1. Who is responsible
The controller responsible for processing your personal data under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the German Federal Data Protection Act (BDSG) is:
Philipp Ludwig Syring (an individual)
Otto-Lauffer-Str. 3a, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
Email: support@sundae.pro
Full provider identification: Legal notice.
Sundae is operated by an individual. We are not legally required to appoint a data protection officer, and we have not appointed one. For any privacy question, use the contact address above; we aim to reply within 24 hours.
2. Scope of this policy
This policy explains how we handle personal data when you use the Sundae mobile application (the “app”) and when you visit this website. It does not cover third-party services that we link to but do not operate (for example the Apple App Store or Google Play), which have their own privacy policies.
This is the English version, provided for convenience. A German version is available at Datenschutzerklärung; for users resident in Germany, the German version is the authoritative text.
3. What data we process
We only collect what we need to run a weekly-match dating service. Depending on how you use Sundae, this includes:
| Account | Your mobile phone number, verified with a one-time SMS code — or, if you sign in with Apple or Google, the account identifier (and email address, if you share it) that Apple or Google passes to us; a phone number must still be verified before you can finish sign-up. Sundae does not use passwords. Also your account creation date, language preference, and whether you have accepted the terms. |
|---|---|
| Age verification | Your date of birth, entered during sign-up, and the whole-year age derived from it. Used to confirm you are 18 or older and for age-range matching. |
| Profile | First name, gender, who you want to meet, a main photo, a bio, at least one prompt answer and one further photo, your relationship intentions, relationship style and whether you have or want children. Optionally: a second prompt and photo, height, interests, your political leaning, your religion or belief, and a short free-text note next to any of these choices. |
| Personality test | Your answers to the one-time personality questionnaire and the personality profile (a set of dimension scores) calculated from them. Used for matching and for your personal insights. While you are matched, your dimension scores — not your individual answers — can be shown to that match to explain your compatibility. |
| Location | Your device location (coordinates and the city derived from them), which you share once during sign-up and can refresh in Settings, plus your chosen search radius (or “no distance limit”) and, optionally, a hometown you type in. Location is required because matching is based on who is near you. Your exact coordinates are never displayed to other people; a match sees your city and an approximate distance, which the app calculates from your stored location. |
| Matches & messages | Records of who you were matched with and when, the compatibility score, match status, and the messages you exchange with a match — text messages and voice messages (audio recordings of up to two minutes, plus a small waveform shown in the chat). Whether the other person is currently typing is passed on live and is not stored. Past matches are kept and shown to you in an in-app match history. If you enable notifications, the sender's first name and a short preview of a new message (or “Voice message”) is sent through our push provider and can appear on your lock screen. |
| Feedback & traits | The answers you give after a match ends (how it went, selected traits, whether you'd meet again, what happened afterwards), and the aggregated “traits people notice” shown on your profile and to your matches. |
| Discover & postcards | Which people appear in your “Discover” selection — twelve best-fitting people near you who are not yet matched with you, refreshed once a day — and the postcards you send or receive there: a short note (up to 100 characters), when it was sent and delivered, and whether you've agreed to a guaranteed match with that person. A postcard's content is shown to the person it was sent to once it's delivered. Sending or receiving postcards is also one of the signals our matching model considers when it ranks pairs for future drops. |
| Match quality signal | An internal score we derive from how your past matches went — your partners' end-of-match feedback (in particular whether they would meet again) and engagement signals such as message counts and how a match ended. From the same feedback we also derive how well received people tend to be, which the matching model uses so that pairs are balanced. These values are used to tune future matching and, potentially, to decide eligibility for a mid-week match. They are never shown to other users. |
| Safety & moderation | Blocks you create, and reports you submit or that are submitted about you, including the reason and related match. We keep this to operate the service safely and to handle abuse. |
| Subscription | Whether Sundae+ is active for your account and when it started. Payment itself is processed by Apple or Google — we do not receive your card details. |
| Device & notifications | If you enable push notifications, a push token for your device and your notification preference. Your device also asks for permission before Sundae uses the camera or photo library (to take or choose photos), the microphone (only while you record a voice message) or your location. Basic technical data (app version, platform) may be included in error logs. |
| Support | The content of emails you send us and our replies. |
| Website | Server logs kept by our hosting provider (see section 14) and the email address you enter into the waitlist form, which is sent to us by your own email app. |
We do not use advertising SDKs, cross-app tracking, or third-party analytics that build a profile of you.
4. Why we process it and our legal basis
| Providing the service — creating your account, building your profile, generating and delivering one match per week, enabling text and voice chat, showing you people near you in Discover, running the weekly cycle | Performance of a contract with you — Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR |
|---|---|
| Personality test, feedback and insights used to improve future matches for you | Performance of a contract — Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR; for the sensitive aspects, your explicit consent — Art. 9(2)(a) GDPR |
| Deriving and using the internal match quality signal so that matching works well for everyone | Performance of a contract — Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR; our legitimate interest in a functioning, fair matching service — Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR |
| Device permissions — location, camera and photo library, microphone, push notifications | Your consent, given through the operating system permission prompt — Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR. For location, processing is also necessary to provide the matching service — Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR. You can withdraw a permission in your device settings at any time. |
| Optional profile fields (second prompt and photo, height, interests, political leaning, religion, notes) | Your consent by choosing to provide them — Art. 6(1)(a) and, where sensitive, Art. 9(2)(a) GDPR |
| Safety, moderation, preventing and investigating abuse, keeping the service secure | Our legitimate interests and those of other users in a safe service — Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR; and compliance with legal obligations — Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR |
| Verifying your phone number (SMS code) to keep fake and duplicate accounts out | Performance of a contract — Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR; our legitimate interest in a trustworthy service — Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR |
| Handling support requests | Performance of a contract and our legitimate interest in helping users — Art. 6(1)(b) and (f) GDPR |
| Complying with legal requests and defending legal claims | Legal obligation — Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR; legitimate interests — Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR |
| Operating this website and the waitlist | Our legitimate interest in presenting and offering the service — Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR; for the waitlist email, your consent by submitting it — Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR |
5. Sensitive data and consent
By its nature, a dating profile can reveal information that the GDPR treats as a special category (Art. 9) — in particular data concerning your sex life or sexual orientation, which may be inferred from the gender you want to meet, as well as your political opinions and religious or philosophical beliefs if you choose to fill in those optional fields, and any health or similar details you choose to write in your bio, prompts, notes or messages.
We process this data solely to provide the matching service you signed up for, on the basis of your explicit consent under Art. 9(2)(a) GDPR. You give this consent when you create your profile and enter Sundae. You can withdraw it at any time by editing or removing the relevant fields, or by deleting your account — this does not affect processing that happened before withdrawal.
6. Who we share data with
Other users
When you are matched, your match can see your profile: your first name, age, photo (blurred until the reveal), city or approximate distance, prompts, interests, the traits others have noticed, and your personality dimension scores shown as compatibility indicators. Any match can open your full profile text — bio, prompts, the basics you filled in (including height, political leaning and religion if you entered them) and interests. A match who has Sundae+ can additionally see your further photos beyond the main one, and later sees you in their match history. Your phone number, email address, date of birth, exact coordinates, individual personality answers, your feedback about others and the internal quality signal are never displayed to other users.
People near you (Discover & postcards)
Your profile can be seen before you are matched. If your preferences and those of another person fit each other (gender, age range, distance), you can appear in that person's daily “Discover” selection of twelve people near them, ranked by fit — the same twelve for everyone, your photo shown sharp (not blurred), with your first name, age and compatibility score; they can open your profile as described above. You do not appear there if you have paused matching, are in a match, have been matched with that person before, or if either of you has blocked the other. If someone sends you a postcard, you see its content once it's delivered (the next day) — you decide whether to write back, and if you each send enough postcards, you can both agree to a guaranteed match for the next Sunday.
Service providers (processors)
We use a small number of providers that process data on our behalf under data processing agreements:
- Supabase (Supabase, Inc.) — database, authentication, file storage (your photos), realtime messaging and and the hand-off of one-time codes to our SMS provider. This is where your Sundae data is stored. See supabase.com/privacy.
- Vonage — sending the SMS one-time codes used to verify your phone number when you sign in or link your number. Your phone number and the code are processed by Vonage and by mobile carriers. See vonage.com/legal.
- Apple and Google — if you choose “Sign in with Apple” or Google Sign-In, they verify your identity and pass us an account identifier (and your email address, if you allow it). Their own privacy policies apply to that sign-in. Separately, if you ask Apple for a refund on a Sundae+ purchase, we may send Apple limited information about that purchase in response to its request (see Terms of Use, section 9).
- Expo (Expo Application Services, operated by 650 Industries Inc., 140 2nd Street, Floor 4, San Francisco, CA 94105, USA) — delivery of push notifications (the notification text, such as the sender's first name and a message preview, and your device push token), if you enable them. See expo.dev/privacy.
- GitHub Pages (GitHub, Inc.) — hosting for this website (sundae.pro). GitHub keeps standard server logs. See GitHub's privacy statement.
Reports are reviewed by us through a private admin tool that connects directly to the Supabase database; report data is not sent to any additional third-party service.
App stores and payments
If you subscribe to Sundae+, the purchase is handled by Apple or Google under their own terms and privacy policies. They tell us that a subscription is active; they do not share your payment details with us.
Legal reasons
We may disclose data if we are legally required to, or where it is necessary to enforce our terms, protect the safety of users, or establish, exercise or defend legal claims.
We do not sell your personal data and we do not share it for advertising.
7. International data transfers
Your core Sundae data — your profile, messages, photos, personality data and everything else stored with Supabase — is held in the EU (West Europe, Ireland) region, inside the European Economic Area.
Some processing still takes place outside the EEA, including in the United States: GitHub (website hosting and its server logs), Expo (delivery of push notifications), Vonage (SMS verification codes, delivered through international carrier networks), Apple and Google (if you use their sign-in), and any access to the Supabase platform by Supabase, Inc. from outside the EEA for support or operations. Google, Apple and Microsoft (GitHub's parent) are certified under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, which the European Commission has recognised as providing an adequate level of protection; other providers' transfers are covered by Standard Contractual Clauses together with additional safeguards. You can request a copy of the relevant safeguards using the contact details in section 16.
8. How long we keep data
- Account and sign-in data (including your phone number), age-verification and profile data, personality data, preferences, photos, and your own match feedback — kept while your account exists; hard-deleted when you delete your account (see section 11).
- Matches, messages and postcards — kept while your account is active so the service, your match history and your insights work. When you delete your account, the match records are kept but your profile becomes an anonymous placeholder (“Deleted user”), and the messages and postcards you already sent — including voice messages — remain available to the people you sent them to, attributed to that placeholder.
- Moderation records — a report and the conversation snapshot taken with it are kept for as long as needed to handle the report, an appeal, repeat-abuse detection or a legal claim. If an account is banned, its data is kept to handle appeals and ban evasion and is then anonymised, as a rule within 90 days of the ban.
- Support emails — kept for up to 24 months after the request is closed.
- Website server logs — kept for a short period by GitHub (typically a few weeks) for security and troubleshooting.
- Where we are subject to statutory retention periods (for example under tax or commercial law), we keep the relevant records for as long as the law requires and restrict processing in the meantime.
9. How matching works
Once per weekly cycle, Sundae selects one candidate for you. The main introduction runs on Sunday; if you were not matched, Sundae may make one further attempt mid-week, with a slightly wider distance. The selection uses your personality profile, your stated preferences (who you want to meet, age range, distance), your location, and signals from your past matches — including the internal quality signal described in section 3, which is built from your partners' end-of-match feedback and engagement signals — as well as postcards you have sent or received in Discover, which also count as a signal of interest. A compatibility score is calculated and shown to you. The model that ranks pairs is re-fitted periodically on the end-of-match feedback and engagement of all users (for example whether people said they would meet again); it also takes into account how well received people tend to be, so that pairs are balanced. The same ranking decides which people appear in your Discover selection. One exception: if you and another person each send enough postcards and both agree to a guaranteed match, that pairing is placed directly for the next Sunday, ahead of and outside this model.
This is an automated selection, but it does not produce a legal or similarly significant effect on you within the meaning of Art. 22 GDPR — it proposes a person to talk to, and you are free to end any match. If you would like a human to review how a match or your quality signal was generated, or to contest it, contact us.
10. Your rights
Under the GDPR you have the right to:
- access the personal data we hold about you (Art. 15);
- have inaccurate data corrected (Art. 16);
- have your data erased (Art. 17);
- restrict processing in certain cases (Art. 18);
- receive certain data in a portable, machine-readable format (Art. 20);
- object to processing based on our legitimate interests, on grounds relating to your particular situation (Art. 21);
- withdraw any consent you have given, at any time, without affecting processing that already took place (Art. 7(3)).
To exercise any of these rights, email support@sundae.pro. We may ask you to confirm the phone number or sign-in on your account so we can be sure it's you. We respond within one month. We may decline a request that is manifestly unfounded or excessive (Art. 12(5) GDPR), and where fulfilling a request would reveal another member's personal data — for example specific feedback a past match gave about you — we may redact or limit what we share to protect that person's rights (Art. 15(4) GDPR).
11. Deleting your account
You can delete your account yourself at any time: Settings → Account → Delete account. This ends any active match and permanently hard-deletes your personal details, phone number and sign-in details, date of birth, photos, personality answers and profile, preferences, and the feedback you gave about others. Your profile row is turned into an anonymous placeholder so that past conversations still make sense to the people you talked to, and your sign-in is permanently disabled. Match records and the messages and postcards you already sent are kept as described in section 8. Where a report or ban is involved, a conversation snapshot may be retained for the purposes and periods in section 8. You can also ask us to delete your account by email.
12. Security
Data is transmitted over encrypted connections (TLS). Access to stored data is protected by database access rules that limit what each account can read and write, and by restricted administrative access. Sundae does not store passwords; sign-in works with one-time SMS codes or with Apple or Google. No online service can be guaranteed to be completely secure, but we work to protect your data and to notify you and the authorities if a breach ever legally requires it.
13. Age limit
Sundae is only for people aged 18 or older. We ask for your date of birth during sign-up to check this and do not knowingly process data of anyone under 18. If we learn that an account belongs to a minor, we will delete it.
14. This website
This website is a static information site. It does not set advertising or analytics cookies and does not embed third-party trackers. A theme colour preference and similar minor settings, if any, are stored only in your browser.
The site is hosted on GitHub Pages. When you load it, GitHub automatically receives technical information that your browser sends, such as your IP address, the requested page, referrer, timestamp and user-agent. This is processed on the basis of our legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR) in operating and securing the site, and is kept only briefly.
The waitlist form does not send data to a server. When you submit it, your own email app opens a pre-filled message to support@sundae.pro; the email is only sent if you send it. We use the address you provide to notify you about the launch, and delete it afterwards or on request.
15. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy as the app evolves or the law changes. The “last updated” date at the top always reflects the current version. For significant changes we will give notice in the app or by email before they take effect.
16. Contact and complaints
For any privacy question or request, contact support@sundae.pro.
If you believe our processing of your data infringes the GDPR, you have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority, in particular in the EU member state of your habitual residence, place of work, or the place of the alleged infringement. The authority responsible for the controller is:
In Germany, this is the data protection authority of the federal state in which the controller is based or in which you live. A directory of the German state authorities is published by the Federal Commissioner for Data Protection at bfdi.bund.de.