Privacy Policy

This policy covers the Aligned Hearts website, the Aligned Hearts mobile app for iOS and Android, our events, and our matchmaking and coaching services.

Aligned Hearts is the controller of the personal information described here. You can reach us at hello@alignedhearts.singles. Privacy requests reach a person, not a queue.

Aligned Hearts is for adults. You must be 18 or older to create an account, attend an event, or become a client. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If we learn that an account belongs to a minor, we delete it and its associated data. See our Child Safety Standards.

Information you give us

• Account details. Name, email address, date of birth, city, and the password or sign-in method you choose.
• Your profile. Photographs, the things you write about yourself, your preferences, and your ranking and description of the Five Alignments.
• Your intake file. For matchmaking and coaching clients: your relationship history, what you are looking for, your dealbreakers, and the notes Samuel takes during sessions and debriefs.
• Messages. Conversations with people you have matched with, and your correspondence with us.
• Bookings and tickets. What you booked, when, and whether you attended.
• Payment details. Handled by Stripe. We receive a confirmation, the last four digits and the card brand. Full card numbers never reach our systems.
• Anything else you send us. Support emails, event feedback, reports about another member.

Information we collect automatically

• Device and technical data. IP address, device type, operating system, app version, browser, and identifiers assigned to your device.
• Usage data. Which screens you open, which introductions you view, when you open the app. We use this to run and fix the product, not to work out how to keep you on it longer.
• Approximate location. Derived from your IP address or, on mobile, from coarse device location, so we can show you introductions and events in your area.
• Precise location. Only if you explicitly turn it on, and only to improve event and introduction proximity. You can turn it off at any time in your device settings without losing access to anything else.

Information from others

• Payment processors, who tell us whether a payment succeeded.
• Age signals from Apple and Google, where a state App Store Accountability law requires an age category or parental-consent status to be passed to us. This is covered in section 4.
• App stores, which tell us about downloads, crashes and subscription status in aggregate.

Some of what we hold is sensitive personal information under US state privacy law and similar laws elsewhere, and we treat it accordingly.

That includes: information about your sexual orientation and sex life; your precise geolocation, if you enable it; and, unavoidably, information in your intake file that touches on health, relationships, family planning or religion because you chose to tell us.

How we handle it

• We ask for your opt-in consent before processing sensitive personal information, and you can withdraw that consent at any time.
• We use it only to provide the service — to make introductions, run your bookings, and keep members safe.
• We never sell it, share it for advertising, or use it to build a marketing profile.
• We never use it to infer characteristics about you for any purpose other than matching you with people, which is the thing you asked us to do.

Several states now require app stores to pass an age category, and sometimes a parental-consent status, to developers. Where Apple or Google provides us with such a signal, we treat it as its own category of personal information:

• We use it only to confirm you are 18 or over and to enforce the age restriction on this service.
• We never use it for advertising, profiling, personalisation, or any purpose other than compliance.
• We do not retain it. The signal is evaluated at the point of account creation and discarded once verification is complete.

We do not verify identity. We do not ask for a selfie, a government-issued ID, or any other identity document, and we do not collect, create or keep biometric data of any kind — no face scans, no templates, no liveness checks.

What we do check is narrower: that you are 18 or over, as described in section 4, and that you control the email address or phone number you sign in with, which is confirmed by the code we send it.

We use personal information to:

• Make introductions and show you where you align with someone
• Confirm you are an adult and keep the community safe
• Run bookings, sessions, events and tickets
• Send service messages: confirmations, reminders, introduction alerts, event updates
• Send marketing emails, if you asked for them, and stop the moment you unsubscribe
• Investigate reports, enforce our Terms and Safety Standards, and prevent fraud
• Fix crashes, measure which pages work, and improve the product
• Meet legal obligations, including tax, accounting, and responses to lawful requests

What we do not do. We do not use your intake file, your messages, your Five Alignments, or anything about your relationships to target advertising. We do not train third-party AI models on your personal information. We do not use automated decision-making that produces legal or similarly significant effects about you.

Samuel sees the profile, intake file and correspondence of his one-to-one clients. That is the job.

Other members see only what you put in your profile, and only when you have been matched. Your intake file is never shown to another member. Your profile is not browsable, not searchable, and not indexed by search engines.

Service providers, under contract, and only what they need to do their work:

• Payment processing (Stripe)
• Cloud hosting and storage
• Email and notification delivery
• Error monitoring and analytics
• Scheduling and calendar tools
• Event ticketing

Each is bound to use the information only to provide its service to us, and is prohibited from selling it or using it for its own purposes.

Legal and safety disclosures. We may disclose information when we are legally required to, when we believe in good faith that it is necessary to protect someone from serious harm, or to establish or defend legal claims. If someone's safety is at stake, we will act first.

Business transfers. If Aligned Hearts is acquired or merged, personal information may transfer to the successor. We will tell you before that happens and the successor will be bound by this policy or give you a meaningful choice.

Service messages — booking confirmations, introduction alerts, event updates, security notices — are part of the product and cannot be turned off while your account is active, though you can control push notifications in your device settings.

Marketing emails only go to people who asked for them. Every one has a working unsubscribe link and we act on it immediately. We do not sell or rent our mailing list.

After you delete your account, we remove your personal information within 30 days, except where a row above requires us to keep something longer, or where we must keep the minimum necessary to stop a banned account from returning. Backups are purged on a rolling cycle completed within 90 days.

Wherever you live, Aligned Hearts gives you all of the following. We do not restrict them by country or state, because operating a two-tier privacy service seemed worse than just giving everyone the same rights.

• Know and access. What we hold about you, where it came from, and who we have disclosed it to.
• Correct. Fix anything inaccurate.
• Delete. Remove your personal information, subject to section 9.
• Portability. Get a copy in a usable, machine-readable format.
• Opt out of sale or sharing. We do not do either, but the right stands.
• Opt out of targeted advertising. Likewise.
• Limit the use of sensitive personal information. To what is necessary to provide the service.
• Opt out of profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects. We do not do this.
• Withdraw consent at any time.
• Non-retaliation. Exercising any of these rights never affects your service, your price, or how Samuel treats you.

How to exercise them. To delete, the fastest route is the app: You → Account → Delete account, with no need to contact anyone. For a copy of your data or anything else, use the Delete Your Account page, or email hello@alignedhearts.singles.

Timing. We respond within 45 days and will tell you if we need a further 45, which is rare.

Verification. We need to be confident the request comes from you. Usually that means confirming control of the email on the account. For deletion we may ask for a second confirmation, because deletion is permanent.

Authorised agents may act for you with written permission; we may still contact you to confirm.

Appeals. If we refuse a request, we will tell you why and how to appeal. Email hello@alignedhearts.singles with "Appeal" in the subject line and a person will re-examine it within 45 days. If we deny the appeal, we will give you a working link to submit a complaint to your state attorney general. Residents of Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Montana, Texas, Oregon, Delaware, New Jersey, Minnesota, Maryland, Indiana, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Iowa, Utah and Washington have this right by statute; we extend it to everyone.

If your browser or an extension sends a Global Privacy Control signal, we treat it as a valid opt-out of sale and sharing for that browser, automatically. You do not need to do anything else and we will not ask you to confirm.

We recognise GPC on every page of this site. Where you are signed in, we apply the opt-out to your account rather than just the browser.

California. This policy is also our Notice at Collection. The categories of personal information we collect are listed in section 2; they map to the CCPA categories of identifiers, customer records, protected classifications, commercial information, internet activity, geolocation, sensory data (photographs), professional information where you volunteer it, inferences, and sensitive personal information. Purposes are in section 6, sources in section 2, disclosures in section 7, retention in section 9. We have not sold or shared personal information in the preceding twelve months. California residents have the rights in section 10, including the right to limit use of sensitive personal information, and may designate an authorised agent.

Nevada. Nevada residents may submit a verified request that we not sell covered information. We do not sell it. Requests to hello@alignedhearts.singles.

Washington and Nevada consumer health data. See section 3. This section, together with section 3, serves as our Consumer Health Data Privacy Notice.

Colorado. In addition to section 10, Colorado residents may opt out through a universal opt-out mechanism, which we honour. As an online dating service, we also file an annual safety report with the Colorado Attorney General.

Other states. Residents of every state with a comprehensive privacy law have the rights in section 10 and the appeal route described there.

We use encryption in transit and at rest, access controls that limit internal access to people who need it, and monitoring for unusual activity. Access to intake files is restricted to Samuel.

No system is perfectly secure and we will not claim otherwise. If a breach affects your personal information, we will notify you and the relevant authorities as the law requires, and we will tell you what actually happened rather than issuing a statement about how seriously we take your privacy.

Aligned Hearts is based in the United States, and your information is stored here. The service is open to people anywhere in the world. If you use it from outside the United States, your information is transferred to and processed in the United States, where data protection law may differ from the law where you live. Some service providers may process information in other countries, under contractual protections.

If we change this policy materially, we will email account holders and post a notice on the site at least seven days before it takes effect. The effective date at the top always tells you which version you are reading. Previous versions are available on request.

hello@alignedhearts.singles — for any privacy question, request, appeal or complaint. A person answers.