Privacy & cookies
What we hold, and who sees it
PickMyMate is a hundred-person experiment, not a company. This page says plainly what the site stores, who can read it, and how to remove it.
Who's responsible
PickMyMate is run by Christine Risby. For anything on this page, or to ask for a copy or correction of your details, write to support@pickmymate.com.
What we store
- Your profile — name, age, whether you joined as a man or a woman, email address, and two photos.
- What you write — if you're a woman, the three questions you pose. If you're a man, your answers to them.
- What you do here — which profiles you swiped left or right on, which polls you stood in, which polls you voted in, and your messages.
- Your password, stored only as a scrypt hash. Nobody, including us, can read it back — a forgotten password is replaced, never recovered.
- Sign-in records — when you last signed in and how many failed attempts there have been, so an account can be locked after 6 wrong guesses.
- Your consents — the date and time you ticked each box at signup. That record is the reason we're allowed to hold the rest.
Adults only
You must be 18 or over to take part. The signup form refuses a lower age, and the database will not store one. Age is self-declared — we don't ask for identity documents — so if you believe somebody here is under 18, use the Report button on their profile and we'll look at it.
Sensitive information
A dating profile says something about your sexual orientation, and people often mention health, beliefs or politics in their answers without being asked to. That is special category information under GDPR, which is why it has its own tick box at signup, separate from the general one. We rely on that explicit consent and nothing else.
Ordinary photographs are personal information but not biometric information. We do no face detection, face matching or selfie verification of any kind — the only image software here resizes pictures. If that ever changes it would need a new, separate consent, and we would ask before doing it.
Who can read your answers
This part is unusual, so it's worth being blunt about.
- When a woman opens a poll, the men's answers are shown to anyone holding the share link — her friends, her family, and other members. They are not published on the open web and search engines are asked not to index the site, but anybody given the link can read them. If you'd rather your words weren't read by strangers, don't answer.
- She cannot read the answers herself until the poll closes with at least 50 votes. Until then she sees only counts.
- Messages are between the two of you. Nobody else is shown them.
- The site administrator can see everything in the database, including answers and profile details. That is unavoidable for whoever runs the server, and you should assume it of any small site.
Photos
- Every upload is re-encoded before it is stored, which discards all camera metadata — including GPS coordinates, camera make and model, and the original date. Your photo cannot give away where it was taken.
- Images are resized to at most 1600px on the long edge and recompressed, so what is stored is a much smaller file than what you sent.
- Files are kept outside the public web folder under unguessable random names and served by the application, not by the web server directly. Browsers may cache them; shared caches and proxies are told not to.
- Photos are shown to members only, with one deliberate exception: if you open a ballot from a share link, you can see the faces on that ballot — the woman it's for and the men standing on it — and nothing else. Otherwise a photo address returns nothing, even if somebody forwards it to you.
Cookies
Reading this page sets no cookies at all. There is no analytics, no advertising, no tracking, and nothing on this site is loaded from another company — no fonts, no scripts, no images from anywhere else. There are two cookies and both are needed for the site to work, which is why you are not asked to opt in to them:
If we ever add analytics or anything non-essential, Danish rules require your opt-in first, and we would ask before switching it on rather than afterwards.
- About your account — such as a password reset link you asked for. These are sent whatever you ticked, because without them you could be locked out of your own account.
- Anything else — only if you ticked the optional third box at signup. It is optional on purpose: agreeing to be emailed is never a condition of taking part. Ask us and we'll stop.
Email is sent through Microsoft 365, so Microsoft handles messages on our behalf as they pass through.
Where it lives, and for how long
- Everything is on a single server in Denmark. Nothing is sold, shared or handed to anyone for advertising.
- The database is backed up nightly. Backups are kept for 30 days, plus one snapshot per month, readable only by the account that runs the site.
- This matters when you delete: deleting your profile removes you from the live site immediately, but copies can remain in those backups until they age out. Ask us and we'll remove you from the backups too.
- When the experiment ends, the whole database and all photos are deleted.
Accounts nobody uses
We don't keep your details forever just because you drifted away. If you don't sign in for 12 months, your account is deleted — the same complete deletion described above, not a flag marking you inactive.
- At 12 months minus 30 days we email you one warning saying the account goes in 30 days.
- Signing in is all it takes to keep it. That cancels the warning and resets the clock.
- Nobody is deleted without that notice, and never on the same day it was sent.
- Afterwards, copies remain only in backups, and those age out within 30 days. Write to us and we'll clear them sooner.
- Going dormant is not the same as being inactive. If you go dormant but still sign in, nothing is deleted.
The sweep runs once a night, so deletion happens within a day of becoming due rather than at some unpredictable later date.
Your choices
- Go dormant (women) — leave the swipe deck while keeping your profile, matches and conversations. Reversible any time.
- Delete your profile — erases your account and everything attached to it: photos, questions, answers, votes, conversations and messages, for both sides of every conversation. Photo files are overwritten on disk, not merely unlinked. It cannot be undone.
- Correct your details — name, age and email address are editable from your profile page, and your photos can be replaced there too.
- Withdraw consent, or ask for a copy or a correction of what we hold, by writing to support@pickmymate.com. Withdrawing the consent for sensitive information means deleting the profile, because the site cannot work without it.
- You can complain to Datatilsynet, the Danish Data Protection Agency, if you think we've handled your information badly.