Privacy is a dial, not a switch

Most apps give you one privacy setting. Public or private. On or off. The setting applies to the whole profile, and if you want to be visible for one thing and invisible for another, the answer is usually to make a second account.

That does not reflect how anyone actually lives, and it definitely does not reflect how people in kink communities live. You can be out about rope in your local scene and private about edge play. You can be open about power exchange at a play party and not want that on a searchable profile. The honest shape of privacy is not a switch. It is a dial. And it is a dial per category, not a single dial across everything.

The Scene is built around that shape.

Four tiers

Public. Anyone on the app can see this. Not public to the internet. Public within the community that has signed up, agreed to the terms, and completed the consent course.

Matched. Only people you have matched with can see this. A mutual match is the gate. Nothing before.

Private. Only you can see this. It stays in your profile but does not appear on anyone else's view of you. You can reveal it later, category by category, match by match.

Archived. Removed from the app. Not visible to anyone, including you in day-to-day use. Still recoverable if you ever want it back. Deletable if you do not.

Why per-category

A single profile-wide privacy setting forces a compromise. If your rope work is the thing you want a community for, and your edge play is the thing you want only specific people to know, a single setting means one of those gets hidden or one of those gets over-shared. Neither is good.

Per-category means rope can be public and edge play can be private, on the same profile, without a workaround. The shape of your visibility is as detailed as the shape of your kinks.

Some categories default to more private than others. We err on the side of less visible until you make a choice. You can always make something more public. Making it less public after the fact is the harder direction, so we start there.

How private photos work

Photos have their own privacy, per photo. A public photo is served from a standard CDN URL. A matched or private photo lives in a restricted bucket, and the URL is signed on request.

"Signed URL" means the link works for a short window and only for the person it was issued to. The photo is gated at match. If the match unmatches, the access expires. The photo never lives on a public URL, never gets cached on a public edge, never shows up in search.

The person viewing your photo cannot save the link and share it. The link will not work for anyone else, and it will stop working for them after a short time even on their own device. Screenshots are a different problem, one no app can solve, but URL leakage is solved.

Data you can archive

Photos. Past quiz answers. Old bio drafts. Messages from matches you no longer have.

Archive means out of sight, not out of the system. If you change your mind, the data is recoverable. If you want it gone, there is a separate delete action. The default is archive, because panic-deletion is the leading cause of regret.

For the full legal terms on how data is handled, shared, retained, and transferred, see our privacy policy at /privacy. This post is a design explainer, not a legal document.

🖤