Law enforcement guidelines

This page is for law enforcement officers and agencies seeking records from Aligned Hearts. It is not legal advice and it does not expand or limit anyone's rights.

If you are a member rather than an investigator, the pages you want are Safety & Community Standards for reporting someone, and Privacy for what we hold about you and how to get it, correct it or delete it.

Email is the fastest route and the one we prefer. Post reaches us at 1180 Peachtree St NE, Suite 400, Atlanta, GA 30309, and takes considerably longer.

Please include:

• The issuing agency, the officer's name, badge or ID number, and a direct telephone number and official email address, so we can verify the request is genuine
• The legal process relied on, attached as a PDF
• A clear identifier for the account — the email address is best. We cannot reliably search by a person's real name; see section 5
• The specific records sought and the date range
• Your deadline, and whether the matter is time-critical

We verify every request before acting on it, including calling the agency back on a number we look up independently. This is not obstruction — impersonating law enforcement is a routine tactic for obtaining someone's data, and a service that skips the check is a service that can be socially engineered.

We disclose records as the Stored Communications Act (18 U.S.C. § 2701 et seq.) and other applicable law require, and not otherwise.

A request from outside the United States should come through a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, letter rogatory, or other recognised channel. We will tell you promptly if we cannot act on what you have sent rather than leaving it unanswered.

We may object to, narrow, or decline a request that is overbroad, vague, improperly served, or not supported by the process the law requires. Where we do, we say which part is the problem so it can be corrected.

Emergency disclosure. Under 18 U.S.C. § 2702(b)(8) we may disclose records without legal process where we believe in good faith that an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury requires it. Put EMERGENCY in the subject line, state the nature of the danger, the person at risk, and why the information is needed now. We act on these the same day, and we would rather look at one that turns out not to qualify than be careful with somebody's life.

Preservation requests. Under 18 U.S.C. § 2703(f) we will preserve existing records for 90 days pending legal process, extendable by a further 90 days on request. A preservation request does not itself disclose anything. Send it the moment an account matters to an investigation — a member can delete their account at any time, and our ordinary deletion runs within 30 days, with backups purged inside 90.

We also do not run criminal background checks. Please do not treat the presence of an account as evidence that anybody was screened.

What exists: the email address or telephone number used to sign in and whether it was verified; account creation and activity dates; profile text and photographs; messages exchanged between members who matched; records of reports and blocks; enforcement history; and payment records for sessions, tickets and retainers.

Photographs are held in private storage and are never public. They are served to members only through links that expire after fifteen minutes, so there is no public URL to preserve, and an image cannot be obtained by anybody who has not been served it.

Payments are processed by Stripe. We hold the transaction record, the last four digits of the card, the brand and the expiry month. We never hold a full card number — card details do not reach our servers at all. Card data beyond that must be sought from the payment processor or the issuing bank.

Location. Members may share a location so that distances can be calculated. Distance is shown to other members as a banded label, never as coordinates.

Conversations are not pre-read. We do not monitor messages. Messages between matched members exist in our systems and are producible on a warrant, but nobody at Aligned Hearts has read them in the ordinary course.

Section 9 of the Privacy Policy carries the full table. In summary:

• An active account — held while the account is active.
• After deletion — personal information is removed within 30 days, and backups are purged on a rolling cycle completed within 90 days.
• Payment and transaction records — 7 years, for tax and accounting law.
• Safety reports — 5 years, so that a report cannot be erased by deleting the account it was made about.
• Enforcement records — 5 years, as an identifier only, to stop a removed account re-registering. No images and no profile content.
• Anything under a preservation request or legal hold — kept as long as the law requires, outside the cycles above.

Our default is to notify a member before disclosing their records, with enough time to object, because somebody is entitled to know when their private messages are handed to the state.

We will not notify where we are legally prohibited from doing so, such as under a non-disclosure order; where we believe notice would create a risk of death, serious physical injury, harm to a child, or destruction of evidence; or where the account appears to exist only to commit the offence under investigation.

If you need notice withheld, say so in the request and state the legal basis or the specific risk. We will not withhold notice simply because withholding it is more convenient.

Child sexual abuse and exploitation material is reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children under 18 U.S.C. § 2258A, and evidence is preserved as the law directs. The Child Safety Standards page sets out our obligations and our named point of contact in full.

Anything involving a minor is escalated ahead of everything else and reviewed the same day. Mark it CHILD SAFETY and it jumps the queue.

Format. Records are produced electronically, as PDF or CSV, with a short note explaining what each field means. Our systems were built to run a matchmaking practice rather than to answer subpoenas, so a plain-English key is usually more useful than a raw export.

Certification. We will provide a business-records certification under Federal Rule of Evidence 902(11) on request. Ask for it when you serve the process rather than afterwards.

Costs. We do not charge for responding to a preservation request, an emergency request, or any request concerning a child. We reserve the right to seek reimbursement for the reasonable cost of an unusually broad production, as the law permits, and we will tell you before incurring it rather than afterwards.

• We will not disclose content without a warrant, absent a qualifying emergency.
• We will not give anyone standing access to our systems, accounts or databases, and there is no portal.
• We will not build surveillance into the product or monitor a member prospectively on request.
• We will not confirm or deny the existence of an account to anyone who has not served valid legal process, including to someone claiming to be a family member, an employer, or a private investigator.
• We will not vouch for an identity we have not verified, and we do not verify any.

Where we decline something, we say so plainly and explain which part of the request is the obstacle.

Civil subpoenas, requests from private investigators, and requests from individuals go to the same address and are handled under the same rules. A civil subpoena does not obtain message content — the Stored Communications Act prohibits it — and the member whose records are sought will ordinarily be notified so they can object.

If you are trying to find out whether somebody you know has an account here, we will not tell you. Nothing on Aligned Hearts is browsable or indexed, and that holds for everyone.

Aligned Hearts files an annual safety report with the Colorado Attorney General's office by 31 January each year as Colorado law requires, and complies with the disclosure requirements of the New Jersey Internet Dating Safety Act and equivalent laws in other states.

We will post any change to this page here with a new effective date.