Privacy

What Longhand is

Longhand is a dating app where you meet people through writing first. You take a quiz, and if matching is not running in your area yet, you wait until it is. Once you are in a live area you are shown one match at a time, you can open a conversation, and photographs are exchanged only after both of you have talked for three days and both agreed to it.

That means this page covers real conversations, real photographs of faces, and real payments.

What we collect

• Your email address.
• Your first name.
• Your date of birth, used to confirm you are 18 or older and to show your age to a match.
• Your gender identity and which genders you are interested in.
• The school you type in, if you do. Separately, if your email address ends in .edu we work out which school that is from the domain, and we mail you a link so you can confirm the address is yours. Until you click it we do not use it at all, because until then it is only a claim. Once you have, it can raise your score against somebody at the same school when you both said you wanted that, and it lets us tell such a person that you are a verified student. The name of the school is not shown to anybody.
• Roughly where you are, from a pin you put on a map yourself. There is a button that asks your browser where you are, and your browser will ask you before it answers. The reading is rounded to about a kilometre inside your own browser, before anything is sent, so the precise pair never reaches us and is not something we could hand over or lose. You never have to press it: dragging the pin, picking a city, or using the arrow keys all do the same job. The pin is rounded to about a kilometre before it is stored and only the rounded value is kept, so what we hold is a neighbourhood rather than an address. It is used to decide which city you are matched in and who is close enough to meet, and it is never shown to anybody else. Some accounts made before the map instead have a ZIP code they typed.
• Your quiz answers. There are 42 questions, a few of which are only asked depending on an earlier answer, including questions about politics, religion, relationship intentions, and alcohol, tobacco, or cannabis use.
• Photographs you upload, and any pictures you send inside a conversation. These are stored privately. They are never scanned, never used to identify you, and no face recognition of any kind is run on them.
• The messages you send and receive, kept so the conversation still exists when you come back to it.
• A record of anything you buy: what it was, what it cost, and whether it was paid. Card details are handled by our payment processor and never reach us.
• Who you have blocked or reported. A report also stores a copy of that conversation as it stood when you filed it.
• Login records: the one-time links we email you, and the sessions they open.
• If you turn notifications on, the address your browser gives us for sending them. It identifies that one browser on that one device and nothing else, and it is deleted when you turn them off or delete your account.
• Your network address, briefly, to count requests and stop somebody flooding the site or burying a stranger's inbox in our mail. It is counted against a limit and the counters are deleted once the hour they cover has passed.
• Basic usage events: which question you were on, whether you finished, whether you shared your result.
• Which link brought you here, if it carried a tag. A link we put in an advertisement or a post can end in something like `utm_source=instagram`, and we keep that word so we can tell which of them people actually come from. It is stored on your quiz answers, it is a single word we chose ourselves, and it is sent to nobody. If the link had no tag, nothing is recorded.
• Server errors, so faults can be found. Addresses, identifiers and anything long enough to be a token are stripped out before an error is written down.

Sensitive information

Some of the above is treated as sensitive personal information under California law, specifically your gender identity, who you are interested in, your religious beliefs, and your political views.

We collect it for one reason: matching people on these answers is what the product does. We do not sell it, we do not share it for advertising, and we do not use it to infer anything about you beyond producing your result and your matches.

Every one of those questions can be answered "prefer not to say" or left at a neutral value, and the quiz still works.

Photographs of your face are sensitive for a different reason. They are held privately, they are released only on the mutual agreement described below, and nothing automated ever looks at them: no face recognition, no age estimation, no content scanning. Screening therefore depends on people reporting what they are sent.

Nothing here is used to build an attractiveness score. The questions about height, build, exercise and how you present feed the filters and are shown on your card as a short description, so that when photographs open nobody is meeting a stranger they had pictured wrong. No ranking of how people look is computed or stored anywhere.

Your height is the exception, and it is held back until you and another person have both said yes. Alongside a build and a way of dressing it does not sit level with them: a number can be measured against a line somebody has already drawn, and everything next to it stops being read. It is still shown after that, which is well before any photograph.

What your quiz answers are used for

Your answers produce your personality type, which is the card you see at the end and may choose to share.

They are what matching runs on. Answers are compared against other people in your area to decide who you are shown, and some of them are treated as hard limits rather than preferences, such as the age range you give and anything you mark as a dealbreaker.

They are also counted in aggregate to work out whether enough people in a given area have signed up for matching to be possible there. That is what decides when an area opens.

What is shown to other people

Before either of you has decided, a match sees your first name, your pronouns if you gave any, your age, how well the two of you scored, and a written profile: a few paragraphs assembled from your answers by us rather than by you, and the short description above without your height. Your surname is never shown, and a first name on its own is not enough to find anybody. They also see any of the four answers below that you have chosen to show.

Once you have both said yes, your height is shown as well. Once the conversation is open, so is the one line you wrote yourself at the end of the quiz.

The written profile is in your name rather than in a pronoun, because it is easier to read that way. Your pronouns are shown beside your name and are used for nothing else: they do not affect who you are matched with. Who you are and who you are interested in decide that, and neither is ever shown.

They never see your email, your school or your location. Your answers about politics, religion, values, children, alcohol and drugs, your dealbreakers and every preference you set are used for matching and shown to nobody, unless you choose to show some of them: your religion, your politics, whether you want children, and your drinking, smoking and weed can each be switched on from your account page, and appear on your card only while switched on. Everything else in that list is never shown, whatever you choose.

If you confirmed a university email address, a match may be told that you are a verified student. Which university is never shown. Even that much is shown only to somebody who said on the quiz that they wanted to be matched with people from their own school, because it means nothing to anybody else.

They are never told why the two of you were matched, and they are never told who paid to open the conversation.

Your photographs are shown to nobody until you and one other person have talked for three days and both agreed to exchange them. Until that moment nothing you upload is visible to anyone else, and the other person is never told whether you have agreed, because that would turn a decision into a request.

Nobody is ever shown where you are, and no distance between you and another person is displayed anywhere.

If you share your result card, you are sharing a link that shows your personality type, its tagline, and three traits. It does not contain your name, email, school, age, or any quiz answer.

Who else touches your data

• Vercel, which hosts the site and stores uploaded photographs.
• Neon, which hosts the database.
• Resend, which sends our email, and therefore handles your address.
• Stripe, which processes payments. Card details go to Stripe directly and are never stored by us.
• The company that serves the map on the signup page, which sees the address you are connecting from and the part of the map you are looking at. It never sees your pin: the pin is worked out inside your browser and sent only to us.
• Apple, Google or Mozilla, whichever made your browser, carries a notification to your device if you turned them on. What they carry is encrypted to your browser and they cannot read it.
• Nobody else. There is no analytics vendor, no advertising network, and no data broker involved.

How long we keep it

Until you delete your account, or until this service shuts down, whichever comes first. If it shuts down, the database is deleted rather than kept, sold or transferred.

Deletion is immediate and permanent.

Your choices

You can delete your account yourself, at any time, from your account page. That removes your answers, your photographs, every conversation you have had, and where you put your pin. The people you have talked to see the conversation end and are not told why.

Deleting also destroys any stamps you are holding, and we do not pay them out. Your account page tells you the number before you confirm. If you bought them within the last 7 days and have spent none, write to support@joinlonghand.com for a refund before you delete.

A record of each payment stays: the amount, the date, and the processor's reference, with your name and account removed from it. It is deleted after 7 years.

You can also ask us for a copy of your data or ask us to correct it. Email support@joinlonghand.com and we will do it. You do not need to explain why, and asking will not affect anything else.

We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of these rights.

Age

This site is for people 18 and over. If you tell us a date of birth under 18 the signup is rejected. If we learn that someone under 18 signed up anyway, we delete the record.

Changes

If what we collect changes again, the date at the top changes with it.