Privacy Policy

The data controller for DearCupid.app is Dear Cupid Limited (trading as Dear Cupid), registered in England and Wales, company number 17232358, registered office 20 Wenlock Road, London, England, N1 7GU.

For any privacy question or request, email info@dearcupid.app.

If you join the waiting list we collect your email address, an optional first name, your confirmation that you are 18 or over, your privacy acknowledgement, whether you chose to receive occasional news, and the date you joined.

We use this to manage the waiting list and, if you agreed, to contact you about invitations and news. The lawful basis is our legitimate interest in managing access to the beta and, for optional news emails, your consent, which you can withdraw at any time by emailing us.

Accounts can only be created through a personal invitation. We store the invited email address, invitation status and expiry. Invitation links are stored only in a scrambled (hashed) form.

Your account holds your email address, an encrypted password, your membership status and, if relevant, staff permissions. We use these to sign you in, run your membership and keep the service secure. The lawful basis is performing our agreement with you (our Terms of Use).

Your email address is never shown to other members.

Your profile contains a display name of your choosing and, optionally, a short biography, an age bracket and a picture (a monogram, an illustration or a photograph). You never need to use your real name. Profiles are visible only to signed-in members.

Photographs are optional. When you upload one, it is cropped in your browser, and embedded camera and location details are removed when it reaches our servers. It is stored in private storage and is checked before other members can see it — first by an automated AI moderation tool and, where needed, by a moderator. You can replace or remove it at any time; removing it deletes the file from our storage.

The lawful basis is performing our agreement with you.

Discussions and replies you submit are checked before they appear — first by an automated AI moderation tool and, where needed, by a moderator — and, once approved, can be read by anyone visiting the website, together with your display name and approved picture. Reactions you give are recorded against your account but are not shown publicly as yours.

Please think carefully before sharing personal details. We cannot automatically detect or remove personal information you include in your own words.

The lawful basis is performing our agreement with you and our legitimate interest in running a moderated community.

Ask Cupid conversations are saved to your account so Cupid can follow the thread of a conversation. They are not visible to other members or to the public. Recent messages from the current conversation (your message plus up to the last eight messages) are sent to our AI provider to generate a reply. Your name and email address are not included, but anything you type is.

You can rename conversations, delete individual conversations, or delete all of them at any time. Deleting a conversation removes it and its messages from our database.

The lawful basis is performing our agreement with you. See section 8 for sensitive information.

When you report content or a profile we record what was reported, the reason, any details you give and who reported it. The member reported is not told who reported them. When you block a member we record that choice so it can be enforced; they are not notified.

We keep records of moderation decisions (such as approvals, removals, warnings, suspensions and bans) and rate-limit records that help prevent abuse.

Automated moderation: to keep the community safe at scale, new and edited discussions, replies and profile photographs are sent to an AI model (provided by OpenAI through our platform provider, Lovable) that assesses them against our Community Guidelines. The provider's terms for this model state that it does not retain the content or use it for training. The tool can approve clearly suitable content, hold content for a moderator, or stop content being published. It never warns, suspends or bans anyone — those decisions are always made by a person — and you can ask for a person to review any automated decision not to publish your content. We record the outcome, a short reason, the model and policy version used. Our lawful basis is our legitimate interest in running a safe, moderated community and meeting our online-safety duties. [Draft — wording and retention period for moderation records to be confirmed following legal review.]

The lawful basis is our legitimate interest in keeping the community safe and treating members fairly.

Conversations about relationships can involve special category information under UK GDPR — for example about your health, sex life or sexual orientation. Simply typing such information does not, on its own, mean you have given explicit consent, and we do not treat it that way.

The Love Lounge: approved discussions and replies are visible to anyone visiting the website, not only to members. Where you choose to publish sensitive information in such a contribution, we expect to rely on the condition for information you have deliberately made public (Article 9(2)(e)). Whether this condition applies, and whether a further safeguard such as explicit consent is needed, must be confirmed by legal review.

Ask Cupid: conversations are private, so that condition does not apply. Before your first live conversation we ask for your explicit consent (Article 9(2)(a)) using a separate, unticked checkbox that is not bundled with any other agreement or email preference. We record the wording and version you agreed to and when you agreed. If you decline, you can still see sample replies but live AI conversations are unavailable.

Withdrawing consent: you can withdraw at any time from Ask Cupid Privacy & Consent in your account menu. From that moment, no new messages from you are sent to the AI provider. Withdrawal doesn't affect processing carried out lawfully before it, and doesn't delete your saved conversations by itself; you can delete them there or in Ask Cupid. We keep the record of when you gave and withdrew consent to show your choices were respected.

Wherever possible, please avoid sharing names, addresses or other details that could identify you or anyone else.

We do not sell your personal information. We use these service providers to run Dear Cupid:

[Data processing agreements, the providers' locations, international transfer safeguards and how each provider handles and retains AI requests must be confirmed before external beta testing.]

Account, profile and Ask Cupid information is kept while your account is open, unless you delete it sooner. Deleted Ask Cupid conversations and removed photographs are deleted from our database and storage. Discussions and replies you delete are removed from public view straight away, and are kept for moderation records.

[Retention periods for deleted community contributions, moderation and report records, waiting-list entries, expired invitations, closed accounts and backups have not yet been decided and must be set before external beta testing.]

During the beta, you can ask us to close your account and delete your information by emailing info@dearcupid.app from the email address linked to your account. We will confirm your identity, delete your account, profile, photographs, Ask Cupid conversations and membership records, and agree with you whether your published contributions are removed or shown as written by "Former Member". We will confirm when this is done.

We use access controls so that members can only reach their own private information and only authorised staff can use moderation tools. No online service can be completely secure, so please choose a strong password and avoid sharing more than you need to.

Under UK data protection law you have rights to access your information, correct it, have it deleted, restrict or object to certain uses, receive a copy in a portable form, and withdraw any consent you have given. Some rights depend on the circumstances.

To use any of these rights, email info@dearcupid.app. We will respond within one month, as the law requires.

If you are unhappy with how we handle your information, please contact us first at info@dearcupid.app. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO): ico.org.uk, telephone 0303 123 1113.

We use essential browser storage to keep you signed in. We do not currently use advertising or analytics cookies. [Cookie wording to be confirmed by legal review.] We may update this policy as the service develops; see also our Terms of Use.