Law enforcement

Where to send a request

Send legal process to support@joinlonghand.com with "Law enforcement" in the subject line. Requests are accepted by email and there is no portal. The mailing address on the contact page receives letters, but it is not an address for service.

Include the agency, the name and contact details of the requesting officer, the legal authority relied on, and the specific accounts at issue, identified by the email address or phone number used to register. A request that names only a first name or a display name cannot be acted on, because neither is unique here.

You will get an acknowledgement before you get an answer. Say in the subject line if a matter is urgent.

What process is required

Basic subscriber information is disclosed on a valid subpoena. That means the email address, the phone number where one was verified, the first name given, the date of birth given, the date the account was created and the dates it was used.

Anything else about how an account was used, including who somebody was matched with, requires a court order or a search warrant.

The contents of a conversation, and photographs, require a search warrant.

Requests from outside the United States should come through a mutual legal assistance treaty or a letter rogatory.

What is actually held, and what is not

Several things an investigator would expect to exist here do not.

• Location is a pin rounded to about a kilometre in the browser, before it is sent. The precise coordinates are never transmitted and never stored, so they cannot be produced.
• There are no address logs. An address is used as a counter to rate limit requests, in windows the schedule deletes within hours. There is no history of which address an account signed in from.
• Photographs are held privately and released only when both people in a conversation agree. Nothing automated has ever examined them: no face recognition, no age estimation, no content matching. There is no hash set and no scanning history.
• Messages exist only inside a conversation that was opened. An unopened match has no messages.
• A report filed by a user stores a copy of that conversation as it stood at the time, which may survive a later deletion of the messages themselves.
• Payment records are kept for seven years for tax and dispute purposes. When an account is deleted the owner is removed from those rows, so they show an amount and a date and no longer identify a person.
• When an account is deleted, the account, its quiz answers, its matches, its messages and its photographs are deleted with it. What remains is described above and cannot be reconnected to a person here.

Preservation requests

A preservation request under 18 U.S.C. 2703(f) is honoured for 90 days and can be extended once for a further 90 days on request. Send it to the same address, and identify the account the same way.

Preservation holds what exists when the request arrives. It cannot recover what has already been deleted.

Emergencies

Where there is a good faith belief that an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury requires disclosure without delay, information may be disclosed under 18 U.S.C. 2702(b)(8).

Put "Emergency" in the subject line, and describe the nature of the emergency, the danger, and why the information sought will address it.

We do not notify the user

We do not tell somebody that a request about them has been received. Requests here are often about harassment, stalking or violence, and the person concerned is often the one causing the harm.

We read every request before answering it. One that is broader than its stated basis, or that names an account with no apparent connection to the matter, is questioned rather than answered.