Privacy policy

Last updated: 13 October 2026

VMAT Home (@matthieu_pidns_bot) is a private Telegram assistant for the Van Damme household. It is not a public service: only people the owner has approved can use it. This policy explains what happens to your data when you do.

Who is responsible

Matthieu Van Damme, Belgium – [email protected]. You can also ask your question in the bot itself.

What the bot stores, and where

The bot runs on a private server at the owner's home in Belgium. It keeps:

Your account: your Telegram user ID, your first name and your role (owner or household member).
Settings: quiet hours, the briefing time, camera-alert preferences and the home town used for the weather.
Conversations: only in the server's working memory, for at most the last 60 messages per chat. They are never written to disk, and they are erased by /reset and whenever the bot restarts.
Technical logs: the chat ID, the commands and tools used, and timings. Message text is not logged. Logs rotate automatically, so only the most recent ~100 MB are kept.
Home notifications: the last 300 alerts about the server, network and camera.
What you add on purpose: recipes, bookmarks, film requests and documents the owner files go to the household's own apps on the same home server.

The server is not reachable from the internet. Its data is backed up every night, encrypted, to a storage provider in Germany (Hetzner), and backups are kept for at most 6 months.

Who else receives data

Telegram carries every message between you and the bot (Telegram Privacy Policy).
Anthropic (Claude API, USA) reads your messages, photos and documents that you send to the bot, plus the results of the home tools it uses, so it can write an answer. It also runs web searches for questions about the outside world, and it describes camera snapshots. Under Anthropic's commercial terms this data is not used to train AI models, and Anthropic keeps it only for a limited period (Anthropic Privacy Policy).
Open-Meteo receives the coordinates of the home town to return the weather forecast.
YTS receives the film titles you search for.
Recipe websites you send a link to are visited by the server to read the recipe.

Nothing is sold or shared for advertising. The bot uses no analytics or tracking, and neither does this website.

Camera

When camera alerts are on, snapshots of detected people, cars or animals at home are sent only to the owner. They are described by Anthropic's AI. Alerts can be switched off at any time.

Your choices

/reset erases your current conversation, and /stop interrupts the bot.
Anything that changes something at home asks you to confirm with ✅ first.
To see or delete what is stored about you, or to stop using the bot, ask the owner. Your access and your account entry will be removed, and backups that contain it expire within 6 months.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top is updated and household members are told in the bot.