Privacy
by default.

Data minimisation, not collection

We collect only what’s needed to run the product. We don’t take your call logs, your contact list, your social graph, or anything else off your device beyond what you deliberately give us.

What we store

• Your email address and a hash of your password (sign-in)
• Your date of birth — we check on our servers that you’re 18 or over
• Profile information you enter: display name, bio, tagline, tags
• Photos you upload (profile photos; albums are switched off during the beta)
• Conversations and messages
• An energy counter used by wellbeing features (not shown during the beta)
• Trust signals that help our moderators, such as whether you’ve confirmed your age, completed your profile, or been reported
• Your most recent location, when you use location-based discovery

What we don’t do

• We never show anyone your exact position. We store your coordinates so we can work out distance, but the database blocks other user accounts from reading them, and what other people receive is a position snapped to a grid of roughly 550 metres.
• We don’t keep a location history or a movement trail — only your latest position, overwritten each time it updates.
• We don’t collect location in the background, or from any other app on your device.
• We don’t touch your contact list, your social graph, or other apps.
• We don’t read your messages for advertising, because there is no advertising.
• We don’t use device identifiers for cross-app tracking.
• We don’t sell your data.

How the location snapping works

This is the part worth understanding properly, because it’s the difference between a privacy feature and a promise.

• Your coordinates are stored against your profile and are readable only by you and by our servers.
• When someone loads the map, our server hands back a position snapped to a ~550 metre grid, with a small fixed offset that belongs to your profile. Your pin sits somewhere inside that square rather than on your address.
• Because the snapping happens inside the server query rather than in the app’s interface, it also holds for anyone talking to our API directly instead of using the app.
• The offset is stable rather than random, so your pin doesn’t jitter between refreshes in a way that would let someone average out your real position.
• Turn location off and you don’t appear on the map at all.

Visibility controls

You control who sees what, and you can change it at any time in Settings.

Map visibility

• You only appear on the map if you allow location access. Turn location off and you don’t appear at all.
• Anonymous mode: your pin shows no name or photo.
• Anonymous mode, private visibility and blocking are all enforced on our servers, not by the app — so they hold at the API too.

Profile visibility

• Public: people on SYNC can see your profile, and you can appear on the map
• Private: your photos stay locked until you approve someone, and you’re hidden from the map

Where we stand legally

SYNC is operated from Melbourne, Australia by Diarmuid Dunne. We’re bound by the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the 13 Australian Privacy Principles.

• Information about your sexual orientation is “sensitive information” under the Privacy Act. It gets a higher standard of protection, and we can only collect it with your consent — which you give when you create a SYNC profile.
• We’re covered by the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme. If there’s a breach that’s likely to cause serious harm, we notify the OAIC and we notify you. Given what SYNC is, we treat anything that could out someone as serious harm by default.
• Some of your data is stored overseas — our database and photo storage are in Frankfurt, Germany. We have to tell you that, and we do.
• If you’re in the EU, the EEA or the UK, the GDPR applies to you as well and we honour it.

Your rights

Under the Australian Privacy Principles, and as a matter of policy wherever you live:

• Access: download everything we hold about you (Settings → Export my data)
• Correction: edit any field in your profile at any time, or email us for anything you can’t edit yourself
• Deletion: delete your account. There’s a cooling-off period during which your profile is hidden and you can change your mind, then it’s permanent.
• Portability: the export is machine-readable JSON
• Withdraw consent: turn location off, or delete your account
• Complain: to us first, and to the regulator if we don’t sort it out

One thing about deletion worth knowing: when your account goes, your messages are anonymised rather than deleted. The other person keeps their conversation, with you shown as a deleted user. We do that so deleting your account never breaks someone else’s history.

Complaints

Come to us first — privacy@syncdatingapp.com, with “Privacy complaint” in the subject. We’ll acknowledge within 5 business days and answer in writing within 30 days.

If we don’t fix it, you can take it to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, the regulator for the Privacy Act, at oaic.gov.au. If you’re in the EU, the EEA or the UK, you can also complain to your local data protection authority.

Third parties

We use these providers to run the product:

• Supabase (database, sign-in and photo storage) — hosted in Frankfurt, Germany
• Vercel (hosting and edge functions)
• Resend (transactional email)
• Amazon Web Services Rekognition (automated screening of uploaded images) — United States
• PostHog (product analytics, tied to a random account identifier) — United States
• OneSignal (push notifications, if you turn them on) — United States
• Sentry (error reports so we can fix crashes)
• OpenRouter (AI Wingman suggestions — not used during the beta)

We don’t sell your data. We don’t share it with advertisers. SYNC has no ads.

Questions?

Email privacy@syncdatingapp.com for any data request. We answer access and correction requests within 30 days, which is what the Privacy Act requires, and usually a lot sooner.