Emberside — Dating, self-discovery, and compatible connections

1. About this Policy

Emberside is a social, dating, relationship, and community service. Helping people form meaningful connections sometimes requires information that can reveal unusually personal aspects of their lives, including relationship preferences, sexual orientation, sexual interests, location, social connections, communication preferences, and compatibility information.

We believe information this personal deserves correspondingly strong privacy protections.

This Privacy Policy explains what information Emberside collects, why we collect it, how we use and protect it, when it may be disclosed, how long it is retained, and the choices and rights available to you.

For purposes of this Policy, “Emberside,” “we,” “us,” and “our” refer to Emberside, Inc., located in Ontario, Canada.

Our services include the Emberside mobile application, associated websites, APIs, messaging infrastructure, and other services that link to this Policy.

Privacy Officer
Emberside, Inc.
43 Bonnechere St S, Renfrew Ontario, K7V 1Z2
Email: privacy@emberside.app

2. Emberside is for adults

Emberside is intended only for people who are 18 years of age or older.

People under 18 are not permitted to create or maintain an Emberside account. If we discover that an account belongs to a person under 18, we may suspend or delete the account and take other safety steps appropriate to the circumstances.

The fact that Emberside is an adults-only service does not eliminate our obligations concerning child safety. Reports involving suspected child sexual abuse, exploitation, grooming, or other threats to children may be subject to specialized legal, safety, preservation, and reporting processes.

If you believe a person under 18 is using Emberside, or you need to report an urgent safety concern, contact safety@emberside.app.

3. Our privacy principles

Emberside is designed around data minimization, defined purposes, strong authorization, and protections appropriate to the sensitivity of the information involved.

Providing sensitive information for matching does not automatically make that information visible to other members.

Private conversations and community rooms have deliberately different privacy models. A private conversation is not silently converted into a server-readable conversation.

We do not sell personal information or use personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising.

We do not use end-to-end encrypted private-message content, private-chat report evidence, or raw compatibility quiz answers to train general-purpose artificial-intelligence models.

If we introduce a materially different use of sensitive information, we will provide appropriate notice and obtain additional consent where required.

4. Account and identity information

When you create and maintain an Emberside account, we may collect your email address, account identifier, date of birth or age, real-name information, member-chosen display or screen name, authentication information, account status, account-recovery information, privacy settings, presentation preferences, consent records, and related account information.

Real-name information is private identity information. Supplying your real name does not by itself make your entire legal name publicly visible.

Emberside uses separate presentation settings for different social contexts. By default, community spaces use your screen name, while private conversations use your real first name where available and otherwise fall back to your screen name. Applicable presentation settings can be changed through Emberside.

5. Profile and sensitive relationship information

Your Emberside profile may contain information such as your display name, photos, biography, gender or gender identity, pronouns, sexual orientation, relationship status or structure, relationship intentions, interests, lifestyle preferences, communication preferences, compatibility preferences, and other information you choose to provide.

Because Emberside is a dating and relationship service, some information you provide may reveal particularly sensitive aspects of your life. This can include sexual orientation, sexual interests, BDSM or kink interests, relationship structure, relationship values, sensory or accessibility needs, attitudes toward substance use, family and reproductive preferences, and other intimate relationship information.

We treat this information as sensitive even where a particular law does not assign it a special statutory category.

Where applicable law requires express or explicit consent for sensitive processing, Emberside obtains that consent for the applicable purpose.

Consent to use sensitive information for compatibility or matching is separate from permission to display that information to another member.

6. Quizzes and compatibility information

Emberside provides compatibility questionnaires and self-discovery experiences concerning subjects such as relationship foundations, communication and connection, lifestyle and expression, and other supported compatibility areas.

Your individual quiz answers are private to your account.

Raw quiz answers are not exposed through another member's profile and do not enter ordinary analytics, research, advertising, or AI-processing systems by default.

Emberside may calculate compatibility dimensions, constellation values, or other derived information from your responses. A derived compatibility dimension does not influence matching until you confirm it.

Derived compatibility information may retain the response snapshot and catalog or algorithm version necessary to reproduce calculations, correct errors, govern algorithm changes, and honour correction or deletion requirements.

Using an answer to calculate compatibility does not make the underlying answer visible to another person.

7. Location information

Emberside may use location information to provide geographic discovery, approximate distance, regional functionality, security protections, and other location-dependent features.

If you give Emberside device-location permission, we may receive precise or approximate location depending on the permission granted by your device and the feature being used.

We may also infer a general geographic area from information such as an IP address for security, regional availability, or service operation.

Emberside does not intentionally disclose your precise device coordinates to other members.

User-facing distance or location information is reduced in precision or otherwise presented in a form intended to avoid revealing your exact location.

8. Private conversations

Private conversations include direct messages and invitation-only private groups of up to 32 members.

Private conversations are end-to-end encrypted.

Message content is encrypted on participants' devices. Emberside's infrastructure may authenticate participants, authorize access, route traffic, provide offline delivery, and temporarily store encrypted data, but Emberside does not possess the ordinary technical ability to decrypt or inspect private-message contents.

Private-conversation content is not made available to staff or server-side systems for search, indexing, advertising, analytics, content classification, automated moderation, transcription, embeddings, or AI processing.

Private conversations are not publicly discoverable or platform-searchable.

End-to-end encryption does not conceal all conversation metadata. Emberside may process information needed to operate and secure the encrypted service, including conversation identity, participant membership, sender identity, event identifiers, timestamps, delivery information, recipient information, security state, traffic volume, and approximate encrypted payload size.

9. Private-group membership

Membership in a private group is visible to the members of that group.

Before an invited person joins, Emberside shows them information needed to make an informed decision, including the group identity, inviter, current member roster, member count, and privacy mode.

Existing members are informed that group membership may be disclosed to future invitees for this purpose.

Being part of a Tribe, relationship graph, connection, or other social relationship does not automatically add you to an encrypted conversation. Joining requires an explicit invitation and acceptance.

New and re-invited members do not receive private messages or private-attachment keys from before their current membership began.

A private group that reaches its supported membership limit does not automatically lose end-to-end encryption. Creating a community room is a separate action with a different privacy model, and encrypted history is not automatically copied into it.

10. Private-message retention

Emberside's server-side private-message archive retains end-to-end-encrypted message ciphertext for a rolling period of 72 hours from server receipt.

This temporary archive supports intermittent connectivity and short periods offline.

If a device has been offline longer than the history still available from the server, Emberside may show a history gap. We do not represent locally incomplete history as complete.

Expiration from the server archive does not remove copies already retained on participants' devices.

History stored on your device

Protected local private-message history has no automatic time-based expiry.

It remains on an installation until you clear it, sign out, revoke that installation, reset Emberside's local data, delete your account, or the installation's protected state is otherwise destroyed.

Emberside does not maintain private-key escrow or a server-side plaintext history backup capable of reconstructing this history on a replacement installation.

Replacing an encrypted messaging installation begins a new cryptographic history boundary. Emberside does not provide the replacement installation with the old installation's private keys, historical ratchet state, or private-attachment keys.

11. Private images

Supported images sent through private conversations are prepared and encrypted on the sending device before they are uploaded.

Emberside stores ciphertext and limited operational information needed to authorize, transfer, expire, and delete the encrypted object.

Through the private-image service, Emberside does not receive the plaintext image, plaintext filename, caption, thumbnail, content-derived plaintext hash, or decryption key. Information required to describe and decrypt the image is exchanged inside the end-to-end encrypted conversation.

Hosted private-image ciphertext is available from Emberside for seven days after successful upload finalization. Viewing or downloading the image does not extend that period.

Private-image ciphertext is excluded from long-lived server backup.

Removing an image from Emberside cannot recall a copy already downloaded, decrypted, photographed, exported, or otherwise retained by a participant.

Private-image storage on your device

Emberside may cache private-image ciphertext in app-private storage. The cache has no fixed time expiry, uses a 512 MiB soft least-recently-used limit, and may be cleared earlier when the device requires storage.

Persistent decrypted private-image derivatives are not stored in this cache.

Private-image ciphertext and protected private-message state are wiped when you sign out, revoke the installation, reset local Emberside data, or delete your account.

Emberside does not automatically save private-chat images to your public photo library. Deliberately saving or exporting an image creates a user-controlled copy outside Emberside's protected storage that Emberside cannot subsequently recall.

12. Presence, typing, delivery, and notifications

Private messaging may provide online presence and typing indicators. These are separate controls and are governed by reciprocal privacy: when you disable a corresponding signal for an interaction, you also stop receiving that signal from the other participant.

Emberside does not collect or display general last-seen history for private conversations.

Private messages may use authenticated delivery receipts. A Delivered status means Emberside has evidence that a message reached an authorized recipient installation. It does not mean that the recipient opened or read the message.

The current private-chat model does not provide read receipts.

Push notifications

Push notifications for private conversations are designed as content-free wake-up signals.

The payload sent through a push-notification provider does not contain the private-message body, ciphertext, decryption material, sender identity, relationship identity, or moderation details.

The default notification may simply say “You have a message.”

If you enable notification previews, sender or message information is produced by the Emberside application after your device authenticates, retrieves the encrypted message, and decrypts it locally. Emberside does not place that plaintext preview in the provider push payload.

13. Blocking inside private groups

Blocking another person does not automatically remove either person from a private group that both already belong to.

Emberside suppresses applicable direct interaction between the blocked pair, including message delivery, presence, typing, mentions, reactions, notification effects, and private-image retrieval between those accounts.

Other eligible members may continue to receive content from both people. A block therefore controls what Emberside automatically delivers between the blocked accounts. It cannot prevent another human participant from manually repeating, copying, photographing, or otherwise sharing information they received.

14. Community rooms

Community rooms are designed for larger public or access-controlled communities, local groups, interests, meetup coordination, and other scalable discussion.

Community rooms are not end-to-end encrypted.

Community content is protected during transmission and using applicable storage safeguards, but authorized Emberside systems can process the plaintext.

This allows functions such as moderation, spam and abuse prevention, community administration, search, indexing, safety enforcement, and role-based permissions.

Community images may be quarantined, validated, security-scanned, decoded, re-encoded, stripped of unnecessary metadata, transformed into safe derivatives, and reviewed or moderated where appropriate before publication.

Users should not treat community-room content as having the same confidentiality guarantees as an end-to-end encrypted private conversation.

15. Community activity information

Emberside does not turn community activity into a general service-wide last-seen system.

For public communities, current owners and administrators may see the trusted time of a member's most recent accepted post in that room and most recent view of that room.

This information exists for disclosed community-administration purposes and is not provided for direct messages or encrypted private-group conversations.

Community room-view activity is retained for 30 days.

16. Contextual identity and profile access

Making your profile non-discoverable prevents it from appearing through ordinary discovery but does not necessarily erase your identity from conversations you already joined.

People sharing an authorized conversation with you may continue to receive a limited contextual identity, profile, or primary-photo view where needed to identify participants and support safety and moderation.

This does not place your profile back into Explore or restore ordinary matching controls.

An applicable block denies contextual profile and photo access between blocked accounts.

If your profile is non-discoverable, existing conversations may remain available in read-only form. Participation features may require you to restore an actively discoverable profile.

17. Reports, safety, and participant-controlled disclosure

We collect information relating to reports, complaints, blocks, safety incidents, moderation decisions, account restrictions, suspected spam, fraud, impersonation, harassment, abuse, ban evasion, security anomalies, and communications with our safety or support teams.

Reporting an end-to-end encrypted conversation is a participant-controlled disclosure. It is not a mechanism that gives Emberside access to the conversation's encryption keys or continuing access to the conversation.

When you report a private message, your device may decrypt and disclose the selected message together with a bounded amount of surrounding context.

The ordinary reporting flow does not silently export your entire locally available conversation history.

If Emberside offers an option to disclose all locally available history, that is a separate explicit choice. Before submission, Emberside shows what will be disclosed, including your own included messages, and explains that locally available history may be incomplete.

Reported private content is transferred into a dedicated trust-and-safety processing boundary and is not placed into ordinary analytics, crash reporting, notifications, search, matching, research, advertising, or model-training pipelines.

Submission of a report does not provide Emberside with the private conversation's encryption keys.

Private-chat attachment disclosure is not enabled in production unless Emberside's dedicated child-safety, evidence, legal, security, privacy, retention, staff-protection, and specialist-processing requirements have been satisfied.

18. Device, session, and security information

To authenticate accounts and secure the service, Emberside may process information concerning your account, session, application installation, authentication state, revocation state, IP address, network information, application version, operating system, device capabilities, security events, and other content-minimized technical information.

Emberside may use device or installation security signals to detect credential misuse, suspicious activity, fraud, abuse, or attempts to evade account enforcement.

Ordinary logs and analytics are designed to exclude authentication tokens, refresh credentials, cryptographic private keys, encryption material, sensitive profile contents, private-message content, and other secret credential material.

19. Purchases and direct communications

If you purchase an Emberside feature, we may receive information such as the product purchased, transaction identifier, transaction date, entitlement state, payment status, refund status, and the storefront or payment provider involved.

Where Apple, Google, or another payment provider handles payment credentials, Emberside generally does not receive your complete payment-card number.

If you contact Emberside for support, privacy, account recovery, feedback, safety, or legal reasons, we collect the information you provide and related information needed to understand and respond to your request.

20. How we use personal information

We use personal information to provide Emberside, operate accounts and profiles, provide discovery and compatibility features, enable conversations and communities, deliver purchases, provide support, and maintain your settings.

We use relevant information to authenticate users, authorize access, prevent unauthorized disclosure, protect accounts, enforce blocks and safety controls, prevent spam and abuse, investigate reports, and maintain service integrity.

We may use appropriately governed information to diagnose failures, understand whether the service works correctly, improve reliability, and develop features.

Sensitive profile and compatibility information is not repurposed for unrelated analytics, research, AI processing, or advertising merely because Emberside possesses it.

We may also process information where necessary to comply with law, respond to valid legal process, protect someone's safety, investigate unlawful activity, enforce our agreements, or establish, exercise, or defend legal claims.

21. Automated matching

Emberside uses software to calculate compatibility, filter or rank potential connections, provide recommendations, and personalize discovery.

These systems may use information such as confirmed compatibility dimensions, profile preferences, location or distance criteria, relationship preferences, and other information relevant to the feature.

Raw quiz answers are not shown to another member merely because they contribute to a compatibility calculation.

Compatibility outputs are estimates produced from available information and algorithms. They are not objective judgments about a person's worth, character, health, or suitability.

Emberside does not use dating or compatibility systems to determine eligibility for employment, housing, credit, insurance, education, government benefits, or comparably significant opportunities.

22. When we disclose personal information

Other Emberside members

We disclose information to other members when necessary for social features you deliberately use and according to the applicable conversation, membership, privacy, visibility, blocking, and presentation rules.

Service providers

Emberside uses selected service providers to operate infrastructure, storage, email, push notifications, payments, authentication, security, diagnostics, support, and other operational services.

Providers receive only information reasonably necessary for their approved purpose and are subject to applicable contractual, security, and privacy obligations.

Legal process and safety

We may preserve, access, or disclose information where reasonably necessary to comply with applicable law or valid legal process, respond to a credible safety emergency, investigate unlawful activity, enforce our rules, protect the security or rights of Emberside or others, or establish, exercise, or defend legal claims.

End-to-end encryption does not give us information we do not possess. A legal request directed to Emberside cannot cause us to produce plaintext private-message content or encryption keys that Emberside does not have.

Participant-disclosed report evidence is different because a participant has intentionally supplied that information to Emberside.

We do not provide governments or law-enforcement authorities with unrestricted or standing access to Emberside user information.

Routine legal process, preservation requests, subpoenas, warrants, court orders, and other non-emergency law-enforcement correspondence should be directed to legal@emberside.app.

leo@emberside.app is reserved for exigent circumstances involving an imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm where an immediate response is necessary. Because this channel may trigger an urgent after-hours response, it must not be used for routine legal process, status inquiries, or non-emergency requests.

At your direction

We disclose information when you deliberately direct or authorize us to do so, such as when you publish to a community, accept membership in a private group after reviewing its roster, or submit evidence through a report.

23. Retention

Emberside does not use one retention period for every type of information. Retention is based on why the information exists, its sensitivity, safety requirements, legal obligations, and the architecture of the applicable feature.

Information	Retention
Private-message server ciphertext	72 hours from server receipt
Hosted private-image ciphertext	7 days after successful finalization
Protected local private-message history	No automatic time expiry; retained until clearing, sign-out, installation revocation, reset, account deletion, or destruction of protected state
Private-image device cache	No automatic time expiry; subject to a 512 MiB soft LRU limit and device storage pressure
Community room-view activity	30 days
Unaccepted private-group invitations	Normally expire after 7 days
Access logs, security logs, and IP address history	No more than 60 days
Payment transaction history, invoices, bank records, and tax obligations	Retained indefinitely for accounting, tax, payment, and compliance purposes

Other information, including account records, community content, operational metadata, security logs, safety reports, enforcement records, compatibility information, and support records, is retained only for as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes for which it is maintained and any applicable legal, safety, security, accounting, or evidence requirements.

Trust-and-safety evidence is separate from the ordinary 72-hour private-message archive and seven-day private-image lifecycle. Participant-disclosed report evidence may therefore be retained longer where necessary and legally permitted for investigation, safety, enforcement, evidence preservation, mandatory reporting, or legal claims.

Account data removed from live systems may remain in encrypted recoverable backups for up to 30 additional days. A whole-account legal hold is retained in a separate restricted vault until authorized personnel release it.

24. Account deletion and clearing content

You may delete your Emberside account regardless of where you live.

Account deletion is different from hiding your profile, making your profile non-discoverable, signing out, or temporarily restricting your account.

Account deletion is available from the Emberside application and through https://emberside.app/deleteme, our public web-based deletion mechanism. The web page lets you authenticate with the social identity provider used for Emberside, so you can request deletion without reinstalling the app.

When account deletion is confirmed, Emberside immediately quarantines your account: it is not visible or usable in the app, and applicable installation and messaging access is revoked. You may sign in at the deletion page and undo the request for 14 days. After that period, Emberside deletes ordinary account data; if deletion completed, returning requires a fresh new account.

A whole-account legal hold may preserve quarantined data for civil procedure, a law-enforcement request, subpoena, fraud prevention, security prevention, or abuse prevention. Held data is isolated from ordinary product systems and is available only to authorized Emberside Trust & Safety personnel. We do not disclose the existence of a hold through the sign-in flow; after the 14-day window, contact support if your deletion remains in progress.

We retain access logs, security logs, and IP address history for no more than 60 days. Payment transaction history, invoices, bank records, and tax obligations are retained indefinitely for their separate accounting, tax, payment, and compliance purposes. Deleting an account does not cancel an App Store or Google Play subscription; cancel that subscription through the relevant store.

Deleting your account cannot remotely erase information another participant has already independently retained.

Where shared community content must remain for other members, Emberside removes your account attribution and displays it as authored by “Deleted member.”

Local deletion and recall

The current private-chat model does not provide a general recipient-side unsend or recall feature.

Deleting a private message locally removes it from that installation. It does not represent that another participant's copy has been erased.

25. Your privacy rights

Depending on where you live, applicable law may give you rights to access personal information, obtain information about its use or disclosure, correct inaccurate information, withdraw consent, request deletion, receive certain information in portable form, object to or restrict certain processing, complain about our handling of personal information, or request review of certain automated decisions.

Emberside provides account deletion to all members, not only to people living in jurisdictions where deletion is legally required.

We may need to verify your identity before releasing, changing, or deleting personal information. Verification is designed to be proportionate to the sensitivity of the request.

Some rights are subject to legal exceptions. If we decline or limit a request, we will explain why where required by law.

26. Canadian users

Emberside is operated from Canada and applies Canadian privacy principles concerning accountability, identified purposes, meaningful consent, collection limitation, appropriate use and disclosure, safeguards, openness, individual access, and retention.

Sensitive information receives heightened protection, and express consent is sought where required by applicable Canadian law.

Depending on where you live and the processing involved, federal or provincial privacy legislation may apply.

You may have the right to complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada or an applicable provincial privacy authority after raising the concern with Emberside.

27. International users and cross-border processing

Emberside is operated from Canada, but some service providers or infrastructure may process information in another province or country.

Information processed in another jurisdiction may become subject to that jurisdiction's laws and may be lawfully accessible to courts, regulators, governments, or law-enforcement authorities there.

Emberside remains responsible for personal information under its control and uses contractual, technical, organizational, and legal safeguards appropriate to the transfer and sensitivity of the information.

Where European data-protection laws apply, Emberside provides the rights, lawful-processing grounds, safeguards for special-category information, and international-transfer mechanisms required by applicable law.

28. Security and staff access

Emberside applies technical, organizational, and administrative safeguards intended to reflect the sensitivity of the information being protected.

Safeguards include encryption in transit, encryption at rest where appropriate, end-to-end encryption for designated private conversations, least-privilege authorization, purpose-aware access controls, protected credential storage, content-minimized logging, account and session revocation, security monitoring, controlled staff access, secure development practices, vulnerability management, and audit mechanisms.

Private-message encryption keys are not escrowed by Emberside for server-side content recovery.

Private-image decryption keys are not stored alongside the corresponding server-hosted ciphertext.

End-to-end encrypted private-message plaintext is not available to staff through ordinary platform administration.

Information deliberately submitted through a trust-and-safety report is different because the reporter has chosen to disclose that information for investigation.

No internet-connected service can guarantee absolute security. We review and adapt our safeguards as Emberside's systems and the threats facing them evolve.

29. Privacy and security incidents

If Emberside becomes aware of unauthorized access, use, disclosure, loss, or another compromise involving personal information, we investigate, take reasonable measures to contain and remediate the incident, assess the potential harm, and document the incident as required.

Where applicable law requires notification to affected people, privacy regulators, or other authorities, we will make those notifications.

30. Third-party services and exports

Your operating system, app store, payment provider, authentication provider, or an independent website or service you visit from Emberside may process information under its own privacy terms.

Once you deliberately export content, save something outside Emberside's protected storage, or provide information directly to another person or independent service, Emberside may no longer control that copy.

This Policy governs personal information controlled by Emberside and does not replace the privacy policies of independent third-party services.

31. Changes to this Policy

We may update this Policy as Emberside, our technology, or our legal obligations change.

The Last updated date identifies the current version.

If we make a material change to how personal information is collected, used, disclosed, or retained, we will provide notice appropriate to the significance of the change.

If a new purpose requires consent, particularly one involving sensitive information, we will obtain that consent where required. We will not use a privacy-policy update as a substitute for required consent.

32. Questions, requests, and complaints

Questions about this Policy, privacy requests, concerns, or complaints can be directed to:

Privacy Officer
Emberside, Inc.
43 Bonnechere St S
Renfrew, Ontario K7V 1Z2
Canada
Email: legal@emberside.app

We will investigate privacy complaints and respond according to applicable law.

If you are dissatisfied with our response, you may also have the right to contact the privacy or data-protection regulator responsible for your jurisdiction.

Meet compatible people.Know yourself better.

You both value clarity.

Chemistry is more than a photograph.

Keep attraction in the picture

See ease and friction

Use insight, not a verdict

A better profile starts before the blank page.

Fun to explore

Useful on your own

Better raw material

You create closeness through clarity.

Every person.One shared map.

How the map works

When two silhouettes become almost one.

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Rowan & Lucas

When attraction may meet real friction.

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Built to help you choose—not to sell you another swipe.

Consider the whole person.

Who you want—and what you want together—come first.

Relationship shape is foundational

Gender and orientation direct eligibility

Nuance stays member-controlled

Connection does not begin and end with a match.

Jealousy is information. What is it trying to protect?

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Posts with room to think

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Built with contributors

A clearer path from curiosity to connection.

Discover your patterns

Build a profile with substance

Consider a curated set

Explore the connection together

You recharge differently.

A private place to find out what the map can’t know.

Expressive conversation

Audio + video messages

Real end-to-end encryption

Pay for extras.Not for the right to participate.

The foundation stays open.

Enhancements without hostage features.

One-time unlocks

Season passes

Something warmer is on the horizon.

Ideas for kinder connection.

Meet compatible people.
Know yourself better.

Every person.
One shared map.

Pay for extras.
Not for the right to participate.