Privacy Policy

Last updated: 30 October 2026

1. The short version

We collect as little as we can. We don’t sell your data, and there are no advertising trackers.
Your chats are end-to-end encrypted. We can’t read them.
Nobody can browse you. Only the person you’re connected with sees your anonymous profile.
Your location is used only on the first-date screen, and never stored.
We record which pages of Crushsprout you visit, to see how it’s used. When you delete your account, that record is no longer linked to you.
When you delete your account, we delete your data and media immediately.

2. Who is responsible for your data

An independent developer based in India runs Crushsprout. We are the “Data Fiduciary” under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act) and the “controller” under the EU and UK GDPR. Contact: grievance@crushsprout.com.

3. What we collect

Account

Your email address, and if you sign in with Google or GitHub, an account identifier from that provider. We don’t keep your name, profile picture or contacts from them.
Your birth year and a record that you confirmed you are 18 or older. We don’t store your full date of birth.
Your gender (including “Prefer not to say”), which version of the Terms you accepted and when, and your settings.
The country you signed up from, worked out from your IP address, to show the right prices.

Profile

Your favourites, snaps and short videos (shown to your connections before any reveal).
Your reveal profile (photos, name and tagline), shown only when you choose to reveal.
We remove location and camera details (EXIF metadata) from photos and videos on your device before upload.

Chats

Messages, photos and voice notes are end-to-end encrypted. We store only the encrypted form, and only until the chat's timer runs out after the other person reads them (a minute, or up to 24 hours if the invited person chooses).
To deliver them we process limited information about them: which connection they belong to, when they were sent, their size and when they expire.
Your devices’ public encryption keys.

Invites and safety

Invites you send: the name or nickname you give the person (only you ever see it), the date, and a one-way hash of their address. We never store the address itself, and we never show it to anyone, including you (see If you were invited).
Blocks and reports: the reason and your own description. Reports never include anything from a chat.

Waitlist

If you ask us to email you when Crushsprout opens: your email address, the country you asked from (worked out from your IP address), and the date. Nothing else.

Feedback

If you send feedback (from “Feedback” at the bottom of the app, or “How was your first chat?”): what you write, the choice you tap, the app page you sent it from, and the date, linked to your account. Never anything from your chats.

Technical

Your IP address, browser and device type, and request logs, used to keep the Service secure, prevent abuse and fix problems.
Pages you visit on crushsprout.com, including inside the app: the page (with connection ids and invite links taken out), the time, the site that sent you (its name only), your country and your type of device. When you’re signed in, this is linked to your account. When you aren’t, it’s linked to an anonymous visitor number that changes every day; your IP address isn’t stored with it.

4. What we don’t collect

The content of your chats (we can’t read it).
Your precise location. On the first-date screen, your browser shares your location only if you allow it; we round it to a wide area (about 5 km) to look up nearby places, then discard it.
Your contacts, and your phone number (phone sign-in isn’t offered).

5. Why we use it

To provide the Service you signed up for: your account, profile, invites, connections, chat and reveal. (GDPR: performance of a contract. DPDP: your consent, given when you sign up.)
To keep people safe: checking you are 18+, rate-limiting invites, handling reports, and (once switched on) automatically checking uploaded profile media for illegal or unsafe content. (GDPR: legitimate interests and legal obligations.)
To understand and improve the Service: which pages people visit, how they move through sign-up, and where they get stuck, using the page record above and the feedback you send. (GDPR: legitimate interests. DPDP: your consent, given when you sign up.)
To send you service emails: sign-in codes, invite and connection notices, deletion warnings. We don’t send marketing emails without your separate consent.
To tell you when Crushsprout opens, only if you joined the waitlist: one email. (GDPR and DPDP: your consent.)
To send the weekly newsletter, only if you tick the box at sign-up or turn it on in Settings. It’s never pre-ticked, and you can turn it off in Settings at any time. (GDPR and DPDP: your consent.)
To meet legal obligations, such as responding to lawful requests and keeping records required by law.

You can also withdraw consent at any time by deleting your account (or, for the waitlist, by emailing support@crushsprout.com). However, this does not affect processing already carried out.

6. If you were invited

If someone invited you and you haven’t signed up:

We use your email address once, to send the invite email, and never store it. We keep only a one-way hash of it, which can’t be turned back into your address, to check that the right person accepts the invite and to enforce invite limits.
The person who invited you gives the invite a name or nickname so they can tell their invites apart. Only they can see it; it’s never sent to you or shown to anyone else, and it’s deleted with the invite.
Invite emails have no tracking: no tracking pixels and no tracked links. We don’t know whether you opened the email, and neither does the sender.
To stop anyone being flooded with invites, your address gets at most 3 invite emails in 30 days, from everyone combined.
If you don’t join, the invite and that hash are deleted after 40 days.
If you tap “Don’t contact me again”, we keep only a hash of your address, permanently, so that nobody can invite you again.
We never tell the sender whether you opened, declined or ignored the invite.

We don’t sell or rent your data. Instead, we share it only with service providers who process it for us, under contract:

Cloudflare: hosting, database, file storage, security, email forwarding, and counting visits to our public pages.
YadeApps: counting visits to our public pages.
Zoho (ZeptoMail): sending service emails.
Google and GitHub: sign-in, only if you choose them.
Anthropic (Claude): helps us review feedback and visit totals each week to decide what to improve. It receives the words of your feedback and overall numbers only, never your email, account or chats.
Geoapify: nearby-place lookups on the first-date screen. It receives the rounded area only, never who you are.
Microsoft (Azure AI Content Safety): automated checks of uploaded profile media, once switched on (not yet). It will receive the images and video frames only, never who you are.

We may also disclose information where the law requires it, or to protect someone’s safety. Because chats are end-to-end encrypted, we cannot disclose their content.

Affiliate and sponsored links on the first-date screen take you to other companies’ websites, whose own privacy policies apply.

8. Where your data is stored

Cloudflare hosts our database and files, with storage placed in the Asia-Pacific region where possible. Cloudflare’s network processes requests in data centres around the world, and our other providers may process data outside your country, including outside India and the EU/UK. So, where the GDPR applies, we rely on appropriate safeguards such as the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses.

9. How long we keep it

Your account and profile: until you delete your account (immediate), or until it is deleted automatically.
Accounts that aren’t used: deleted after 40 days without use, with email reminders beforehand.
Messages, photos and voice notes: one minute after the other person reads them, or longer if the invited person chose a timer (up to 24 hours). Unread ones wait, encrypted, until they are read or the connection ends.
Invites (with the sender’s nickname for the person and the address hash): 40 days if not accepted. Once accepted, the sender keeps seeing their nickname for as long as the connection lasts. Opt-out hashes: kept permanently to honour your request.
Waitlist: until we’ve sent the email saying Crushsprout is open, or until you create an account with that address, whichever comes first, and never more than 12 months. To be removed sooner, email support@crushsprout.com.
Feedback: 12 months. If your account is deleted sooner, the words stay until then without any link to you.
Reports: 180 days after they are resolved, as required by law.
Pages you visit: linked to your account for as long as it exists. When your account is deleted (by you, or for not being used), the record is kept only without any link to you: no account, email or user id, so it can’t be traced back to you. Records from signed-out visits carry only the visitor number that changes every day.
Security logs: a short period, currently up to 7 days.
Backups: our database provider keeps automatic point-in-time backups for up to 30 days, so deleted data can remain in these backups until they expire.

10. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you have the right to:

get a summary of the personal data we hold about you and how we use it;
correct, complete or update it;
have it erased (deleting your account does this immediately);
withdraw consent;
receive a copy in a portable format, restrict or object to certain processing (GDPR);
nominate someone to exercise your rights if you die or become unable to (DPDP Act);
have your grievance addressed by us, and then complain to the Data Protection Board of India, or your local data protection authority in the EU/UK.

Most of this is available in your account settings. For anything else, email grievance@crushsprout.com. Before acting on a request, we may need to confirm it’s you.

11. Security

Chats are end-to-end encrypted. Besides chats, we encrypt everything else in transit (HTTPS) and at rest. Similarly, media is private and shown only to the people you’re connected with, through short-lived links. Only the operator can access our systems. Of course, no system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your personal data, we will notify you and the authorities as the law requires.

12. Cookies

We use only essential cookies: to keep you signed in and to protect forms against abuse. In other words, we don’t use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, so there is nothing to opt out of.

We also count every page visit on our own servers, including on the sign-in page and inside the app (see What we collect). This uses no cookies and no tracking script, and we share nothing with anyone else.

On our public pages (such as the home page, How it works and FAQ), we count visits with Cloudflare Web Analytics. It sets no cookies, doesn’t identify you or follow you across sites, and gives us only totals, such as how many people visited a page, which site sent them, their country, their type of device, and how fast the page loaded. However, we don’t use it on the sign-in page, on invite links or anywhere in the app.

On the same pages, and only there, we also count visits with YadeApps analytics. It also sets no cookies and doesn’t store your IP address. We record each visit with the page, the site that sent you, your approximate location (country, region and city, worked out from your IP address), your type of device and browser, and an anonymous visitor number that changes every day, so a visit can’t be linked to you or to your visits on other days. In addition, it honours Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control.

13. Children

Crushsprout is for adults aged 18 and over. We block sign-ups from anyone who says they are under 18, and if we learn that an account belongs to someone under 18, we delete it.

14. Changes and contact

We’ll notify you by email and in the app before material changes to this policy take effect. Questions or requests: grievance@crushsprout.com (privacy and grievances) or support@crushsprout.com (general help). See also our Terms of Service.