Privacy

Last updated 25 September 2026

The Gaze is currently in a closed testing phase. It is not a finished commercial product, and you should not share anything you would mind other testers seeing.

Who is responsible

The Gaze is operated by the app's creator as an independent project. For any privacy question, or to exercise any of the rights below, write to admin@thegaze-dating.com or use the in-app feedback form.

What we collect

  • Account details — your email address and a securely hashed password. We never store your password itself.
  • Profile information — the name you choose, date of birth, and anything you voluntarily add: bio, height, weight, gender, sexuality, body type, hobbies and your desert-island answers.
  • Location — your GPS position, used to detect when you pass another member. This is the most sensitive thing we hold, so it gets its own section below.
  • Messages and photos — anything you send inside a private chat, including photos you choose to reveal.
  • Usage records — likes, passes, matches, blocks, reports and votes.

How location is handled

Your precise coordinates are used only momentarily, on our server, to work out how far you are from other members. They are never shown to anyone else.

When a crossing is recorded, the location saved is deliberately blurred: it is snapped to a grid roughly 150 metres across, offset differently for every pair of people. Distances shown to you are rounded into broad bands rather than exact figures. Both measures exist to make it impossible to reconstruct anyone's precise movements or work out where they live — from the app, or from our database.

Location sharing is entirely optional. Decline the permission and everything except the pass-by feature continues to work.

Why we're allowed to hold it

Under the EU and UK GDPR we rely on your consent for location data and for the special-category information some people choose to share, such as sexuality — you give it by choosing to fill those fields in, and you can withdraw it at any time by clearing them or deleting your account. For everything else we rely on performance of a contract: we cannot run a dating service without a profile and messages. Safety features such as blocking and reporting rest on our legitimate interest in protecting members.

Who we share it with

We do not sell your data and we do not run advertising. Other members see only what appears on your profile, plus the coarse pass-by information described above.

Beyond the hosting and database infrastructure that runs the app, three processors are involved. Our email provider delivers verification and password-reset messages. Anthropic receives two things: profile text when you save it, so it can be translated into the app's other languages, and every photo you upload, so it can be screened for prohibited content before it is delivered — both are transfers outside the EU. The original profile text always remains the stored version, a screened photo is not retained by the screening step, and a refused photo is discarded rather than stored anywhere. When the pass-by map is displayed, the map tiles are fetched from CARTO, which therefore receives your device's IP address and the coordinates of the tiles being shown, meaning the general area you are looking at. No profile, message or account data is sent to the map provider.

How long we keep it

Your data is kept while your account exists. Delete your account and everything is erased immediately — profile, messages, matches, photos and pass-by history, including the copies held on other people's side of a conversation.

One exception: if someone has reported you, that report is kept without your account attached, so a pattern of harmful behaviour cannot be erased by deleting and re-registering.

Your rights

You can access, correct, export, restrict or erase your data, object to how it's used, and complain to your national data protection authority — in Poland the UODO, in Germany your state authority or the BfDI, in Czechia the ÚOOÚ, and in the UK the ICO. Deletion is built into the app: Profile, then Delete account. Anything else: write to admin@thegaze-dating.com or use the feedback form.

Age

The Gaze is strictly for adults aged 18 or over. Accounts without a verified date of birth are not visible to anyone, and any account found to belong to a minor is removed.