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Privacy policy
What we collect, why, how long we keep it, and what you can make us do about it. Last updated 15 October 2026.
The short version
We collect the things a dating site needs in order to work: who you are, how to reach you, and what you have chosen to put on your profile. We do not sell your personal data. We do not pass it to advertising networks, and there is no analytics or advertising script on this website at all. You can ask us for a copy of everything we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or delete your account yourself at any time.
The rest of this page is the detail, because the short version is not enough to make a decision with.
1. Who is responsible for your data
The data controller is the riblinked operating entity, whose office is at 834 Prospect Pl, Brooklyn, NY 11216, United States. We are established in the United Kingdom and subject to the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. You can reach us about anything on this page at privacy@riblinked.com or on +1 718 778 0996.
We have not appointed a statutory Data Protection Officer, because we are not required to. The mailbox above reaches the people who actually make these decisions.
2. What we collect, and why
We try to collect as little as possible. If we cannot explain why we need a field, we do not collect it.
| What we collect | Why we need it | Lawful basis |
|---|---|---|
| Your first name | To identify you on your profile and in messages. | Performance of a contract |
| Your email address | To confirm your account, to let you reset a password, and to contact you about your account. | Performance of a contract |
| Your date of birth | To keep the service to adults of 18 and over, and to show your age on your profile instead of your birth date. | Legal obligation, and our legitimate interest in keeping the service adults-only |
| Your password | To protect your account. It is stored only as a salted hash, never in a form we can read. | Performance of a contract |
| Your country | To show you people who are near enough to meet. | Performance of a contract |
| Your answer to “who would you like to meet?” | To show you profiles you are likely to be interested in. | Your explicit consent — see section 3 |
| Your profile text and photographs | Because that is the service: other members read it. | Performance of a contract |
| Messages you send to other members | To deliver them, and to investigate a report if one is made. | Performance of a contract |
| Messages you send to us | To answer you and to keep a record of what was decided. | Our legitimate interest in supporting members |
| Technical data: IP address, browser type, pages requested | Kept in our web server's logs. Used to keep the service running, to diagnose faults and to block abuse. | Our legitimate interest in running a secure service |
| Optional marketing preference | To send you occasional product news. Never a condition of registering. | Your consent, withdrawable at any time |
We do not ask for your postal address, your telephone number, your employer, your income, or your exact location, and we do not run credit checks or buy data about you from brokers.
3. The one sensitive answer we ask for
Knowing who you would like to meet can reveal your sexual orientation. Under the UK GDPR and the EU GDPR that is special category data, which needs a higher standard of permission than ordinary personal data.
We therefore ask for it separately, in plain words, with its own checkbox and its own explanation. The legal basis is your explicit consent under Article 9(2)(a). If you do not give it, you can still use riblinked: you will simply be shown a general selection of profiles rather than a filtered one.
You can withdraw that consent at any time in your account settings, and we will stop using the answer immediately. Withdrawing it does not affect anything we did before you withdrew it.
Some dating services collect sexual orientation as a profile field, alongside a link to terms and conditions that never mentions it. We think that is not consent, and we have not built it that way. If you were registered with us before and remember a page that asked this without explaining it, that page is not part of this site.
4. Who we share it with
Other members see the parts of your profile you have chosen to make visible. They do not see your email address or your date of birth.
Beyond that we share personal data only with the suppliers who run the service for us, and only as far as they need it:
- Our hosting provider, which stores the site and its databases and keeps the server logs described above.
- Our email delivery provider, which sends account emails such as a password reset.
- Our payment provider, if and when we introduce paid features. Card details would go to them directly and would never reach our servers.
- Law enforcement or a regulator, where we are legally required to, or where it is necessary to protect somebody from harm. If we are allowed to tell you that we have done this, we will.
We do not sell your personal data. We do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, and we do not use it to train machine learning models.
5. Sending data outside the UK and the EEA
We operate an office in the United States, and some of our suppliers may store data there. Where personal data is transferred out of the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, we rely on an adequacy regulation where one applies, and otherwise on the International Data Transfer Agreement or the standard contractual clauses together with a transfer risk assessment. You can ask us for a copy of the safeguards used for a particular transfer.
6. How long we keep it
| What | How long | Why that period |
|---|---|---|
| Your profile and account data | While your account is open | It is the service. Deleting your account removes it. |
| Your profile after you delete it | Removed from the live site immediately; up to 30 days in backups | Backups run on a cycle and cannot be edited in place. |
| Messages you sent to other members | Deleted with your account | Held only so the recipient can read them. |
| Safety reports and the messages attached to them | Up to 3 years after the report is closed | Records of a decision about somebody's account need to survive a later appeal. |
| Correspondence with our support team | Up to 2 years after the matter is closed | So that we can answer a follow-up without asking you to repeat yourself. |
| Web server logs | Up to 90 days | Long enough to investigate an incident, short enough not to become a profile of you. |
| Records needed for tax or accounting | As long as the law requires | We cannot shorten a statutory period. |
7. Your rights in the UK and the European Union
You have the right to:
- be told what we do with your data — this page;
- see it — ask for a copy of everything we hold about you;
- correct it — most of it you can edit yourself in your profile, and you can ask us about the rest;
- delete it — delete your account yourself at any time, or ask us to;
- restrict what we do with it, while a question about its accuracy or our use of it is being settled;
- object to processing we do on the basis of our legitimate interests. We will stop unless we can show compelling grounds that override your interests;
- take it with you — receive the data you gave us in a structured, machine-readable format, or have us send it to another provider;
- withdraw consent at any time, where consent is the basis we rely on. This covers the sensitive answer in section 3 and the optional marketing emails, and withdrawing it is as easy as giving it.
To use any of these, write to privacy@riblinked.com. We answer within one month, and we do not charge. If we need longer — for a request that is genuinely complex — we will tell you within that month and explain why. We may ask you to confirm your identity before we act, so that we do not hand your data to somebody else. We will not ask you for more than we need to do that.
If you think we have handled your data badly, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office — the ICO, at ico.org.uk — which is the supervisory authority for the United Kingdom, or to the supervisory authority in the country where you live in the European Union. We would rather you came to us first, but it is your choice and we will not hold it against you.
8. Your rights in the United States
If you live in a US state with a comprehensive privacy law — California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah or Virginia — you have rights under those laws as well. In California that means the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act (the CCPA and the CPRA); the other states have their own statutes, which give broadly the same rights under different names. We apply the same standard to everybody, wherever they live, because operating two different standards is how these things go wrong.
Specifically, wherever you live in the United States you may:
- ask what categories of personal information we have collected about you, and the specific pieces of it;
- ask us to delete it;
- ask us to correct it;
- ask who we have shared it with, and why;
- opt out of the sale or sharing of your personal information. We do not sell your personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, so there is nothing for you to opt out of — but the right is yours and you can assert it by writing to us;
- not be discriminated against for exercising any of these rights. We do not offer different prices or a lower quality of service to people who exercise them.
You can exercise these rights using the same address as above, and we will respond within the period the law in your state requires — 45 days for California, and between 30 and 45 days elsewhere. You can use an authorised agent to make a request for you, though we may ask for proof that they are authorised. If we refuse a request, we will say why and tell you how to appeal.
We do not knowingly collect or sell the personal information of anybody under 18, and we do not collect information that would count as “sensitive personal information” for the purpose of inferring characteristics about you beyond showing you profiles, which is what section 3 describes.
9. The forms on this site right now
The registration and contact forms on this website do not transmit anything. There is no server receiving them, nothing is stored, and nothing is written to your browser. They validate what you type so that the design can be reviewed, and then tell you that nothing was sent.
If you fill one in, assume nobody has received it. To reach us today, use the telephone number or support@riblinked.com. This section will be rewritten when the forms are connected, and until it is, nothing else on this site is collecting your data either.
10. Cookies and browser storage
This website sets no cookies, and the only thing it stores in your browser is a single flag remembering that you closed the storage notice. The cookie policy sets this out in full. Our fonts are served from our own server rather than a third party's, so simply reading this page does not tell anybody else that you were here.
11. Children
riblinked is not for anybody under 18, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from a child. If you believe a child has given us their data, write to privacy@riblinked.com and we will delete it.
12. Keeping it secure
Traffic to this site is encrypted, passwords are stored only as salted hashes, and access to member data inside our organisation is limited to the people who need it to do their job. No system is perfect, and we will not claim otherwise.
If a breach happens that is likely to put your rights at risk, we will tell you without undue delay and tell you what we know, what we are doing, and what you should do. Where the law requires it, we will also notify the Information Commissioner's Office within 72 hours.
13. Changes to this policy
If we change how we use your data, we will update this page and change the date at the top. If the change is significant, we will tell you by email or with a notice on the site before it takes effect.
See also the terms of service and the cookie policy.