Privacy policy — how we collect and handle your data

What we collect

Account data — email address, a hashed password (we never store your password in clear text), display name, and the date you joined.
Saved events — the events you choose to save to your profile, so we can show them on your dashboard.
Location and connection details — we record the IP address you connect from and the country it maps to, when you create your account and again when you sign in with Google. We keep only the most recent one, so it reflects where you are now rather than building a history of your movements. We work the country out on our own servers using a local IP-to-country database, so your IP is not sent to a geolocation vendor, and we keep no location more precise than the country. Separately, you may enter a country and, in the United States or Canada, a state or province on your account page — you can change or clear those at any time. Signing in with Google shares only your name, email address and profile picture with us; we never read an address from your Google account. Deleting your account clears every stored location. We use this to understand which countries our members are in and to show events and content relevant to where you are.
Operational logs — standard server logs (IP, timestamp, request URL, user agent) generated by our hosting provider, kept short-term for debugging and abuse prevention.
Page views — we count how many times each event page is loaded, in aggregate, so organizers can see interest in their listing. We do not associate views with individual accounts.
Claire, the event assistant — when you are signed in and ask the on-site chat about events, cities, or organizers, we store that conversation against your account. We use it to enforce a daily question limit and to see what members ask so we can improve the assistant. Deleting your account removes the chats.

What we do not collect

No third-party advertising. Optional Google Analytics (GA4) may load when administrators configure a measurement ID — IP anonymization is enabled and we do not use advertising cookies.
No precise location tracking — no GPS or device location. We keep only your most recent connection, never a history of where you have been.
No social-graph or contact-list scraping.
No content from your browsing on other sites.

How we use it

To create and authenticate your account.
To send transactional email (verification, password reset, organizer notifications).
To send our newsletter to members and to people who sign up for it. Every newsletter has a one-click unsubscribe link, and you can also turn it off on your account profile; once you unsubscribe, we stop sending it to that address.
To show you the events you saved.
To detect and stop abuse, fraud, or violations of our content rules.
To produce aggregate statistics about the platform (no personal identifiers), including which countries members are in.
To answer signed-in questions in the Claire chat, enforce its daily limit, and improve those answers.

Cookies

We use a small number of cookies that are strictly necessary — a session cookie to keep you logged in, and a CSRF cookie that protects forms. When administrators configure Google Analytics (GA4), Google may set first-party analytics cookies (for example _ga) with IP anonymization enabled. We do not set marketing or third-party advertising cookies.

We share data only with the infrastructure providers we use to run the site (hosting, database, transactional email, error logging). They process data on our behalf under written agreements and may not use it for their own purposes. Country-from-IP is derived on our servers, so we do not send your IP to a third-party geolocation service. We do not sell data to anyone.

Your rights

Access — ask us for a copy of the data tied to your account.
Correction — update profile fields directly, or email us for anything else.
Deletion — ask us to delete your account and personal data; we comply within 30 days.
Export — ask for a machine-readable copy of your saved events list.

Security

Connections are encrypted with TLS. Passwords are hashed with bcrypt. Access to production databases is restricted to a short list of operators. We do our best, but no system is perfectly secure — if you spot an issue, please reach out via the contact page.

Our public forms are protected by reCAPTCHA. It checks that a submission comes from a person rather than a script. Google receives the technical details it needs for that check. Google's Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Children

SpeedDates.com is not directed at people under 18. We do not knowingly collect data from minors. If you believe we have collected information from someone under 18, contact us and we will delete it.

Changes

If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify registered users by email and post the updated version here with a new revision date.

Approximate country-from-IP uses GeoLite2 data created by MaxMind, available from https://www.maxmind.com.