Your data, in plain terms.

HookUs is an adults-only dating and social discovery service. This policy explains what we collect about you, why, who else sees it, how long we keep it and what you can make us do about it.

It covers the HookUs website at hookus.app and the HookUs mobile apps. It is written to describe what the product actually does today, not what it might do later.

HookUs is strictly for people aged 18 and over. We ask for your date of birth when you create a profile and refuse accounts below 18. We do not knowingly collect anything from a child. If you believe someone under 18 has an account, report the profile in the app or email us and we will remove it and delete their data.

Everything in this table is something you give us or something the app produces as you use it.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers.

Location is optional. If you decline the permission, HookUs still works — you simply will not see distances, and distance-based discovery will not apply to you.

When you do share it:

• We store your coordinates to calculate distance, and your city and country for your profile.
• Your coordinates are never disclosed to another member. Other members see a rounded distance and, if you set one, your city — never a precise point, and never an address.
• The distance shown is a whole number of kilometres and never below 1 km, so it cannot imply you are at the same address as someone.
• Location older than 24 hours stops being used for distance until the app refreshes it.
• We collect location only while you are using the app. HookUs does not track you in the background.

Your stored location history is permanently deleted when you delete your account.

A verified badge on a HookUs profile means the member has confirmed an email address or phone number they control. It means they are contactable. It is not a check of who they are, and you should not treat it as one.

Our platform also supports a stronger identity check that reviews a selfie, a short liveness video and a government identity document, assessed by a trained reviewer. Where that check is offered to you, taking it is your choice, the documents are used only to decide whether to grant the badge, and they are never shown to other members.

Other members

Your profile — name, age, photos, bio, prompts, interests and the details you chose to add — is visible to other members who can discover you. Some answers you mark as matches-only are shown only to people you have matched with. A private album is visible only to the specific people you grant access to, for as long as that access lasts.

A few things on your profile are only ever yours: your company name and the number of children you have are never shown to another member, even after you match.

Service providers

We use a small number of providers to run the service. They act on our instructions:

• Cloud hosting and databases — to run the service and store your data.
• Cloudflare R2 — to store photos, videos and chat media.
• Expo push notification service and the platform push services (Apple, Google) — to deliver notifications to your device.
• Twilio — to send SMS such as verification codes.
• Our email provider — to send account and notification emails.

Legal and safety

We may disclose information where we are legally required to, or where it is genuinely necessary to investigate abuse, enforce our Terms, or protect someone's safety.

If you allow notifications, we register a push token for that device so we can tell you about messages, matches, likes and Hooks. You can turn notifications off at any time in your device settings, or from Settings inside the app, which also revokes the token on our side.

We record whether a device is capable of receiving notifications and whether you granted or refused the permission, so that support can tell "never asked" apart from "asked and declined" when a member reports that notifications are not arriving.

• See and change your data. Your profile is editable in the app at any time.
• Hide yourself. You can set your profile to hidden, which removes you from discovery without deleting anything.
• Turn off location or notifications. Both are permissions you can withdraw in your device settings.
• Block and report. Blocking is immediate and mutual: neither of you appears to the other again.
• Delete your account. In the app, from Settings.

Depending on where you live, you may also have rights to access, correct, export or erase your personal data, and to object to some processing. Email us at privacy@hookus.app and we will respond.

We would rather tell you precisely than say "we delete everything" and be wrong.

When you delete your HookUs account:

• Your profile is removed from HookUs and anonymised, and your photos and videos are queued for permanent deletion from storage.
• Your stored location history is permanently deleted.
• Your likes, passes and matches are ended and removed from view.
• Every sign-in session is revoked and your devices are deregistered from notifications.

Two things are deliberately kept, and you should know about both:

• Messages you already sent remain in the other person's conversation. We cannot remove a message from someone else's inbox without rewriting their history of a conversation they took part in.
• Safety records — reports, blocks, enforcement decisions and security events — are retained. Deleting an account must not be a way to erase a record of harm to someone else.

If you want your data erased beyond this, email privacy@hookus.app and we will tell you what we can and cannot do, and why.

• Traffic between your device and HookUs is encrypted in transit.
• Passwords are stored only as a hash. We cannot read your password.
• Photos and private album media are served through short-lived signed links, not permanent public URLs.
• Repeated failed sign-ins and account-closure attempts are rate limited.

No service can promise perfect security. If a breach affects you, we will tell you and the relevant regulator where the law requires it.

HookUs is available internationally, and our providers operate across multiple countries. Your information may therefore be processed outside the country you live in, including in countries with different data protection laws. Where we transfer personal data internationally, we rely on the safeguards available to us under applicable law.

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top of this page. If a change materially affects how we use your information, we will tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect.

Questions about this policy, or about your data, go to privacy@hookus.app. See also our Terms of Service and our Trust & Safety page.