Privacy Policy

This is a health-adjacent app, and we treat status data with the same rigor as sensitive health data as a matter of trust, regardless of what any specific regulation requires. For detail specific to your HIV/HSV status -- collection, disclosure consent, sharing, and retention -- see our Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy.

What we collect

Directly from you: your account email and password, your profile information (name, date of birth, city, gender, orientation, bio, photos), your status (HIV+/HSV-1/HSV-2, self-reported), your prompt answers and dating preferences (age range, distance, and any optional gender/state/status filters you set), your messages with matches and any photos you attach to them, referral links you use or generate, and any report, appeal, or privacy request you file.

Automatically: consent events (what you agreed to or withdrew, and when), likes/passes and match/block records, read receipts, rate-limiting and authentication security logs, and essential session cookies/browser storage needed to keep you signed in. We don't use analytics, advertising, or tracking cookies of any kind.

From other members, about you: if someone reports you or a message you sent, that report and its content are stored. See “Reports and appeals” below for how that's handled.

If you contact support, we keep that correspondence to respond to you and, if relevant, to a safety investigation.

We collect and retain your full date of birth, not just an age, because we need to confirm you're 18 or older and keep your displayed age accurate on an ongoing basis, not only at signup. Other members can only ever read the age we calculate from it, never your birth date itself, enforced at the database level so this holds even against a direct API call, not only through the app's own screens. We collect only what the app needs to function: no location beyond city/metro level, ever.

Why we use it, and who can see it

We use this information to operate matching and messaging, keep the community safe (investigating reports, enforcing blocks and bans), authenticate you and provide support, respond to legitimate legal requests, fulfill your own privacy-rights requests, and, for compatibility scoring and report triage only, local automated text processing described below. We don't use any of this for advertising, and we don't sell it.

Your profile, prompts, and photos are visible only to members our matching system actually selects as your candidates, or members you've matched with, not to the general membership, and this boundary is enforced at the database level, not only by which screens the app shows you. Once you've given separate disclosure consent, your status is part of that same visible profile, the same way your city is.

Location

We store the city or metro area you select from a fixed list, and the maximum distance you're willing to match within. We use those to work out roughly how far apart two members are, so we only show you people within both of your chosen ranges.

That distance is calculated on our servers from the published geographic centre of each city: public reference data about places, not a location reading from you. We never ask your browser or device for your location, and we never collect or store your coordinates, street address, workplace, or postcode. Other members only ever see your city and state plus an approximate range such as “Within 25 miles”, never an exact distance, and never a map.

Photo verification

Photo verification is entirely optional. It's never required to browse, be shown to other members, or use any part of Yurela. If you choose to complete it, we collect a single live selfie captured through your device camera, used only so a Yurela reviewer can visually compare it against your own profile photos and confirm you appear to be the same person. We don't run automated facial recognition or biometric matching, and we don't create or store face embeddings, face geometry, or any other biometric template.

Your verification selfie is stored in a private location separate from your profile photos, accessible only to a reviewer through a short-lived signed link, never through the same paths as your regular profile photos, and never shown on your profile. We delete it as soon as a reviewer makes a decision, whether approved or rejected, or immediately if you delete your account before review. We keep only the outcome (whether you're currently verified) and internal review metadata, not the image itself. A Photo Verified badge means a reviewer compared a live selfie to your profile photos. It does not verify your legal identity, age, health status, background, or any other profile claim.

We'll email you when we receive your verification photo and again when a reviewer has decided. Those emails say only that a verification exists and how it turned out. They never contain your verification photo, your health status, or any other member's information.

How it's protected

Status and message content get the same protection as everything else in the app: the database and network connections are encrypted in transit and at rest, provided by our hosting and database infrastructure. This is not end-to-end encryption. It protects your data from outside interception and from anyone accessing the underlying infrastructure without authorization, but Yurela's own systems can access message and status content where necessary to operate the service, respond to a report, or handle a support request. Photos are stored with signed, access-controlled URLs, never a public bucket.

Withdrawing consent

You can withdraw disclosure consent any time from Settings → Privacy & Data Center. That stops any new authorized sharing of your status immediately, enforced the same way at the database level, re-checked on every request rather than once a day, and pauses your discoverability to new and existing candidates/matches until you re-consent. It can't retract status information a member already saw, screenshotted, or remembers before you withdrew, and it doesn't change message content you already sent.

Who we work with

Yurela has no ad-tech or analytics vendor of any kind. We do rely on a small set of infrastructure providers to run the app, who process data on our behalf under their own security commitments to operate the service, not for their own independent purposes: Supabase (database, authentication, file storage, and realtime messaging), Resend (delivering account emails like password resets and photo-verification updates, which receive your email address and never your status, and delivering privacy requests you submit through our request form to our support inbox), Google (Gmail, which hosts that support inbox), and Vercel (hosting).

A privacy request you submit through our form is saved in our systems and also emailed to our support inbox, so we can respond to you. That email contains your email address, the type of request you chose, and anything you type into the details box, which is why the form asks you not to include your HIV/HSV status or other health details.

What we never do

We never sell your data, and we never share it for advertising or with a data broker. No ad-tech, no "anonymized" data sales, no ads, ever. The infrastructure providers named above are not an exception to that. They don't receive your data to advertise or sell it, they process it under contract solely to run the parts of the service they provide. We may disclose limited information when legally required to (for example, a valid legal process), which is a separate, narrow category from a commercial sale or advertising use.

Who this is for

Yurela is for adults 18 and older, currently available in the U.S. states and D.C. we list at signup, not every state. We don't knowingly collect information from anyone under 18; if you believe an account belongs to a minor, contact us at hello@yureladating.com and we'll investigate. Date of birth is self-attested, not independently verified, and enforced as a hard floor at the database level regardless of which screen or path is used to set it.

Account existence and login

Login and password reset return identical responses whether or not an email is registered. Signup does not fully guarantee this today: because email addresses aren't currently confirmed before an account becomes active, a brand-new signup receives a working session immediately, while an address that's already registered does not, this is a known, tracked gap, not a claim we're making that it's already closed. A successful login necessarily differs from a failed one (you're signed in either way you could tell), but a failed login never reveals whether the problem was the email or the password.

Rights requests

From Settings → Privacy & Data Center (or our privacy request form if you can't sign in), you can export a copy of your data, correct your profile directly, view and withdraw your consent history, or delete your account. A request we can't fulfill through self-service (an emailed correction to your account email, for example) is reviewed by a person, not an automated system; we aim to acknowledge promptly and don't treat 30 days without a response as acceptable. If we deny a request, tell us and we'll take a second look. We verify your identity as the requester before acting on a request that isn't already tied to your signed-in session.

Deletion and retention

Deletion is a real purge, not a soft deactivation, and removes your profile, status, messages, matches, and photos from the live app, including a shared match and its message history for both people in it, since a conversation is one shared record, not two separate copies (a founder decision, not a technical limitation). What isn't deleted with your account: a report you filed or were named in is kept, with your identity removed from it, so a safety record isn't lost when one side of it deletes their account; a privacy request you submitted through the public form is kept as our own record of having received and handled it; and your consent history is deleted along with everything else (a deliberate choice, not an oversight). Routine infrastructure backups may retain deleted data for a limited period before they roll over to newer backups; we have not yet published the exact backup retention window and will update this once confirmed. We don't sell backup access, and backups aren't used for anything but disaster recovery.

About this policy

Several states have specific statutory confidentiality protections for HIV/STI status, and other state privacy laws may apply depending on where you live; we haven't exhaustively resolved every open legal question for every enabled state. This policy describes what the product actually does and the founder's own operational decisions. It is not a substitute for legal advice. See the notice above for its review status.