Privacy Policy
Arch is a dating app. Using it means telling it things about yourself that matter, some of them sensitive. This page says what Arch collects, who can see it, who it is shared with, how long it is kept, and how to get it back or have it deleted. It is written to be read, not skimmed past.
The short version: Arch collects what it needs to introduce you to people and to keep the service safe. It does not sell your data, does not show you advertising, and contains no advertising or analytics trackers. Your questionnaire answers and who you are looking for are never shown to anyone. You can download everything, and delete your account from inside the app at any time.
What Arch collects
When you sign in
- Sign in with Apple: an identifier Apple gives Arch for you, and your name and email address if you choose to share them. Apple lets you hide your real email; if you do, Arch only ever sees a private relay address.
- Email sign-in: your email address, to send you a one-time code.
Your profile
Your first name, date of birth, gender, pronouns, height, work, the town or neighbourhood you choose, your photographs, your written prompts, and your interests.
What you tell Arch in private
- Who you are looking for, and the age range and distance you want. Because the genders you are looking for can reveal your sexual orientation, Arch treats this as sensitive: it is used only to choose who you are introduced to, and it is never shown on your profile or told to anyone.
- Your answers to the compatibility questionnaire. Used only to choose who you are introduced to. They are never shown to anyone and never turned into a score or percentage.
- Your Date planner answers, if you use the Date planner: what a good first date sounds like to you, afternoon or evening, whether you drink, what you would like to spend, and how far you would travel for a date. And any places you mark “Not for us”, so the Date planner does not suggest them to you again. They are used only to plan dates, as the next section explains, and are never shown to anyone.
Your location
If you let it, Arch reads your phone's location once, when you set where you live, and rounds it to about a kilometre before it leaves your phone. Nothing more precise is ever stored, and Arch does not track your location in the background. Instead of sharing your location you can pick a town by name. The rounded position is used only to apply the distance you choose. Other people see the name of your town or neighbourhood, never a distance or a position.
What you do in Arch
- Messages you send and receive.
- Who you dismiss, block or report, and any appeal you make. These are never shown to the person concerned.
- Who you have been introduced to, and when. This is kept so the same people are not introduced again straight away.
From your phone
- A notification token, if you allow notifications, so Arch can tell you when someone writes to you.
- Fraud and abuse signals from Apple. Arch uses Apple's App Attest and DeviceCheck services to confirm it is talking to a genuine copy of the app on a real iPhone, and to keep accounts removed for serious abuse from coming back. DeviceCheck stores two bits of information about your device with Apple. It contains nothing about you.
If you buy Arch Premium
Apple handles payment. Arch never sees your card or bank details. It receives an identifier for your subscription and the date it ends, and checks both with Apple.
Who can see what
Arch only shows your profile to people it has introduced to you, and introductions are mutual: if someone is in your roster, you are in theirs. They can see your first name, age, gender, pronouns, town or neighbourhood, height, work, photographs, prompts and interests.
They cannot see your date of birth, your location, your questionnaire answers, your Date planner answers, who you are looking for, your age or distance settings, or whether you dismissed, blocked or reported them. Arch has no read receipts, no "seen" indicators and no online status.
Messages are seen by you and the person you are writing to. If either of you reports the other, a person at Arch reads that conversation to review the report. The person reported is not told who reported them, or that anyone did.
The Date planner plans around both of you. When someone you are in a conversation with plans a date with you, their copy of Arch reads your Date planner answers so that the plan suits you too. They are never shown: a plan only reflects them, for example by leaving out a bar if you said you do not drink. Only people in a conversation with you can have them read this way. That stops if the conversation ends, if either of you blocks the other, or if you delete your account, which deletes your answers.
Who Arch shares data with
Arch does not sell or rent your personal information, and does not share it for advertising. It uses a small number of service providers to run the app, and they process data only on Arch's behalf:
- Supabase: hosting, database, sign-in and photo storage. This is where your data lives.
- Resend: email. When someone is reported, it delivers a notice to Arch's own team with the reason, any note, and the first names of the two people involved. Messages are never included.
- Apple: Sign in with Apple, push notifications, App Store payments, Apple Maps (to find your town, and places for the Date planner around the point halfway between you and the person you are planning with), and the App Attest and DeviceCheck services described above.
Arch may disclose information when the law requires it, or where it is needed to protect someone's safety.
How long Arch keeps things, and deleting your account
You can delete your account at any time in Settings. Deleting it removes your profile, prompts, interests, questionnaire answers, preferences, notification tokens and the rest of your account's own records (such as who you dismissed and when you changed your town), takes you out of everyone's roster, and ends your conversations. Your photographs are removed at once from everything Arch shows, and the image files themselves are erased from storage within about two hours.
A few things are kept after deletion, for specific reasons:
- Messages you already sent remain readable by the person you sent them to. The conversation is marked as ended, so it cannot continue. As with any message, the other person already has what you sent them.
- Moderation and safety records. This means blocks other people placed on you, reports about you, removals, and the identifier from Sign in with Apple. They are kept so that deleting an account cannot be used to escape a ban or clear the record of having been blocked. Your name and email are removed.
- Purchase records, for as long as tax and accounting law requires.
- Which version of the terms you accepted, and when. It records what was agreed to and nothing else about you.
- The record of your introductions, without your name or any link to your account, as the next section describes.
Improving how Arch chooses people
To find out whether its introductions work, and to improve how it chooses people (including by training models on these records), Arch keeps a separate record of each one. It holds what the matcher knew about each person when it made the introduction: age, gender and questionnaire answers, and how far apart the two people were, to the nearest kilometre. It also holds the score the matcher gave the pair, where each person ranked the other, and what followed. That means whether a conversation started, who wrote first, whether there was a reply, how many messages were sent in the first week, and whether the introduction was dismissed (not by whom). The record contains no names, photographs, messages, anything you wrote on your profile, who you are looking for, or where you live. It identifies people only by a random code, is stored apart from the app's live data, and is never shown to anyone in the app. When you delete your account, the link between that code and you is destroyed, the record can no longer be connected to you, and it is kept in that form.
The matcher also keeps the information it used for each night's introductions: your age, gender and approximate position at the time. It is kept for 90 days and then deleted, and it is deleted straight away if you delete your account.
Your choices and rights
- See and download your data: Settings → Download your data.
- Correct it: edit your profile at any time.
- Delete it: Settings → Delete account.
- Location and notifications can be switched off in your iPhone's settings at any time.
Depending on where you live, you may have further rights, such as asking what Arch holds about you or objecting to how it is used. Write to support@archdating.com and you will get an answer within 30 days. If you are in Canada and are not satisfied with the answer, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
Age
Arch is for adults. You must be 18 or older to use it, and Arch does not knowingly collect information from anyone younger. If you believe someone under 18 is using Arch, write to support@archdating.com.
Security
Everything travels over encrypted connections. Your sign-in is stored in your iPhone's keychain. On the server, every table is protected by access rules that let you read only what is yours or what has been shared with you. No system is perfectly secure, but these protections are built in, not added on afterwards.
Where your data is stored
Your data is stored by Supabase in the United States (Oregon), so if you live in Canada or elsewhere, it is stored outside your country. It may also be processed in other countries where Arch's service providers operate, and while it is there, the law of that country applies to it, which may give authorities there access to it.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes in a way that matters, Arch will say so in the app before the change takes effect. The date at the top shows when it last changed.
Contact
Alwin Ning · support@archdating.com