Privacy policy

Winkly is an app for meeting new people, run by Lazykraft (“we”, “us”). This policy explains what information we collect when you use the Winkly app and website, why we collect it, who can see it and the choices you have. Lazykraft is the controller of your personal information.

Winkly is only for adults aged 18 and over. We don’t knowingly collect information from anyone younger.

Information you give us

• Account details. You sign in with Google or Apple. We receive the email address of that account and an identifier for it. If you use Apple’s “Hide My Email”, we receive the relay address Apple gives us instead.
• Profile details. Your first name, date of birth (we show your age, not the date), gender and who you’d like to meet, and 3 to 6 photos. You can also add a bio, answers to profile questions, your job and company, education, height, interests, languages, what you’re looking for, qualities you value in others, star sign, habits such as smoking, drinking and exercise, pets, whether you have or want children, religion, political views and opening questions for your matches.
• Matching preferences. The age range and distance you want to see people within.
• Verification photo. If you choose to verify your profile, you take a photo that our team compares with your profile photos.
• Activity with other members. Likes, super likes and passes, comments you leave on someone’s photo, bio or answers, your matches, and the messages you send: text, photos, voice messages, GIFs, links, replies and reactions.
• Safety actions. Members you block, and reports you make, including the category and any description you add.
• Things you tell us. Messages you send our support team, and the reason you give if you delete your account.

Information collected when you use Winkly

• Location. With your permission, the app shares your device’s precise location with us, along with your city and country. If you use travel mode, we use the place you choose instead. You can turn off location access in your device settings, but Winkly needs a location to show you people nearby.
• Device and app details. An identifier for your app installation, used to send you push notifications, plus your device type, operating system and app version.
• Usage and log data. Your IP address, the requests the app makes, dates and times, errors, and the day you were last active. We use this to run the service, keep it secure and fix problems.

Information from others

• Google and Apple confirm who you are when you sign in.
• Other members may send you messages or report you. A report includes the category, what they wrote and a copy of the relevant content (see “Safety and moderation”).

Some profile details can reveal sensitive things about you: your religion, your political views, and, through your gender and who you’d like to meet, your sexual orientation. Apart from gender and who you’d like to meet, which Winkly needs to suggest people, these details are optional. When you add one, you choose to show it on your profile, and you consent to us using it to run Winkly for you. You can remove it at any time.

Your verification photo is only seen by our team. We don’t use facial recognition or create a biometric template from it.

• To provide Winkly: create your account, show your profile, suggest people, form matches when a like is returned, deliver messages and send notifications.
• To verify profiles: review verification photos and show a verified badge on profiles that pass.
• To keep members safe: review reports, enforce our Terms of service, prevent fraud and spam, and stop banned people from coming back.
• To run and improve the service: monitor performance, fix errors and understand how features are used.
• To communicate with you: reply to your questions and tell you about changes to Winkly or these policies.
• To meet legal obligations: respond to lawful requests and protect our rights and the rights of others.

We don’t sell your personal information, and we don’t use it for third-party advertising.

Legal bases (EEA, UK and similar laws)

We use your information because it’s needed to provide the service you asked for (performance of a contract); for our legitimate interests in keeping Winkly safe, secure and working well; with your consent, for your precise location, push notifications and the sensitive details you choose to add; and where the law requires it. You can withdraw consent at any time in the app or your device settings.

Your profile is shown to other members: your first name, age, photos, bio, answers, job, the profile details you add, whether you’re verified, your city and roughly how far away you are. When you like someone, they can see your like and any comment you added. Messages are seen by the person you send them to.

Other members don’t see your email address, your date of birth, your exact location, your verification photo, who you’ve passed on, or who you’ve blocked or reported.

• Incognito hides your profile from people browsing until the time you choose.
• Travel mode shows people around a place you pick instead of your current location.

We suggest people who fit each other’s gender, age and distance preferences, and order them by things like shared interests, distance and how recently they were active. New members are shown more often for their first week, so they get a fair start. We don’t make decisions with legal or similarly significant effects about you based only on automated processing.

We share personal information only in these cases:

• With other members, as described in “What other members can see”.
• With service providers who process it for us, under contracts that limit how they can use it:
  • Google and Apple, for sign-in;
  • Google Firebase Cloud Messaging, to deliver push notifications;
  • cloud hosting and storage providers, which hold our database, photos and voice messages;
  • Cloudflare, for network delivery and security;
  • Uptrace, for performance monitoring and error diagnostics;
  • GIPHY, which receives your searches when you look for a GIF in a chat.
• For legal and safety reasons, when we believe in good faith that it’s needed to comply with the law or a valid legal request, to protect someone from harm, to investigate fraud or abuse, or to enforce our terms. This includes reporting child sexual exploitation to the relevant authorities.
• In a business transfer, such as a merger or sale of Lazykraft’s assets, in which case this policy continues to apply to your information.

When someone reports a member, we save a copy of what was reported so our team can review it even if it changes later: for a chat, the most recent messages in that conversation; for a profile, the profile as it was. Our team may also look at the reported member’s verification photo and account history. Depending on what we find, we may dismiss the report, suspend the account for a period or ban it. The member is told when their account is suspended or banned.

We keep your information while your account is open. You can delete your account at any time in the app; see Delete your account for the steps. When you do:

• Straight away, your profile disappears from Winkly. No one can find you, like you or message you, you’re signed out of every device, and your sign-in link to Google or Apple and your push notification registrations are deleted. If you signed in with Apple, we also revoke Winkly’s access to your Apple account.
• Within 30 days, we permanently delete your profile details, photos, verification photo, location, preferences, likes, passes and blocks.
• Messages you sent stay in the chats of the people you talked with, because they’re part of those people’s conversations too. They’re kept for as long as that chat exists.
• Reports and moderation records, including the copies of reported content, are kept as long as needed to keep members safe, stop banned people from returning and handle legal claims.
• Log data is kept for a short period for security and diagnostics, and copies in backups are removed as the backups are replaced.

We also keep information when the law requires us to.

• Edit or remove most profile details in the app at any time.
• Turn location access and notifications on or off in your device settings.
• Use incognito to hide your profile for a while.
• Block or report anyone from their profile or your chat.
• Delete your account in the app.

You can also ask us for a copy of your information, or ask us to correct, delete or restrict it, or object to how we use it, by emailing [email protected]. We may need to confirm the request comes from you, and we’ll reply within 30 days. Depending on where you live, these rights are given to you by law:

EEA, UK and Switzerland

You have the rights of access, correction, deletion, restriction, portability and objection, and you can withdraw consent at any time. You can also complain to your local data protection authority.

United States

Residents of California and other US states with privacy laws can ask what personal information we collect, use and disclose, and ask us to correct or delete it. We don’t sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We use sensitive information only to provide the service, so there’s nothing to opt out of. We won’t treat you differently for using these rights. You can ask someone to make a request for you, and we’ll confirm they have your permission.

We protect your information with encryption in transit, access controls that limit who on our team can see member data, and secure handling of sign-in sessions. No system is perfectly secure, though, so we can’t guarantee that information will never be accessed without permission. If a breach affects you, we’ll tell you as the law requires.

Winkly is used around the world, and we and our service providers may process your information in countries other than your own, including the United States. When we transfer information out of the EEA, UK or Switzerland, we use safeguards the law recognises, such as the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses.

Winkly is for people aged 18 and over. If we learn that a member is under 18, we close the account and delete their information. If you think a child is using Winkly, report the profile in the app or email [email protected]. Read our Child safety standards.

We may update this policy from time to time. The date at the top shows when it last changed. If we make a significant change, we’ll tell you in the app before it takes effect.

For questions about this policy or your information, email [email protected].