The short version
- Your exact location never leaves our servers. Other people see a rough distance and an area at least 150 metres (500 feet) from you. A post's location is erased the moment the post ends.
- Little is kept, and not for long. Posts are deleted minutes after they end, chats a day after a conversation ends.
- We don't sell your data, show ads, or use third-party analytics or trackers — in the app or on this website.
- We never share your phone number or your consent to receive texts with anyone for marketing.
- You can download everything we hold about you, or delete your account, from the app at any time.
Contents
- Who we are
- What we collect and why
- Location, in detail
- What other people can see
- Text messages and your phone number
- Service providers
- How long we keep it
- Your choices and rights
- Legal bases (EU and UK)
- Safety, moderation and the law
- Security
- Adults only
- International transfers
- This website
- Changes
- Contact
1. Who we are
#Interest is an app for meeting people nearby who want to do the same thing at the same time. It is operated by Yuriy Parfyonov ("we", "us"), who is responsible for your personal information under this policy. Questions about it go to privacy@theinterest.app.
2. What we collect and why
Your account
- Phone number — to sign you in with a one-time code, and to keep one account per person. Stored encrypted. It is never shown to other users.
- Name, date of birth, bio, languages and photo — your profile. Your date of birth confirms you are 18 or over; other people see only your age. Photos are re-encoded when you upload them, which removes any location or camera data embedded in the file.
- Settings — such as your search radius, whether you are visible, and whether you accept requests only from verified accounts.
- Passkeys — if you add one, we store its public key and a name for it. The private key never leaves your device.
- Sign-in records — when each session started and was last used, so you can sign out everywhere and so a stolen session can be detected. Sign-in codes are stored only as a keyed hash, never the code itself.
Posts, requests and conversations
- Posts — what you want to do, its hashtags, how long it lasts and your chosen radius, plus your location while it is live (see section 3).
- Requests — the #Interests you send and receive, with any short note you add.
- Messages — stored encrypted, and deleted a day after the conversation ends. They are not end-to-end encrypted: we can read a conversation when it is reported to us, or when the law requires it.
- Ratings — after a conversation you can rate it with one tap. Ratings are shown to nobody, the person rated included; only a combined score is kept on each account.
Safety features
- Blocks and reports you make. A report keeps a copy of the conversation and the post it concerns, so it can be reviewed even after they are deleted.
- Safety plans — the place you type, the times, the first name of the person you are meeting, and your contact's name and phone number. The place and the number are stored encrypted. Your contact receives your first name, the other person's first name, the place and the times — never your location, profile or phone number.
- Identity verification, if and when we offer it, is carried out by a specialist provider. We keep the outcome; for a document check, also your date of birth for 30 days. We never receive or keep a copy of your document, selfie or video.
- Moderation records — text you write is screened automatically for content our rules forbid, and we keep a record of what was refused.
Devices and technical data
- Notifications — if you allow them, your device's push token, stored encrypted, and a hashed identifier of the device, used to stop banned accounts coming back. Notifications never contain names, messages or places.
- IP address — our servers see it with every request and use it to keep the service secure: rate limits and abuse prevention. Server logs never contain your location, message contents or sign-in secrets, and are kept for no more than 30 days.
We don't collect your contacts, your location in the background, or anything from your photo library other than the single photo you choose to upload.
3. Location, in detail
Location is the most sensitive thing #Interest handles, so it gets its own rules.
- Your phone sends its location only when you publish a post, and only with your permission. We never track you in the background.
- Your exact location is used on our servers to find people near you. It is never sent to anyone else's phone. Others see a rough distance, such as "0.9 mi", and an area on the map at least 150 metres (500 feet) from where you are.
- The moment your post ends — when it expires, you withdraw it, or it becomes a conversation — its exact location is erased. The post itself is deleted three minutes later.
- We keep no history of where you have been. We count posts by area of about five kilometres across to understand where the service is used.
4. What other people can see
Other users can see your name, age, photo, bio, languages, your posts while they are live, any verification badge, and your trust score once you have been rated by at least three people. People you are chatting with see your messages.
No one else ever sees your phone number, your date of birth, your exact location, or who has blocked or reported whom. A block is silent: the person blocked isn't told.
5. Text messages and your phone number
We send text messages for two purposes only: the one-time code you ask for to sign in, and safety-plan messages to a contact you choose. We don't send marketing or promotional texts. Details of the program, and how to stop messages, are on our text messages page.
No mobile information will be shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. Text messaging originator opt-in data and consent are excluded from every category of sharing described in this policy and will not be shared with any third parties.
Your phone number reaches our text message provider only in order to deliver a message to it.
6. Service providers
We use a small number of companies to run #Interest. They process personal information only on our instructions and only to provide their service to us:
- Render — hosting for our servers and database.
- Cloudflare — storage for profile photos, this website, our domain and email forwarding.
- Twilio — delivery of text messages.
- Apple — delivery of push notifications to iPhones.
- An identity verification provider, named here before we offer verification.
We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for targeted advertising. There are no advertising or analytics SDKs in the app.
7. How long we keep it
| Information | Kept |
|---|---|
| A post's exact location | Until the post ends — three hours at most |
| Posts and their hashtags | Three minutes after the post ends |
| Messages | 24 hours after the conversation ends. A conversation ends after 24 hours without a message |
| Who matched with whom, and ratings | 30 days after the conversation ends |
| Requests that didn't become a conversation | Until the post they were about is deleted |
| Safety plans | Deleted when you check in; otherwise two days after the plan ends |
| Reports | Until resolved, then 30 days if dismissed or 180 days if upheld; longer only when the law requires it |
| Moderation records | 30 days, or 90 days when content was refused |
| Verification | The outcome while you have an account; a document's date of birth, 30 days |
| Sign-in codes | 24 hours after the code expires |
| Sessions | One day after the session expires |
| Devices registered for notifications | Until you sign out on it, or 90 days without use |
| Server logs | No more than 30 days |
| Your account and profile | Until you delete it, or after 90 days without use |
Deleting your account signs you out everywhere and takes your posts and conversations down at once. Seven days later the account and everything attached to it, photo included, is deleted for good; signing in before then and choosing to keep it cancels the deletion. An account unused for 90 days is deleted the same way, with a notification at 30 days if you have notifications on.
Two exceptions. While a report about an account is open or upheld, or must be preserved by law, the account waits so the evidence survives. And when a banned account is deleted we keep a keyed hash of its phone number — not the number — so a ban cannot be undone by deleting the account and signing up again.
8. Your choices and rights
- Get a copy of your data — in the app, Settings › Download my data gives you everything we hold about you as one file, in a format other services can read.
- Correct it — edit your profile in the app at any time.
- Delete it — Settings › Delete account. See section 7.
- Stop text messages — reply STOP to any message from us.
- Notifications and location — turn them off in your iPhone's settings at any time.
For anything else — or if you live in the EU, the UK, California or another place that gives you rights such as access, correction, deletion, portability, restriction or objection — email privacy@theinterest.app. We answer within one month and will never treat you differently for using your rights. If you are in the EU or the UK you can also complain to your data protection authority.
For California residents: in the last 12 months we have not sold or shared personal information, as those words are defined by California law, and we do not use sensitive personal information to infer characteristics about you.
9. Legal bases (EU and UK)
- To provide the service you signed up for (contract): your account, posts, requests, conversations, safety plans and notifications.
- Legitimate interests: keeping people safe, preventing abuse and fraud, enforcing our rules, and securing the service.
- Consent: your location when you post, and notifications. You can withdraw it at any time in your iPhone's settings.
- Legal obligation: when the law requires us to keep or disclose information.
10. Safety, moderation and the law
We review reports, and may act on accounts that break our Terms. We disclose personal information to authorities only when the law requires it, or when we believe in good faith it is necessary to prevent someone being seriously harmed.
11. Security
Traffic is encrypted in transit. Phone numbers, messages, safety plans and push tokens are encrypted in our database. Photos are stored privately and shown through links that expire within two hours. Accounts sign in with one-time codes or passkeys — there are no passwords to steal — and deleting an account or downloading its data requires signing in again. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affects you, we will tell you as the law requires.
12. Adults only
#Interest is only for people 18 and over. We don't knowingly collect information from anyone younger, and we close any account we learn belongs to someone under 18.
13. International transfers
Our service providers may process information in the United States and other countries. Where data protection law requires it, transfers are protected by safeguards such as the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses.
14. This website
theinterest.app sets no cookies, runs no analytics and loads nothing from other companies. Cloudflare, which serves it, processes your IP address to deliver the pages and to protect the site from attacks.
15. Changes
If we change this policy we will update the date at the top. For a significant change we will tell you in the app before it takes effect.
16. Contact
Yuriy Parfyonov, operator of #Interest - privacy@theinterest.app