This policy explains what Cringe collects, why, and what you can do about it. Cringe is a satirical product, but this is a real description of how we handle your data.
Who we are
Cringe is operated by Nuits, a sole trader business (toiminimi) registered in Finland, Business ID 3584845-8, VAT ID FI35848458. Nuits is the data controller for the information described here. For privacy questions or to exercise your rights, write to hi@becringe.org. Our postal address is available on request by email.
What we collect
We collect only what the service needs to run:
- Account details: your email and your confirmation that you are 18 or older.
- Your profile: display name, age, short bio, photos, prompt answers, and the profile details you fill in, including any you choose to keep off your profile.
- Who you want to date: your gender and the genders you want to see in the deck. The genders you want to see can reveal your sexual orientation, which is special-category data under the GDPR. We process it only with your explicit consent, which you give by filling in the preference, and you can change or remove it in your profile at any time.
- Your activity: likes and the comments you attach to them, skips, matches, messages, bot calls, nudge responses, and whether you have switched on the free Cringe+ features. Cringe+ holds no payment data because there is no payment.
- Safety records: reports you file, reports filed about you, including any message text that was reported, the results of automated screening, and the actions we took.
- Pilot operations: event type, date, internal profile identifiers, and whether an interaction involved a Plant. These receipts never contain profile text, message content, photos, email, or device data. We use them to count exposure, likes, replies, matches, and qualified conversations separately for people and Plants.
- Things other people write about you: a like sent to you can carry a comment, which reaches you before you have matched. We screen it before you see it, you can report it, and it is included in your data export.
- Push notifications (optional): if you turn them on, the subscription token your browser's push service issues, or on the iOS and Android apps the device push token that Expo's push service issues, so we can send you a notification. Turning them off removes it.
- Technical data: device and log information, crash reports from the website and the iOS and Android apps that we send to GlitchTip on servers we operate, and the cookies described in our cookie policy.
- The public honest version box, if you use it without an account: the text you paste and the honest version are processed and returned as a link, and neither is stored by us. For that day we keep a salted hash of your IP address to limit abuse; the salt changes daily. If you ask to be told when there are humans near you, your email address is kept by Clerk on our waitlist until you ask us to remove it, and the bot check on that form is run by Cloudflare Turnstile.
- Product analytics (optional): page views, referrers, and basic device and browser information collected by OpenPanel on servers we operate, only if you allow it. We do not record session replays, and we do not use this for advertising or cross-site profiling.
Why we collect it, and our lawful bases
We process your data to provide the service you asked for, which is our contract with you. We process some data to keep people safe, prevent abuse, act on reports, confirm that users are over 18, and measure whether the limited pilot produces conversations between people rather than only Plant activity. Those uses rest on our legitimate interests and our legal obligations, including our duties under the Digital Services Act. Your dating preference, optional analytics, and push notifications run only with your consent, and you can withdraw it at any time. Declining analytics does not stop the smaller operational pilot counts described above. We do not run advertising or behavioural profiling for ads.
AI and your content
AI reads some of your content to run the features described on the AI and bots page. The honesty engine sends your prompt answers and bio to be rewritten and to derive your red flags. The compatibility line sends your prompt answers alongside another profile's. Messages you send to a Plant are sent so the Plant can reply. Automated moderation sends your bio, prompt answers, messages, like comments, and photos to a safety model.
All of this goes through OpenRouter, a routing service in the United States, to the model providers we have chosen: Anthropic for text and Cloudflare's Clef safety model for moderation, with PrimeIntellect as a fallback host for the safety model only. We use OpenRouter's zero-data-retention setting so that prompts and answers are not kept by the providers after the request completes beyond temporary processing and what the law requires. We keep honesty originals only long enough to show you the rewrite, up to about 24 hours, and then delete them. Your content is never used to train models.
How long we keep it
We keep your data while your account is active. When you delete your account, we delete your profile, photos, prompts, matches, and messages, and we ask Clerk to delete your sign-in identity and keep a receipt that it was done. Pilot event receipts remove your internal profile identifier and re-key the fingerprint from the receipt itself, retaining only that opaque receipt fingerprint, event category, date, frozen person-or-Plant classification, and a deleted-participant marker. Daily aggregate counts are not linked back to an account and are not reduced by deletion. Honesty originals are deleted within about 24 hours of the rewrite. Safety reports and the record of moderation actions are kept after deletion, reduced to what is needed to show what happened and why, so that a report cannot be erased by deleting the account. Limited residual copies in encrypted backups expire on a rolling basis. The one exception is material we are legally required to preserve, such as evidence of child sexual abuse, which is held separately under a legal hold for as long as the law requires.
Your rights
You can ask us to access, export, correct, or delete your data, and you can object to or ask us to restrict certain processing. Where we rely on consent, you can withdraw it at any time. To use any of these rights, write to hi@becringe.org or use the controls in your account. We answer within one month. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Office of the Data Protection Ombudsman, the Finnish supervisory authority, at tietosuoja.fi, or with the supervisory authority where you live.
If we hide or remove something you posted, or restrict or close your account, we tell you by email what we did, why, whether automated screening was involved, and how to contest it. Write back to that email or to hi@becringe.org and a person will review the decision.
California and other places
If you live in California, you have the right to know what we collect, to delete it, to correct it, and to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information. We do not sell or share personal information. We honor Global Privacy Control signals. We will not discriminate against you for exercising any right. See your privacy choices. If you live elsewhere outside the European Union, we give you the same controls and will honor the additional rights your local law provides.
International transfers
Our database and the servers we run ourselves are in the European Union. Some providers operate in the United States: Clerk for sign-in, and OpenRouter and the AI model providers it routes to. Clerk is certified under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework. Where data leaves the European Economic Area we rely on that framework or on the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, together with the zero-data-retention setting described above.
Security
We protect data in transit and at rest and limit who can access it. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot promise otherwise. If a breach puts you at risk, we will tell you and the supervisory authority as the law requires.
Children
Cringe is for adults 18 and older. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18. See our child safety standards.
Changes and contact
We may update this policy and will post the new date at the top. If a change matters to you, we will tell you in the app or by email. For privacy questions, write to hi@becringe.org.