Who can see chat messages?

This is the question most churches ask first, and it deserves a straight answer. Messaging is built on a simple principle: adults get the privacy they would expect from any messaging app, and children get the oversight that safeguarding requires. Those are different things, and Hubb treats them differently on purpose.

Conversations between adults

A one-to-one conversation between two adults, or a group chat between the members of a group, is private to the people taking part. Nobody at your church can read it from the web office. That includes your administrators, however senior, and it is deliberate rather than an oversight: a conversation between two adults in your church is theirs.

A group chat is visible to the group’s leaders in the ordinary way, because leaders are in the conversation and can read it in the app like anyone else in the group. There is no back door, just normal membership. See Who can message whom?

Messages to and from children

Every message to or from a child works differently, and is not private in the same way.

• Every message a leader sends to a child goes to the child’s parent or guardian first, who reads it in full and either approves or rejects it. See What a parent sees, and how they approve a message.
• Every one of those messages is permanently recorded, whether it was approved, rejected or left to expire. Nothing can be deleted to hide it.
• Your named Safeguarding Lead can see all of them, through the Safeguarding Dashboard and the Safe Messages record. Nobody else at your church can, including full administrators.
• Where your church allows children to reply, their replies go through the same approval and the same record. See Replies from children, and how they are approved.
• Parents can open a read-only view of their own child’s conversations at any time, so a parent can always see exactly what their child sees.
• This covers every route to a child, not just chat. Mailings, Broadcasts and text messages to children are recorded in the same place. See Sending a mailing or Broadcast to a group that includes children.

In short

• Adults can be seen by the people in the conversation, and by nobody else at your church.
• Group chats can be seen by everyone in the group, leaders included.
• Children can be seen by their parent or guardian, and by your Safeguarding Lead. Always, and permanently.

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Good to know

• Everything is stored inside your own church’s Hubb account. Nothing sits on personal accounts or with another company, and nobody needs to share a personal phone number.
• Chat history is never deleted. If your church ever faces a formal safeguarding case, we can extract the relevant conversation data for you on request. Contact our support team and we will help.
• Our support team can see the Safeguarding area through their support login, so we can help when something is not working. That is worth knowing rather than discovering.
• Because ordinary chat is private, it is not a record-keeping tool. Anything your church needs to keep a record of belongs in a note, a pastoral record or a document, not in a chat.
• If a member has a concern about a conversation they are in, they should raise it with your leadership in the normal way. Messaging does not change your safeguarding or complaints process, and the fact that a conversation is private does not mean it is beyond your church’s care.
• For how this fits with your church’s own arrangements, see Safe Messaging and your safeguarding policy.