Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 2026

This policy explains what Dateworthy, operated by Pappas Productions LLC, collects and how we use it. The short version: we collect what we need to run a dating app, we do not sell your data, we do not use it for advertising, and we do not track you across other companies’ apps or websites.

This website collects nothing. These pages are plain HTML and one stylesheet, served as static files. There is no analytics, no tracking pixel, no advertising tag, no embedded font or script from anywhere else, and no cookie is set. Everything below is about the Dateworthy iOS app.

What we collect, and why

Your phone number: To create your account and sign you in with a one-time code. It is also how we find your account if you write to us. Your number is never shown to other users.
Your date of birth: To confirm you are 18 or older and to calculate your age. Only your age is shown to others, never your exact date of birth.
Your profile: The things you type and choose: first name, the prompts you answer, your height, what you’re looking for, lifestyle and background answers, your industry, and the rest of the public profile fields. This is the part other users see.
Your photos: Uploaded by you, part of your profile, and shown to other users. Every photo is screened before it is stored — see Photos and video.
Your location: Required, and foreground only. See Location and Passport for exactly what we do with it.
Your dating preferences: Including who you want to see, so we can show you relevant people. Some of this is sensitive and we treat it that way.
Your private Shadow Search answers: Optional, never displayed on your profile. See Shadow Search answers.
Messages and media in chat: The messages, photos, voice notes, GIFs and video messages you send in a conversation, stored so we can deliver them to the person you sent them to.
Your contacts, only if you turn contact blocking on: Optional. See Phone numbers are stored as hashes.
A push notification token: If you turn notifications on, so we can tell you about new matches and messages. It identifies a device for delivery, not you personally, and it is not used for tracking.
Your IP address, at sign-up and sign-in: Checked against a VPN / proxy / datacenter list, because scam-farm signups come from those addresses. The same check runs once when your phone reports a location far from home, so a faked location can’t earn a free Passport. We don’t use your IP to work out where you are — that comes from your device’s GPS.
Reports and safety records: If you report someone, or someone reports you, we keep the report, what it said, and what we did about it. Catfish reports can include a photo you took when you met; only our safety team can open it, through a short-lived link, and the file is deleted when the report is resolved.
Your eligibility attestation: The fact that you agreed to the eligibility rules in the Terms of Use, and which version of that wording you agreed to.

Phone numbers are stored as hashes

Two features work on phone numbers without our servers keeping the numbers.

Blocking your contacts. If you turn this on, your phone normalises the numbers in your address book and sends them to us. Our server hashes each one with a secret salt, stores only the hashes, and discards the raw numbers. Anyone whose number matches is then hidden from you and you from them, in both directions. The salt never leaves our server, so the stored hashes can’t be turned back into phone numbers even if the database leaked. You can switch it off at any time, which deletes the hashes.

Ban records. When an account is banned we keep a hash of its phone number and perceptual fingerprints of its photos — not the number, not the photos — so the same person can’t sign straight back up. That is the whole point of a ban, and it is the one record that survives a deletion.

Shadow Search answers

Shadow Search answers are optional, and they are private in a specific, enforced way:

They are never displayed on your profile and are never returned to another user. There is no route in our API, anywhere, that gives one person another person’s Shadow answers or Shadow filters.
They are used on our servers only to decide whether you match somebody else’s private filter. The result of a filter is who appears in a deck — never an answer.
Nobody learns what anyone searched, and the person being filtered gets no signal at all. The “matches N of your filters” count shown on a profile is computed only from public profile fields, deliberately, so it can’t be used to read a private answer off the number.
Sensitive answers — the tier-3 intimate questions, and health questions such as HSV status — are encrypted at rest with a key held by the server. They are decrypted only when you yourself read them back.
The intimate questions are off by default, require you to opt in, and can be turned back off.
You can change or delete any answer at any time.

Photos and video

Profile photos. They are stored for as long as they are on your profile. Before a photo is stored it is screened: a perceptual fingerprint catches duplicates and re-uploads of banned photos, and further checks look for AI-generated or manipulated images, for meme captions, for whether a face is present, for more than one person in the shot, and for faces that appear to belong to a minor (which are blurred before the image is stored at all). Deleting a photo removes it from your profile; deleting your account removes all of them.

Video messages. A video message is up to ten seconds, is uploaded straight from your phone to our object storage, and is deleted automatically: one hour after the recipient views it, or thirty days after it was sent if it is never viewed. A background job does the deleting.

Photo evidence on a catfish report. Stored in the same object storage, readable only by our safety team through a short-lived link, and deleted when the report is resolved.

Location, and how Passport works

Location is required to use Dateworthy. A dating app that shows you people near you cannot work without it, so there is no location-off mode. What we ask for is the iOS “While Using the App” permission. We never ask for “Always,” and we never track you in the background.

Your exact position is never shown to anyone. Other users only ever see a rounded label like “3 mi away.”
Your first fix becomes your home location. That is what the distance filter measures from.
When the app is in the foreground it sends a fresh fix at most once every ten minutes.
If that fix is 50 or more miles from your home location, Dateworthy browses from where you actually are, automatically and free, for as long as you are there. That is the whole contextual Passport: you are really there, so you get it. A VPN, proxy or datacenter IP never earns it.
Setting a Passport by hand, to browse a city before you get there, is a separate premium feature. The free one above is not.

Companies that handle your data for us

We do not sell your data and we do not share it with anyone for their advertising. We do, however, run on other people’s infrastructure, and the honest version of “we protect your privacy” is telling you exactly who else touches what:

MongoDB Atlas: The managed database where your account, profile, matches and messages are stored.
Render: Hosts the Dateworthy API. All traffic between the app and the API goes through it.
Cloudflare R2: Object storage for video messages and for photo evidence attached to a report.
Sightengine: Photo screening. When this screening is enabled, an uploaded photo is sent to Sightengine to check whether it is AI-generated or manipulated, whether a face is present, and whether a face appears to belong to a minor.
proxycheck.io: Receives the IP address you connect from, at sign-up and sign-in and on a far-from-home location update, and tells us whether it is a VPN, proxy or datacenter address.
Giphy: Powers the GIF picker in chat. When you open it, your phone queries Giphy directly, so Giphy sees your search terms and your IP address. It does not see your profile, your messages or who you are talking to.
Expo push notification service: Delivers push notifications to your device, and passes them on to Apple.
Apple: Distributes the app and delivers push notifications to your phone.

If we add another processor — for example an SMS provider to deliver sign-in codes — we will add it to this list and update the date at the top of this page.

What we do not do

We do not sell your personal data.
We do not share it with third parties for their advertising.
There are no third-party advertising or cross-app tracking SDKs in the app, and no analytics SDK collecting your behaviour for anyone.
We do not rate your attractiveness, and there is no desirability score anywhere in the ranking.
We do not show your exact location to anyone.

How your data is protected

Data is sent over encrypted connections (HTTPS). Sensitive Shadow answers are additionally encrypted at rest. Access to personal data is limited to operating the service and responding to safety reports, and every moderation action is recorded with the reason and who took it. No system is perfectly secure, but we work to protect your information.

Your choices, your export, your deletion

Edit or remove. You can change or delete your photos, prompts, preferences and private answers at any time, from inside the app.

Export. Settings › Export my data returns everything we hold on you, including your own Shadow answers and filters. That is the only place Shadow answers are ever handed out, and only to you.

Delete. Profile › Delete account is permanent. It deletes your profile and every answer on it, every photo and voice prompt you uploaded, your matches and the messages in them, your likes, your Worthys, your filters and your private answers. Your phone number is released, so the number can be used for a fresh signup. The people you matched with lose the thread too. What we keep afterwards is the bare minimum the law requires and any safety report filed against you — deleting an account has never been a way to wipe one.

If you want any of this done for you, or you want to know what we hold, email dev@pappasproductions.com from the number on the account or tell us that number, so we can find you.

Children

Dateworthy is for adults 18 and older. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18, and we remove accounts we believe belong to minors. Any attempt to involve or contact a minor is reported to the appropriate authorities.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top of this page and, where appropriate, tell you in the app.

Contact

Questions or requests about your data? Email dev@pappasproductions.com. Dateworthy is operated by Pappas Productions LLC.