Privacy Policy

1. Who is responsible for your information

Love in Babylon (LIB) decides how and why your information is handled, which makes us the controller of it.

Our operating legal entity, registered address and formal privacy contact have not yet been formally established, so we will not print them. They are held as explicit placeholders in our code until they are real: entity: [Legal entity name to be inserted before launch]; registered address: [Registered address to be inserted before launch]; controller contact: [Data controller contact to be inserted before launch]; data protection officer or representative: [Data protection officer or representative to be confirmed before launch, may not be required]. Each will be published in this section before we open to the public.

Until those details are published, members can reach staff through the Safety Centre inside their account, which is read by our safety team. There is no public enquiry inbox yet, and the contact page says so rather than collecting messages nobody reads.

2. Who this policy is for

This policy covers everyone who visits the site, creates an account, applies for membership, or takes part in the community.

Love in Babylon is an adults-only service. You must be 18 or over. We ask for your date of birth at sign-up and the age check runs on our servers, not just in your browser, so it cannot be skipped.

3. What we actually collect

Only what the product genuinely uses. Each item below corresponds to something really stored.

• Account and sign-in: name, email address, password (stored only as a secure hash, never in readable form by us), whether your email is confirmed, and sign-in timestamps. Email and password is currently the only way to sign in.
• Age: your date of birth.
• Profile and application: headline, about, occupation, education, city and country, interests, traits, lifestyle answers (exercise, diet, drinking, smoking, pets, social style), relationship intentions and timeline, views on children, what you are looking for, age and distance preferences, deal-breakers, prompts you answer, and your application status and our review notes.
• Faith details you choose to share: denomination, church, involvement, your faith journey and a verse. See section 6; these are treated as sensitive information.
• Photos: the images you upload, their order, which is primary, and their review status and reason.
• Consents: which documents and permissions you accepted, the version, and when.
• Community activity: interests you express in Discover, connections created when interest is mutual, messages in Table for Two, Courtyard posts, replies and reactions, your Gathering invitations, responses, check-in and private feedback, and your Commons activity RSVPs.
• Safety and moderation: blocks you make, reports you file or that concern you, moderation cases and notes, account state changes, and appeals.
• Membership and billing records: your membership status and billing dates, and for each payment its reference, amount, currency, method type, result and date. Card details are held by Paystack, our payment provider, not by us. Paystack is currently connected in test mode only, so no real payment has been or can be taken until we say otherwise here and in the Terms.
• Verification records: the status of email, phone, identity or photo checks. Email confirmation, staff photo review and the hand review of identity and age documents are live; phone checks exist as status only. No outside verification company is used, and identity documents are deleted 30 days after a decision.
• Technical and security information generated by our platform provider in the ordinary course of running the service, such as connection and error logs.

4. What we do not collect

We think it matters to be clear about the things we are not doing.

• No card details. Membership is paid on Paystack's own checkout; we receive a payment reference, amount, currency, date, result and payment method type, and never the card number.
• No advertising, ad networks, ad identifiers or sale of member information, ever.
• No product analytics, tracking pixels, session recording or third-party telemetry in the app.
• No location tracking. Your city and country come only from what you type.
• No health records, biometric identification, ethnicity data or political opinions.
• No contact-list, calendar or device scanning.

5. Where the information comes from

Almost everything comes directly from you: what you type at sign-up, in your application and profile, and what you post or send.

A small amount is generated by the service itself: timestamps, application and moderation status, and records created when another member reports or blocks you, or when staff take a safety decision about your account.

6. Faith and other sensitive details

Denomination, church, involvement and your faith journey say something about your religious beliefs. Under UK and Nigerian data protection law that is a special or sensitive category of information and needs stronger handling than ordinary profile text.

These fields are yours to fill in or leave blank. We rely on your separate, explicit consent to process them; a distinct tick-box at sign-up, recorded with its own version and date, which is deliberately optional and not a condition of creating an account. You can withdraw it by contacting us and clearing those fields, and withdrawal does not affect anything done before you withdrew.

We do not verify anyone's faith, church attendance or doctrine, and we do not infer beliefs about you from anything else you do on the service.

Your lifestyle answers and relationship intentions are ordinary personal information rather than special category information, but we handle them with the same care because they are personal.

7. Why we use it, and our lawful basis

We match each purpose to a specific basis rather than treating consent as a catch-all.

• Creating and running your account, application review, Discover, mutual interest, Table for Two, the Courtyard and the Gathering: performance of our contract with you (the Terms of Use).
• Faith, church and faith-journey details in your profile: your explicit consent (section 6).
• Keeping members safe: blocks, reports, moderation cases, appeals, account restrictions, photo review and preventing abuse, spam, impersonation and fraud; our legitimate interests in a safe community, balanced against your interests; and, where a safety matter concerns serious harm, substantial public interest.
• Confirming you are 18 or over: our legitimate interests and, where applicable, legal obligation in running an adults-only service.
• Service and security emails, such as confirming your address or resetting your password, performance of our contract.
• Keeping records of the document versions you accepted: our legal obligation to demonstrate accountability.
• Responding to a legal request, court order or regulator: legal obligation.

8. Are decisions about you automated?

No decision that has a legal or similarly significant effect on you is made solely by a machine.

Membership applications, photo approvals, reports, suspensions, bans and appeals are all decided by a person on our staff.

Discover shows you other approved members using straightforward rules, eligibility, blocks and the preferences you set. There is no artificial intelligence, scoring model, behavioural profiling or ranking algorithm behind it. Mutual interest is a simple fact: you both expressed interest, so a private Table for Two opens.

Gatherings are created and curated by our team, and invitations are chosen by staff, not generated automatically.

9. Who can see what

Access is enforced in the database itself, not only in the app, so a member cannot reach information the rules do not allow them to reach.

• Other approved members see only the profile presentation the product allows: your first name, photos, city and country, and the profile fields you completed. Your email address, date of birth, application, review notes and account records are never shown to members.
• Interest is one-sided and private until it is mutual. Nobody is told you expressed interest, and there are no public interest counts.
• Table for Two messages are visible to the two people in that conversation. Safety staff can see message context only when it is attached to a report or moderation case.
• Courtyard posts and reactions are visible to eligible members, with only a minimal presentation of who wrote them.
• Gathering hosts see a deliberately narrow roster: only the minimum needed to host and check people in, for confirmed guests, and only while they are the assigned host. Hosts cannot read post-Gathering feedback.
• Post-Gathering feedback is private to you and our review staff.
• Commons activity joining details are shown only to members with a current place and to authorised staff. Other members see only the general location summary.
• Reports go to our safety staff. We do not reveal to the person reported who reported them.
• Blocked members are hidden from each other in both directions across Discover, the Courtyard, the Gathering and connections.
• Photos are stored privately. They are never on a public web address; they are shown through short-lived links issued only to people permitted to see them.
• Staff access is separated by role, and moderation actions are written to an append-only audit record.

10. Service providers

We keep the list short. Today the service relies on a managed cloud platform that provides our database, authentication, private file storage and the sending of account emails such as confirmation and password reset, together with the hosting of the website itself.

These providers act on our instructions and are not permitted to use member information for their own purposes. We do not share member information with advertisers, data brokers, partners or anyone else for marketing.

We will publish the named provider list, and confirm the written data processing terms with each, before public launch.

11. Where your information is held

Our database, authentication records and uploaded photos are hosted in the European Union, in Ireland.

Our team, and therefore staff access to safety and moderation records, operates with the United Kingdom and Nigeria in mind, so information may be accessed from outside the country you live in.

The formal transfer arrangements that cover this access are being completed as part of our launch preparation. We are not going to claim a specific safeguard is in place before it has been signed.

12. How long we keep things

While your account is open we keep your profile, photos, application, conversations, Courtyard posts, Gathering records and current Commons activity records so the service works. Once something is no longer needed, an automated clean-up removes it on the schedule below. The clean-up runs once a night, and the periods below are the ones the system actually enforces rather than an aspiration.

Table for Two messages: removed 24 months after a connection ends. Courtyard posts hidden by moderation or emptied by the member: removed 6 months later. Interests that never became a mutual connection: removed 12 months after they were expressed. Gathering records, including invitations, attendance and feedback: removed 24 months after the Gathering ends.

Commons records: completed activities and their RSVP records are removed 24 months after the activity ends. Cancelled activities and their RSVP records are removed 24 months after the later of the scheduled end or the cancellation update. This includes attendee-only location or joining details. Active and upcoming Commons activities and current RSVPs are never included in this clean-up.

Membership and payment records: kept for 6 years from the date of the payment, or from the closure of your account where that is later and our records need it. This is Love in Babylon's current operational choice, pending accounting and legal review; it is not a statement of what any law requires, and the period may change once that review is done.

Photo records that were replaced or rejected: removed 3 months after they stopped being your current photo, and the stored files are deleted with them. Verification records: removed 12 months after your account is closed. Blocks: removed 6 months after the account on either side has been closed for that long. Rejected applications from people who never became members: anonymised 12 months after the decision.

Identity and age verification documents: the photo ID image and the selfie holding it are deleted 30 days after a reviewer decides, whatever that decision was. Only the outcome, the reviewer, the dates and any reason given are kept, so we can show that a check was made without holding your ID.

Consent records, proof of what you accepted and when, are kept for 6 years after your account is closed. Safety records, reports, blocks, moderation cases, appeals and the moderation audit trail, are kept for 6 years after the matter is finally resolved, and are deliberately not erased when related content or an account is removed, so that a pattern of harm cannot be wiped by deleting a post or leaving.

Two things hold a removal back. Anything connected to a report, case or appeal that is still open stays until that matter is closed, and the clock only starts then. Anything we are told to preserve for a legal reason stays until that requirement ends.

Closing your account does not wait for these periods: your profile, photos and profile content stop being visible immediately and are removed or emptied at once, as described in section 14. The periods above cover the records that survive closure.

Encrypted backups of the database are kept by our hosting provider on a short rolling cycle and are overwritten in the ordinary course. We do not reach into a backup to delete a single record, so something you removed can persist in a backup until that backup is cycled out.

13. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you have rights over the information we hold about you. We will not pretend a right applies where it legally does not, and we will always explain if we cannot do something you ask.

• Access: ask for a copy of what we hold about you.
• Correction: much of your profile you can change yourself at any time; ask us for anything you cannot.
• Deletion: ask us to close your account and remove your content, subject to the safety and legal exceptions in section 14.
• Withdraw consent: withdraw your explicit consent to faith details at any time (section 6). This does not affect anything done before you withdrew.
• Object or ask us to restrict: object to processing we base on legitimate interests, such as parts of our safety work, and we will weigh your reasons. Where safety of other members is at stake we may need to continue, and we will tell you why.
• Portability: for information you gave us that we process by consent or under our contract with you, ask for it in a portable form.
• Complain: if you are in the UK you may complain to the Information Commissioner's Office; if you are in Nigeria you may complain to the Nigeria Data Protection Commission. We would appreciate the chance to put things right first.

14. Closing your account and taking a copy

You can close your account yourself in Settings, under Data and privacy. When you do, your profile answers, preferences and email address are cleared, your uploaded photographs are deleted from our storage, the posts you wrote in the Courtyard are hidden and emptied, any Gathering place you were holding is released, your interests and open Tables end, and you no longer appear anywhere in the community. Sign-in is permanently disabled for that account.

Some records survive, for the periods set out in section 12: safety reports, blocks, moderation cases and decisions, appeals and the audit trail, the history of your account state, and the record of which policy versions you accepted. Keeping these is what stops a banned account from simply being remade, and protects the members involved. Only our safety team can see them.

Messages you sent to another member are not deleted from our records; they are kept as part of that conversation's history. Once your account is closed the conversation itself is no longer shown to either person, and nothing in it links back to a profile.

We do not claim that closing your account instantly erases every copy from our hosting provider's routine backups; those age out on the provider's own cycle.

You can also download a copy of your own data at any time from the same Settings page. It arrives immediately as a JSON file covering your account, profile, application, consents, verification statuses, membership and payment records, photo details, interests, connections, the messages you sent, Courtyard activity, Gathering records, blocks you made, and reports and appeals you submitted. It contains your own records only; it deliberately leaves out other members' information, reports made about you, who reported anyone, and our internal safety notes.

15. Children

Love in Babylon is strictly for adults aged 18 and over. We do not knowingly hold information about children.

The age check runs on our servers at sign-up. If we find an account belongs to someone under 18 we remove it and the information held with it.

16. Security

We protect member information with authenticated accounts and hashed passwords, access rules enforced inside the database so each member and each staff role can reach only what they are permitted to, separated staff roles, private photo storage served through short-lived links, controlled server-side operations rather than direct database access from your browser, validation of what can be written, and an append-only record of moderation actions.

No service can promise perfect security, and we will not pretend otherwise. If a breach happens that puts you at risk, we will tell you and the relevant regulator as required.

17. Changes to this policy

This policy carries a version. The version shown at the top of this page is the current one, and the version you accepted is recorded against your account.

If we make a material change we will publish the new version here and tell members in the service before it takes effect, and where the law requires it we will ask you to accept it again.

This policy has not yet been reviewed by a qualified privacy lawyer, and the items flagged in sections 1 and 11 will be completed before we open to the public. Section 12 already matches the retention rules the system enforces today.

18. Contact and complaints

Members: use the Safety Centre inside your account, which reaches our safety team directly.

Everyone else: use the contact page on this site.

If you are unhappy with how we handled a privacy matter, you can raise it with the Information Commissioner's Office in the UK or the Nigeria Data Protection Commission in Nigeria.