Per-category privacy: what it means in practice

Privacy on most dating apps is a single toggle. Your profile is either visible or it isn't. Your photos are either there or they're not. The whole thing is one switch, and the only choice you have is whether to flip it.

That model is fine for vanilla dating, where the worst case is an awkward conversation with a coworker who saw your bio. It is not fine for kink dating, where the worst case is a job loss, a custody fight, or a physical safety risk because the wrong piece of information about your interests reached the wrong person.

So we built privacy at a finer grain. Not one switch. Hundreds of small ones, on the parts of your profile that actually matter.

Three settings, applied at the field level

For each category of interest, you can choose:

• Public. Anyone who looks at your profile can see it.
• Match-only. Only people you've matched with can see it. Until then, the field is hidden or shown as private.
• Private. Only you and the matching algorithm can see it. The category influences who you're matched with, but no other human sees it on your profile.

Apply that to the dozens of categories the quiz generates, and the result is a profile that you can shape with as much or as little exposure as you want. Your bondage interests can be public. Your humiliation interests can be match-only. Your fluids interests can be private. The math still uses everything to find compatible people. The display only shows what you've chosen to show.

Photos work the same way

Every photo on your profile has its own visibility setting. Profile photos are public by default. Anything else is a separate decision. You can have a photo that's only visible after a match. You can have a photo that's only visible after the other person also unlocks something. You can have photos that never appear in the feed at all and only get sent in conversation, by your choice.

Private photos are blurred in the feed by default and only resolve to the full image for people you have matched with. The unblurred version is not publicly reachable.

Quiz answers are the most sensitive layer

Your full quiz answers are not part of your profile. They are inputs to the matching algorithm. Other users do not see them. They see what you choose to display.

This is on purpose. The quiz is intentionally granular so it can match well, and that means the answers are intentionally specific. So the answers stay in their own layer, used for matching, and only the summarised, user-controlled, per-category labels appear on the profile.

Why this matters before launch

Because what you like in bed can still cost you a job, a family relationship, or a physical safety. That is not a hypothetical. The kink community has lived under that pressure for as long as it has existed.

The platforms that have served the community badly have done so because they treated privacy as a setting bolted on at the end. We treated it as a design constraint from the start.

For the full legal picture, see our privacy policy at /privacy.

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