Privacy policy

Account information

• Phone number (used for verification only)
• Email address (optional)
• Display name (not your real name: you choose what to share)
• Date of birth (to verify you are 18 or older)
• Gender and relationship preferences
• Profile information: bio, body type, education, occupation, lifestyle details

Photos and media

• Profile photos you upload (blurred by default until revealed to matches)
• Photos and voice notes shared in private chats
• A selfie, if you choose to verify your profile. Our team uses it only to check your photos are really you.
• Location metadata (EXIF data, including GPS coordinates) is removed from every photo on your device before it is uploaded.
• Profile photos are checked automatically for nudity when you upload them (see section 6).

Location data

• We use your location to work out how far away other members are, and to show the area you are in (your suburb or town) on your profile.
• Before it is stored, your position is rounded to a grid of about 1 km, so your exact GPS coordinates are never stored or shared.
• Other members see an approximate distance in whole kilometres and the name of your area, never your location. If you set your own area under Profile, we show that instead.
• Area names come from OpenStreetMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors) and are looked up on our own servers: your location is not sent to anyone to do it.
• You can disable location access in your device settings at any time

Contacts (Block Contacts feature)

• Block Contacts is optional and off unless you turn it on. If you choose to use it, we read the phone numbers in your device's address book and convert each one into a one-way cryptographic hash (SHA-256) on your device. Only the hashes are uploaded. The numbers themselves, and any names or other contact details, never leave your device and are never uploaded or stored.
• We compare those hashes against the hashed phone numbers of other accounts so we can hide your profile from people you already know, and hide theirs from you.
• This is data minimisation, not anonymisation. A phone number does not have much entropy, so someone holding a hash and guessing at the number it came from could in principle confirm a match. Hashing is meant to keep a casual read of the data from revealing anything, not to make the underlying number unrecoverable.
• You can turn Block Contacts off at any time in Settings → Privacy and safety → Block contacts. Turning it off deletes the hashes we hold.

Usage and technical data

• App activity (screens viewed, swipes, matches, whether a message was sent but never its content), used to improve the service. See “Usage analytics” in section 6.
• Device information (type, OS version, app version)
• Crash reports and performance data (Firebase Crashlytics)
• A push notification token for your device, so we can send you notifications
• IP address (logged for fraud prevention)

Payment information

Subscriptions and in-app purchases are processed by the Apple App Store or Google Play and managed through RevenueCat. We never see or store your payment card details. We receive only the purchase, its status and the subscription period.

Service providers

These companies process information for us, as operators under POPIA, only to provide the parts of the Service listed here:

• Supabase: Hosts our database and file storage: your profile, matches, messages, photos and voice notes.
• Firebase (Google): Authentication (signing in with your phone number, Apple or Google), Cloud Messaging (push notifications, sent with a device token), Remote Config (turning app features on and off), Analytics (usage events, described below) and Crashlytics (crash reports).
• Google Cloud Vision: Automatically screens each profile photo you upload for nudity. The photo is sent for analysis and the result is stored with it so our team can review it.
• RevenueCat, with the Apple App Store and Google Play: Process and manage subscriptions and in-app purchases. RevenueCat receives a random account identifier and your purchase history, never your card details.
• GIPHY: Powers GIF search in chat. When you search, your search words are sent from your device to GIPHY (with your IP address, as with any web request). No account identifier is sent.

Usage analytics

We use Google Analytics for Firebase to understand how Sneeky Link is used (which screens are opened, how far people get through sign-up, and how often features such as likes, matches, messages, Tonight and Boosts are used) so we can fix problems and improve the app. Analytics records that an action happened, never its content. It does not receive your name, phone number, email address, messages, notes, photos, gender, who you are looking for, your precise location or anyone else's identity. Events are linked to a random account identifier and to an identifier for this installation of the app. It never uses the advertising identifier. Google works out an approximate location (country and city) from your IP address. Google processes this information for us as an operator under POPIA, on servers that may be outside South Africa (including in the United States), under data processing terms that give it a level of protection comparable to POPIA (section 72). We do not use analytics for advertising and do not share it for advertising. Analytics data is kept for no longer than 14 months. You can turn analytics off at any time in Settings → Privacy and safety → Data. Doing so stops collection on your device and deletes the analytics data stored on it.

Legal and safety

• When required by South African law, court order, or government authority
• To prevent imminent harm to users or the public
• To investigate potential violations of our Terms of Service