Privacy Policy
Last updated: October 9, 2026
22Blues exists to get you off the screen and back into the room. That shapes how we treat data: we collect as little as we can, keep it no longer than we need to, and never make your presence a product. Nobody can see you here until you choose to say something, and your location is never shown to another member. This policy explains what we collect, why, and the choices you have.
1. What we collect
To create an account we need an email address, or Sign in with Apple or Google. Either of those gives us that provider’s identifier for your account and your email address; Apple shares your name only if you permit it, and Google sends the name on your Google account. We never see your password, and we take nothing else from either provider — no contacts, no photos, no profile picture. Before you can take part in a room we ask once for your name, your birth year and your gender; all three are then locked and cannot be edited. You may add up to three profile photos. There is no bio and no free-text profile to fill in. Reading our editorial pages requires no account at all.
2. Location and presence
Your device’s location is used for one thing: working out which zone you are actually standing in, and which zones are near you. We do not store your coordinates. Your presence in a zone lives only in temporary memory, expires ninety minutes after your last activity, and is never written to a permanent record — there is no history of where you have been, because there is nothing to delete. We do keep a short list of which zones you have been near and on how many days, so we know which rooms are worth telling you about; it holds zone references and dates, never a coordinate trail. Your location is never shown to another member — not as a pin, not as a distance, not at any time.
3. What other people see
Until you answer a question, nobody in a room can see you at all — presence is a count, never a face. Answering is what makes you visible, and you choose how. An anonymous answer permanently strips your identity from that answer and from every reply and like attached to it; the choice is locked when you post and cannot be reversed in either direction. An attributed answer shows your name, your photos, your age bracket, and the wall of answers you have given on previous nights. That wall carries the question and your answer and nothing else — never which zone you were in, never the date. Your birth year is never shown to anyone; only a broad age bracket derived from it is.
4. Messages
A first message to someone hangs for thirty minutes and is deleted if it is not answered. We never tell the sender whether it was opened — there are no read receipts here, deliberately. If the other person replies, a chat opens between you; it lives three hours and is then deleted. We keep message content only for as long as the message itself exists, with two exceptions: a report preserves the words as evidence, and the opening messages of some chats — particularly those involving newer accounts — may be retained briefly and reviewed by automated systems or our community safety team, so that a member who behaves badly in their first chats is noticed early. Those retained lines are deleted after ninety days at the latest, are never shown to other members, and stop being retained once an account has a short clean history. Chats otherwise disappear and are not stored.
5. Safety, blocks, and reports
Blocking works in both directions and is permanent: neither of you appears to the other anywhere in the app again. When you report someone we keep the report, the reason, and a snapshot of the content complained about for ninety days, so a person on our team can review it and act. We also keep a minimal record that the app made a real-world connection between two members possible — two member identifiers and a zone, kept for one hundred and eighty days. No part of the product reads it: it exists solely so that if something goes wrong we can answer a serious question. Every time someone on our team looks at that record, the lookup is itself recorded and kept for a year.
6. Automated systems and AI characters
What you post in public is read by automated systems as well as by people. Every public post and photo is checked against our guidelines by AI models run by third-party providers, so that harmful content comes down quickly; a person on our team reviews what those checks flag. Some questions are also read by an AI character. It is always marked with a robot — on the question before you post, and on the character itself — it is never presented as a member, it leaves one public comment under your post and never replies again, and it cannot message you or see where you are. You can report its comment like any other. To write that comment, the AI provider receives the question and your post. On a post you sign with your name it may also receive your name, your age, your gender and a few of your own earlier signed posts on similar questions, so that it can understand you and address you properly. On an anonymous post it receives none of that — not your name, not your age or gender, and none of your history — and nothing you have ever posted anonymously is sent alongside your name. To write a comment, an AI character is never given your photos; and we never send any of these providers your email address, your device details or your location.
7. Notifications
If you allow push notifications we store your device’s push token so we can deliver them, and your per-type preferences so we only send what you asked for. You can switch off any notification you manage from within the app, and the token is deleted when you log out.
8. How you found us
When you arrive through one of our own links — an ad, or a creator’s link — we count the visit and any tap on a store badge against that link, as plain totals with no visitor identifier. If you then create an account, we record once, on your account, which link brought you, so we can tell which of our own efforts work and pay the creators who send us members. If you join on the website, the link is known exactly. If you join in the app, we make a best guess instead: tapping a store badge leaves a scrambled, unreadable form of your network address in temporary memory for a short window — thirty minutes — and an account created from the same network inside that window is matched to the link. Your address is never stored with your account, and the scrambled form deletes itself when the window closes. A creator is told how many members they brought, never who.
9. Cookies and preferences
We use cookies to keep you signed in and to remember your preferences. We do not use cookies to follow you around the internet.
10. How we share
We do not sell your personal data. We share it only with the service providers who help us run 22Blues — hosting, notification delivery, verification, the AI model providers described above, and the like — under contracts that limit what they may do with it, and with authorities where the law requires it.
11. Your rights
You can access or delete your account information at any time from the app, or by contacting us. Deleting your account removes your profile, your photos, and your wall, along with any presence data associated with it. Your name, birth year and gender are locked once set — if any of them is genuinely wrong, write to us and we will correct it. Records we hold for safety reasons, which involve other people as well as you, are kept for the periods described above.
12. Age
22Blues is for adults. You must be at least 18 years old to create an account. We store your birth year only, never a full date of birth, and an account whose year would make you under 18 cannot be created at all. We remove accounts that misrepresent their age.
13. Changes to this policy
If we change this policy in a meaningful way, we will tell you in the app before the change takes effect. Continuing to use 22Blues after that means you accept the updated policy.
Questions?
If anything here is unclear, or you want to exercise any of your rights, write to [email protected] or reach us through the app’s support section — we read everything.