Privacy PolicyPrivacy Policy

We’ll update this policy when the app changes, or when the law does. Each new version goes on this page with a new date at the top.

If a change affects what we collect, why we collect it, or who can see it, we’ll also put a notice at the top of this page at least 14 days before the change applies.

This version was last updated on October 27, 2026 and takes effect on October 27, 2026.

When you sign up, you give us:

• Your phone number. It is your account: one number, one account.
• A password, which you make right after your first code.
• Your first and last name, and the city you’re closest to, picked from a list of US cities.
• Whether you’re a woman or a man, and whether you want to find women or men. You choose each once.
• How far people can be, from half a mile to no limit.
• Five pictures, one for each prompt, chosen from your photo library. The app never opens your camera.

As you use the app, you also give us:

• Your pulls, and what happens on each string: the call’s timing, your private keep or loosen vote, and whether you unmatched.
• Your voice during a call. It is carried live to the other person and never recorded.
• The voice notes you record in the 7 days after a call you both kept.
• The people you block or report, and the reason you pick.

We never ask for your age, your birthday or a bio. You confirm you’re 18 or older on the first sign-up step, before any code is sent.

Accounts made before October 24, 2026 may also still hold an email address from an older way of signing in.

Some things come from your phone as you use the app:

• Your location, which our server rounds to about 200 m before saving it. See How location works.
• When you were last here and when your current visit began, so people can see “Here 14 min”.
• A sign-in session, so you stay signed in on that phone.
• Push tokens, the addresses Apple uses to reach your iPhone, so a call can ring and you hear when you’re approved.
• Your network address, which any internet connection shares: with our servers whenever the app talks to them, and with LiveKit during a call.

The app has no analytics, advertising, crash-reporting or tracking tools in it. The website is different: see The website.

Other people add to what we keep about you when they pull your string, share a string and a call with you, send you voice notes, or block or report you.

When someone reports you, we keep who reported you, the reason they picked and when. You aren’t told about it.

Twilio tells us whether the code you typed is right, and Apple tells us when a push token stops working. We get nothing else about you from other companies.

The app asks for your location on the last sign-up step, and only for while you’re using it. It never asks for “Always” and never uses your location in the background.

Once your profile is approved:

• Your phone sends a low-accuracy reading once when the main screen opens, then every 30 seconds while the Near, Strings or Me tab, or someone’s profile, is on screen. Nothing is sent while you sign up or wait for approval, during a call, or while you’re in voice notes or your notes.
• Our server rounds the reading to a grid of cells about 200 m across before saving it. Only the rounded point is saved: one per person, replaced each time, with no history.
• People see only the distance between your rounded point and theirs, to a tenth of a mile, and only when you’re each within the other’s “How far”. Nobody in the app sees where you are.

Worth knowing:

• Turning off “Visible nearby” takes you off other people’s maps, but your location still updates while you use the app.
• Signing out doesn’t clear your last point. It stays until your next update or until you delete your account.
• Someone who fakes their own position could narrow you down to your cell of about 200 m, but no further.
• Our team can see the rounded point in our database.
• The unrounded reading passes through Supabase’s servers but isn’t saved in our database. Supabase’s own request logs may hold it briefly, under Supabase’s retention rules.
• California and Connecticut law count a point this fine as precise location, so this policy counts it as sensitive information.

Without location, Hotline can’t show you anyone, so the app stops at a “Hotline needs your location” screen until you allow it again, though it never covers a call in progress. “Sign out” stays on that screen. You can turn location off any time in your iPhone’s Settings.

We use what we keep to:

• Sign you in and keep you signed in.
• Have a person on our team look at your profile before it goes live.
• Show you people nearby who fit what you’re looking for, by distance, and show you to them.
• Run pulls and strings: the call, the vote and the 7 days of voice notes.
• Ring your iPhone for a call, and tell you when you’re approved.
• Keep people safe: blocks, reports, and recognizing a reported account that comes back.
• Count visits to the website and see which pages people read.
• Follow the law and answer legal requests we have to answer.

We don’t:

• Sell your data or share it for advertising.
• Show ads, or send marketing texts or emails.
• Record or transcribe calls or voice notes.
• Use your data to train AI, or send anything from your account to an AI service.

Hotline+, a paid plan with AI notes, isn’t available. If anything like it is ever offered, this policy will change before it is.

Other people in the app can see:

• Your five pictures, as described in Everything we keep.
• How far away you are, to a tenth of a mile.
• How long you’ve been here, like “Here 14 min”.
• On a string: whether you’re a woman or a man, your voice on the call, your voice notes, and whether you both kept the string.

They never see your name, phone number, city or location. Anything you say on a call or in a voice note reaches the other person, and we can’t control what they do with it.

The companies that do work for us are listed in Companies that handle data.

We may hand data over when the law makes us, for example under a court order, or when we think someone is in danger, for example by telling the police about a crime that was reported to us.

If Hotline is ever reorganized, sold or merged, your data may move to whoever runs it next, and this policy keeps covering it until a new version is posted here.

We don’t sell or rent your data, and we don’t share it with advertisers.

These companies do a job for us and handle your data to do it. Each works under its own terms and data processing terms, which only let it use your data to provide its service to us.

The App Store and TestFlight, where you get the app, follow Apple’s own privacy policy.

Not used today: no background-check company, no AI or transcription service, no email service, and no Android push service. A new company is added here before it gets any of your data.

• “Visible nearby”, on the Me tab: turn it off to leave everyone’s map. You still see others, and people with a string or a standing pull on you can still see your pictures.
• “How far”, on the Me tab: change it any time.
• “Your pictures”, on the Me tab: change them one at a time.
• “Block or report”, on someone’s profile, the match screen and the voice-note screen: they aren’t told, and you won’t see each other in the app again.
• Unmatch at any point: the other person sees only “A string loosened”.
• Location and notifications: turn either off in your iPhone’s Settings. Without location, the app can’t show you anyone.
• Texts: we text a sign-in code only when you ask for one. See the SMS Terms.
• Leaving: “Delete my account”, on the Me tab or on the waiting screen while you wait for approval, deletes your account right away; partway through signing up, write to udayan@gethotline.app. See Delete your account.
• On the website: you can block or clear its cookies and storage in your browser.

Do Not Track: neither the app nor the website changes anything when your browser sends this signal. Neither one carries advertising or tracking code that follows you to other sites or apps. The outside companies the website does use are listed in The website.

Wherever you live in the US, you can ask us to:

• Tell you what we keep about you, and give you a copy.
• Correct something that’s wrong, including your names or city, which the app won’t let you change after approval.
• Delete your data. “Delete my account”, on the Me tab or on the waiting screen, does it right away. Partway through signing up the app has no delete button yet, so write to us and we’ll delete your account.

You can also take back your permission for location or notifications at any time in your iPhone’s Settings.

We don’t sell your data or use it for targeted ads, so there is nothing to opt out of. We don’t use it to train large language models or any other AI.

To ask, write to udayan@gethotline.app. Before acting, we’ll check that the request is really yours (we text a code to the phone number on the account and ask you to send it back), and we’ll reply within 45 days. Someone you authorize can ask for you.

If we turn a request down, we’ll tell you why, and you can ask us to look at it again at udayan@gethotline.app. If you still disagree, you can contact your state’s attorney general.

Nevada residents: we don’t sell personal information, but you can still send a request not to sell it to udayan@gethotline.app.

How your data is protected:

• Our database lets the app read only what you’re allowed to see.
• Pictures and voice notes sit in private storage, and people in the app reach them only through links that expire: 24 hours for pictures, an hour for voice notes. A link already sent keeps working until then, even after a block.
• Pictures leave your phone with the place, time and camera details taken out.
• Your password is stored only as a one-way scramble that can’t be turned back.
• Calls aren’t recorded.
• When someone calls, your phone shows only “Someone nearby” and “Hotline”, even when it’s locked, and the call stays out of your Recents list.
• The website loads only over a secure connection (HTTPS).

The Hotline team (today, that’s the founder) can open everything we store, locations and voice-note files included, through Supabase’s dashboard, and can read the nightly copies on GitHub. Nobody else has this access. We only look at a location or listen to a voice note when it has been reported, to keep someone safe, or when the law requires it.

No system is perfect, and we can’t promise that nobody will ever get in where they shouldn’t.

Hotline is for people in the United States. Our database, pictures and voice notes are on Supabase’s servers in Northern Virginia.

Some of the other companies in Companies that handle data may handle data in other places: mostly the United States, and sometimes other countries where those companies run their servers.

You have to be 18 or older to use the app. We don’t ask for your age or birthday; you confirm you’re 18 or older before your first code is sent.

If you think someone in the app is under 18, pick “May be under 18” under “Block or report” on their profile, or write to udayan@gethotline.app. If we learn an account belongs to someone under 18, we close it and delete its data.

When you delete your account, these go right away:

• Your profile: names, city, both answers, your settings, and when you were last here.
• Your pictures.
• Every string you were on, with its call timing, votes, unmatch record, and the voice notes from both people.
• Your pulls and blocks, both ways, your last location, your push tokens and your password record.
• The account itself.

What stays after that, and why:

• Reports you made or that name you, for safety, with the link to you removed.
• If someone had reported you, a private record with your phone number (and an email, if your account had one), so a reported account can be recognized if it comes back.
• Nightly copies of our database on GitHub, each deleted after 30 days. They hold database rows, not pictures or voice notes.
• Twilio’s records of the codes it sent you and LiveKit’s records of calls, kept under their own retention rules.
• Your old waitlist entry, if you have one, since it isn’t linked to your account.

While your account is open, nothing is deleted on a timer: loosened, ended and unmatched strings with their voice notes, standing pulls, your last location, the times you were last here, and a profile that is never approved all stay until an account is deleted. We haven’t set end dates for these yet. Reports, and the record of a reported account, are kept for 3 years.

For how to delete your account, see Delete your account.

gethotline.app has no forms, no sign-up and no accounts, so nothing you type there is collected. Lovable hosts it, and every visit passes through Cloudflare.

What happens when you visit:

• Lovable’s visitor analytics runs on every page, this one included. For each page it records a random session id, the time, the page and its full address, the site you came from, any campaign tags in the link, your browser and device, your browser’s language, a country guessed from your time zone, how long you stay, how fast the page loads, and any errors. It doesn’t record your clicks or replay your visit.
• We see only totals in Lovable’s dashboard: visits, pages, sources, countries, device types, visit length and bounce rate. Lovable says it handles this data for us, also makes de-identified data from it, and keeps logs for as long as it needs them.
• Lovable’s hosting may also log your IP address; it doesn’t say what its logs hold or for how long.
• Cloudflare sees your IP address and sets one cookie, __cf_bm, which tells people from bots. It lasts 30 minutes and isn’t used to track you across sites.
• Lovable’s analytics code may also set a cookie called “session-id”, a random id that lasts 30 minutes.
• Google Fonts sends the site’s fonts, so Google gets your IP address and browser type. Google says its fonts set no cookies.
• Your browser keeps three small things the site never sends anywhere: a count of your visits, which only picks the closing line you see; whether you last read these legal pages “In short” or as “Full text”; and your place on the page while the tab is open.

There are no ad pixels, no Google Analytics and no social media embeds, and our own code sets no cookies.

Until October 26, 2026, the website had a waitlist form. It’s gone now, and the site collects nothing you type.

If you joined, we have:

• Your first and last name
• Your email address
• Your phone number
• That you ticked “I’m 18 or older”
• Your city, San Francisco or New York (entries from before October 21, 2026 may have none)
• When you joined

Entries went into our own database on Supabase, where only our team can read them, and they’re in the nightly backups for 30 days. The form said we’d use your entry only to tell you when it’s your turn, and nothing else uses it.

Nothing deletes these entries yet, and deleting a Hotline account doesn’t remove one. We’ll delete these entries by December 25, 2026, when Hotline opens to everyone. To have yours deleted now, write to udayan@gethotline.app.

An earlier waitlist table, made on October 15, 2026 for an email, a neighborhood and an “is adult” box, sits in the website’s own Lovable backend. None of the website’s code that we can find ever wrote to it.

California’s privacy law (the CCPA, as amended by the CPRA) covers businesses much bigger than Hotline. We give California residents its rights anyway, and this section is our promise to keep them.

In the last 12 months we collected the categories below, from you, from your phone, from other people in the app, and from your browser when you visit the website. We disclosed them only to run Hotline: to the companies in Companies that handle data and, as described above, to other people in the app.

Some of this is sensitive personal information under California law: your location, because a point rounded to about 200 m is still finer than the law’s 1,850-foot line for precise location; whether you’re a woman or a man together with who you want to find, because it can show your sexual orientation; and your phone number with your password, because together they open your account. We use these only to run Hotline for you and keep it safe, which is why we don’t offer a separate way to limit their use.

We don’t sell personal information, and we don’t share it for cross-context behavioral advertising (ads based on what you do across other sites and apps). We haven’t done either in the last 12 months.

As a California resident, you can:

• Know what we collect, where it comes from, why, and who receives it, and get a copy.
• Have it deleted, with the exceptions in How long we keep it.
• Have it corrected.
• Opt out of the sale or sharing of your data, though we do neither.
• Limit the use of your sensitive information, which we already use only to run Hotline.
• Use any of these rights without being treated differently: no features taken away, no lower quality, no different price.

To use them, ask as described in Your rights. Someone you authorize can ask for you; we may ask for proof that you gave them permission.

If you live in New York, you have every choice and right in Your choices and Your rights.

We keep reasonable safeguards on your data, suited to a service of our size. See Keeping it safe.

If a breach ever exposes your private information, we’ll tell you without unreasonable delay, and within 30 days of finding out. This is our own promise, whether or not the law asks it of a service like ours.

Hotline sends one kind of text: a sign-in code, and only when you ask for one. Twilio Verify sends it for us. See the SMS Terms.

Your mobile number, and the fact that you agreed to get texts from us, are never sold or rented to anyone. Neither one is ever given to third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotion, whether theirs or ours.

Twilio gets your number only to text your code and check it.

Questions, requests or worries about your privacy: udayan@gethotline.app.

You can also reach Udayan Sethuramalingam, who runs Hotline, at the same address.

To report someone, use “Block or report” in the app.