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Privacy Policy

Last updated: August 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 — which gives us an Apple identifier and, if you permit it, your name. Before you can take part in a room we ask once for your name and your birth year; both are then locked and cannot be edited. You may add up to three profile photos and pick interests from a fixed list. 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, your interests, 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

You can send one private message to one person per night, and it hangs there until they write back. We never tell the sender whether it was opened — there are no read receipts here, deliberately. An unanswered message is deleted after twenty-four hours. 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, unless a report preserves it as evidence.

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. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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, and the like — under contracts that limit what they may do with it, and with authorities where the law requires it.

9. 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 and birth year are locked once set — if either 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.