too. Telegram does not always send that signal, which is a limit worth knowing rather than one worth glossing over.

What this page is not.

This is a description of how the software behaves. It is not a privacy policy, it is not a data-processing agreement, and it does not create any legal right on its own. Vestry is pre-launch, and the binding documents will be written, reviewed and published before anyone can pay for it.

The people who run your community remain responsible for what they installed and for how they answer you about it. The most useful thing this page can do is make that conversation easier, which is why every answer above is one you can check inside the chat itself.

The version written for whoever installed it