Privacy Policy

Last updated: 4 August 2026

Strangerhood is an anonymous 1:1 chat. Privacy isn't a feature we bolted on — it's the product. This page describes exactly what we collect, why, and what we never collect.

What we collect

• Account: your email address (for sign-in links) and a pseudonymous display handle. Other users never see your email — only the handle.
• Profile photo (optional): if you upload one, a human reviews it before any other user can see it; until then only our operator can view it. Camera and location metadata is stripped on upload, a rejected photo is deleted rather than kept, and your photo is stored until you replace it or delete your account.
• Country & local time (optional, both off by default): two independent settings. "Show my country" puts the country you connect from on your card; "Show my local time" puts your clock time there (from your browser's timezone) — shareable separately, never GPS or precise location, which we deliberately do not collect. Each value exists only while its toggle is on: turning it off erases that value from our records, not just from display.
• Safety signals: reports you send or receive, a trust score derived from them, and a device identifier (a hash of network and browser characteristics) used to make bans meaningful.
• Age verification status: a yes/no record that your account passed an age check, the method used, and when. Nothing else — see below.
• Voice notes: stored only until they expire (24 hours at most, sooner if the chat ends) and fetchable only by the two people in the chat. Voice audio is not analysed or transcribed.
• Guests (available in some regions): no email, no account — only the device identifier above and the IP retention described below, used solely so bans hold. Guest conversations are never stored; when you close the tab, everything is gone.
• Kept conversations: a chat where you both take part sticks around by default, so a conversation survives someone going offline or falling asleep. Skipping or ending a chat discards it for both of you — unless either person pressed keep, which makes it permanent. A chat where you did not both take part — a message nobody answered — is never stored.

Age verification (go.cam)

In regions that legally require age assurance, verification is performed by our partner GO.cam (GSI Développement SaS, France). The check runs entirely on your device: your selfie is processed locally and is not uploaded to us or stored by GO.cam. If you explicitly choose the identity-document option, the document is processed for the check and deleted; we never receive it. The only thing Strangerhood receives is a yes/no result. GO.cam's processing is governed by its own privacy notice and our data processing agreement with them.

Moderation & translation

Messages are screened automatically for abuse by models running on our own servers; content is not sent to third-party AI services. Reported conversations may be reviewed to action the report. Where message translation is offered, it runs the same way — on our servers, never through an outside translation service — and translations are shown to you but never stored.

Who processes data for us

Hetzner (Germany — hosting), Cloudflare (network/DDoS protection; sees traffic metadata like IPs), Resend (sign-in emails), and GO.cam (age verification, as above). We run our own database — chat data is not handed to analytics or advertising companies. We use no third-party analytics and show no ads.

What we never collect

• Real names, phone numbers, or profile photos
• Your selfie or ID images (they never reach us)
• Location beyond country (from network routing)
• Contacts, cookies for tracking, or cross-site identifiers

Retention & deletion

Account data is kept for the life of the account. Conversations are kept while they are in use: the clock runs on inactivity, so any message resets it and a conversation you are still having never expires. A chat that persisted automatically is deleted after a year without activity; one you explicitly kept, after two years; and a chat with someone you added as a friend is kept for as long as the friendship and both accounts stand. We warn you 30 days before anything is deleted, and one tap keeps it.

You can delete any saved conversation from your conversation list at any time. The delete is one-sided: it disappears for you, and the other person keeps their copy, because they took part in it too. Once neither of you holds a copy, the messages are erased outright instead of waiting out the periods above. The exception is a conversation that has been reported — its content is kept for the safety investigation and expires on the normal schedule, so that deleting a conversation cannot destroy the record of what happened in it.

You can delete your account at any time. That removes your email, handle, age-verification record, interests, and any conversation where you were the only participant left. Where someone else took part in a conversation, their copy remains — it is their conversation too — but your membership of it is removed. Safety records (bans, device hashes tied to violations) are retained where we have a legitimate interest in preventing abuse; otherwise deleting an account would erase a ban.

Your rights

Depending on your region (GDPR/UK GDPR), you can request access, correction, deletion, or portability of your data, and object to processing. Contact us at [email protected]. You can also appeal moderation decisions at /appeal.

Who we are

Strangerhood is operated by Grainger Labs Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company no. 17379371), which is the data controller for the processing described here. Registered office: Suite A, 82 James Carter Road, Mildenhall, IP28 7DE, United Kingdom. Contact for all data-protection matters, including access, deletion and complaints: [email protected].

You may also complain to your local data-protection authority; in the UK that is the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk).

Questions: [email protected] · Terms