AbhiBus Privacy Policy 2026: What the App Does With Your SMS

Q: Why does the AbhiBus app ask to read your SMS?

The notice states the purpose in its own words: "If you allow us to access your SMS, we read your SMS to autofill or prepopulate 'OTP' while making a transaction and to validate your mobile number." The stated benefit is that you do not have to leave the app to copy a one-time password. SMS access is the broadest of the six permissions the notice describes, because the technical permission is not limited to OTP messages even where the stated use is. The notice describes a purpose; we have not tested the app's behaviour and make no claim about it.

Q: Who actually operates AbhiBus?

The privacy notice names the company. It describes itself as the privacy policy of Le Travenues Technology Ltd, with "AbhiBus" as the operating name. That matters when you are reading the sharing clause, which permits data to go to entities "that control, are controlled by or are under the common control with" the company — a group, not a single brand. The notice does not list those entities.

Q: How long does AbhiBus keep your data?

The notice sets no retention period. For message-board and feedback content it says the information is retained "as necessary to resolve disputes, provide customer support and troubleshoot problems as permitted by law" — a purpose test rather than a number of months or years. The document also carries no "last updated" stamp, so a reader cannot tell when it was last revised. Both are gaps worth noting; neither is unusual among Indian travel platforms, and neither is a breach of anything we can observe.

Q: What happens if you book a ticket for someone else?

The notice puts the consent obligation on you. If you book for other people, "you hereby confirm and represent that each of such other person(s)/traveler(s) for whom a booking has been made, has agreed to have the information" shared. In practice, booking a family member's bus ticket means you are representing that you have their permission for their details to be handled under this notice. The notice does not describe any step AbhiBus takes to verify that.

✍ By Zoutons Editorial Team🕔 Updated: October 19, 2026AbhiBus's own published privacy noticeRead 19 October 2026About 29 KB of text, no revision dateQuoted as publishedA document read, not an accusation🔗 Affiliate links included

Most privacy policies tell you a permission is needed. AbhiBus's tells you what it does with it — including that it reads your SMS to pull out the OTP.

We read the notice on 19 October 2026. It explains six app permissions in plain words, which is better than the category norm. It also names a company most riders will not recognise, and sets no deadline for deleting anything.

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AbhiBus privacy notice, read 19 October 2026

Published at abhibus.com/privacy - about 29 KB of text, no revision date

Six app permissions explained · no notifications means SMS instead · retention period: none stated

📅 Update log:
19 October 2026 — First publication. Read the same day: abhibus.com/privacy, logged out, from India, nothing purchased and AbhiBus not contacted; about 29 KB of text, with no revision or "last updated" stamp anywhere in the document. Recorded from this read: the notice is issued by Le Travenues Technology Ltd; six app permissions are explained individually (SMS, Contacts, Location, Device and App History, Identity, Wi-Fi connection information), with SMS stated as being read to autofill or prepopulate an OTP and validate the mobile number; declining notifications is stated to move booking confirmations and refund updates to SMS; collected data includes credentials, encrypted card numbers and banking or wallet details stored as permitted by the user, device identifiers, cookies and flash cookies, data from the public domain or third parties including linked social networks, and correspondence from others about the user compiled into a file specific to them; sharing is permitted with entities under common control and where appropriate to comply with law or protect rights, with notice and an opportunity to decline for other sharing; security cites SSL/TLS and IS/ISO/IEC 27001; users booking for others represent that those travellers have agreed; and no retention period is stated anywhere.

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Six permissions, and what AbhiBus says each one is for

We read AbhiBus's privacy notice on 19 October 2026 — about 29 KB of text at abhibus.com/privacy, logged out, from India.

The most useful part is a section most privacy policies do not bother with: a permission-by-permission account of what the app asks for and why. Six are described in the notice's own words.

Permission	What the notice says it is for	Note
SMS	"we read your SMS to autofill or prepopulate 'OTP' while making a transaction and to validate your mobile number"	The broadest permission on the list, and the one most often granted without reading
Contacts	To "provide a lot of social features" such as sharing tickets or location with friends, and to pick numbers for mobile recharges	A second passage also ties Contacts to reading account details on the device
Location	"location-specific deals", auto-filling your nearest city, and tracking your bus	Auto-detected when you launch the app to make a booking
Device and App History	OS name and version, mobile network, hardware model, unique device identifier, preferred language	Stated purpose: optimising the booking experience
Identity	Details of the accounts on your device, to auto-fill email IDs and map them to a user	Also linked to "exclusive travel offers, wallet cashbacks"
Wi-Fi connection information	"we optimize your bandwidth usage for multimedia uploads"	The narrowest stated purpose of the six

The SMS clause is the one to read twice. The stated purpose is narrow — autofilling an OTP and validating your number — while the Android permission it relies on is not itself limited to those messages. That gap between stated purpose and technical scope exists across the category; it is not specific to AbhiBus, and we have not tested the app.

Credit where it is due: publishing a plain-language reason for each permission is better practice than most Indian booking apps manage, and it is why this section is quotable at all.

Opting out of notifications moves the messages, not away

"If you do not opt for this, updates for your travel like booking confirmation, a refund (in case of cancellation), etc. will be sent through SMS."

That is a sensible fallback for a transactional message — you do want the booking confirmation. But it is worth being clear-eyed: declining push notifications on AbhiBus changes the channel rather than ending the contact.

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What the notice says it collects

Category	What the notice lists
Account data you type in	Email, addresses, name, phone, gender, travel preferences, travel plans, accommodation and hotel preferences, fax numbers
Payment data	Cardholder name, card number "(in encrypted form)" with expiry, banking details, wallet details - "as shared and allowed to be stored by you"
Credentials	Usernames, passwords and other security-related information
Device and location	Information about your location and mobile device, including a unique device identifier
Browser data	Cookies, flash cookies and similar data, plus JavaScript session measurement, used for fraud prevention among other purposes
Third-party and public data	Data "available in public domain or received from any third party including social media networks", including from linked social accounts
What others say about you	"If other users or third parties send us correspondence about your activities, we may collect such information into a file specific to you"

Two entries here are easy to skim past. The notice reserves the right to take in data "available in public domain or received from any third party including social media networks" and to add it to your account information.

And it describes a file built from what other people say about you: "If other users or third parties send us correspondence about your activities, we may collect such information into a file specific to you."

Payment data is described as stored only "as shared and allowed to be stored by you", with card numbers held in encrypted form.

Where the data can go

Recipient	What the notice permits	Note
Group companies	Entities that control, are controlled by, or are under common control with AbhiBus	Must be subject to this notice or "at least as protective" practices
Law and enforcement	Released where "appropriate to comply with the law, enforce or apply our Terms and Conditions", or protect rights, property or safety	Includes exchanging information with other companies and organisations
Anyone else	You get notice and "an opportunity to choose not to share the information"	The notice's own stated default for sharing outside the categories above
Outside India	The notice undertakes to ensure protection when transferring personal information to other countries	No country list is given
Third-party cookies	You may encounter cookies placed by third parties on some pages	"We do not control the use of cookies by third parties"

The privacy notice is issued by Le Travenues Technology Ltd, not by a company called AbhiBus. Read the group-sharing clause with that in mind: it covers entities under common control, and the notice does not name them.

On security the notice is specific, citing SSL/TLS encryption in transit and the IS/ISO/IEC 27001 information-security standard, plus physical, electronic and procedural safeguards — and warning that it may ask you for proof of identity before disclosing your own personal information to you.

Two things the notice does not say

It states no retention period. The one retention sentence we found ties keeping message-board and feedback content to resolving disputes and providing support "as permitted by law". That is a purpose test, not a clock, and it leaves a reader unable to answer "when is my data deleted?".

And it carries no revision date. Unlike the hosting and domain agreements we have read recently, which stamp themselves, this notice gives no "last updated" marker — so there is no way to tell from the page how current it is. Everything here describes the document as published on 19 October 2026.

Neither gap is an accusation. Both are common in this category, and nothing we read suggests AbhiBus has handled anyone's data improperly. This page is a reading of a published document and is not legal advice.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does the AbhiBus app ask to read your SMS?

The notice states the purpose in its own words: "If you allow us to access your SMS, we read your SMS to autofill or prepopulate 'OTP' while making a transaction and to validate your mobile number." The stated benefit is that you do not have to leave the app to copy a one-time password. SMS access is the broadest of the six permissions the notice describes, because the technical permission is not limited to OTP messages even where the stated use is. The notice describes a purpose; we have not tested the app's behaviour and make no claim about it.

Can you turn off AbhiBus notifications and not be contacted?

Not entirely, by the notice's own account. "If you opt-in for notifications, it enables us to send across exclusive deals, promotional offers, travel related updates... If you do not opt for this, updates for your travel like booking confirmation, a refund (in case of cancellation), etc. will be sent through SMS." So declining push notifications moves transactional messages to SMS rather than stopping them. That is a reasonable design for booking confirmations; it is worth knowing before you assume opting out means silence.

Who actually operates AbhiBus?

The privacy notice names the company. It describes itself as the privacy policy of Le Travenues Technology Ltd, with "AbhiBus" as the operating name. That matters when you are reading the sharing clause, which permits data to go to entities "that control, are controlled by or are under the common control with" the company — a group, not a single brand. The notice does not list those entities.

How long does AbhiBus keep your data?

The notice sets no retention period. For message-board and feedback content it says the information is retained "as necessary to resolve disputes, provide customer support and troubleshoot problems as permitted by law" — a purpose test rather than a number of months or years. The document also carries no "last updated" stamp, so a reader cannot tell when it was last revised. Both are gaps worth noting; neither is unusual among Indian travel platforms, and neither is a breach of anything we can observe.

What happens if you book a ticket for someone else?

The notice puts the consent obligation on you. If you book for other people, "you hereby confirm and represent that each of such other person(s)/traveler(s) for whom a booking has been made, has agreed to have the information" shared. In practice, booking a family member's bus ticket means you are representing that you have their permission for their details to be handled under this notice. The notice does not describe any step AbhiBus takes to verify that.

Prices & codes last verified: October 19, 2026

Zoutons may earn a commission when you buy through links on this page. Every quotation, clause and characterisation here was read on 19 October 2026 from AbhiBus's own published privacy notice at abhibus.com/privacy, logged out, from India, with nothing purchased and AbhiBus not contacted. The notice carries no revision or "last updated" date, so it may have changed before or after this reading without any visible marker. Read the live notice before relying on anything here. THIS IS A READING OF A PUBLISHED DOCUMENT, NOT AN ALLEGATION. We do NOT claim that AbhiBus or Le Travenues Technology Ltd has misused personal data, breached the Information Technology Act, the SPI Rules, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act or any other law, shared data improperly, or acted against any user's interests — we have no evidence of any such thing. Describing a permission's technical scope as broader than its stated purpose is an observation about how mobile permissions work generally and is NOT a claim that AbhiBus reads, stores or uses any message beyond the purpose it states. We did not install, test, decompile or monitor the AbhiBus app, and make no claim about its actual behaviour; this page describes only what the written notice says. Where this page summarises a clause in plainer words, the notice's own wording governs; quotations are reproduced exactly and the surrounding summary is our reading of them. THIS PAGE IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE and must not be used as a substitute for reading the notice or taking professional advice on your own data-protection rights. Noting that the document states no retention period and carries no revision date is a description of the text as published and is NOT a statement that any legal requirement has been breached. Terms and policies change without notice; what AbhiBus publishes at the time you book prevails over anything here.