GOTHS ONLY
Last updated: 20 September 2026
Goths Only is a dating app for the goth subculture. This policy explains what we collect, why, who else sees it, and how to get it deleted. It is written to be read rather than skimmed past.
Goths Only ("we", "the app") is operated from California, United States. You can reach us about anything in this policy at privacy@gothsonly.app.
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Email address | To create your account, sign you in, and send confirmation or password-reset emails. |
| Password | Stored only as a cryptographic hash by our authentication provider. We never see it and cannot recover it. |
| Date of birth | To confirm you are 18 or over and to show your age. We store the date rather than the age, because a stored age silently becomes wrong. |
| Your gender, and who you are looking for | To decide whose profile you see and who sees yours. |
Your name or the name you go by, photos, the scenes and bands and interests you pick, what you are looking for, and any free text you write — what excites you, what grinds your gears, what you have been up to lately, your sense of humour, your ambitions, your dealbreakers, and your answer to the profile prompt.
All of this is optional except your name, and all of it is visible to other people using the app who can see your profile.
If you choose to set your location, we ask your device for your coordinates once and store them rounded to roughly 100 metres. Other people are shown only your distance from them, rounded to whole kilometres and never below 1 km. We do this deliberately: precise distances can be used to work out where someone lives by checking from several places, and no one needs to know you are 3.4 km away rather than 3.
We do not track your location in the background. It updates only when you tap the button.
Who you have swiped on and which way, your matches, the messages you send, which conversations you have opened, and anyone you have blocked or reported.
Nobody can see who liked them. Your swipes are visible only to you. We also do not show read receipts — the record of which conversations you have opened is used only to mark them as new or not, and is never shown to anyone else.
Sensitive information. Your gender identity, who you are looking for, and what you write about yourself can reveal things that both California and other privacy laws treat as sensitive — including sexual orientation. Your photos and approximate location are also sensitive.
We use this information only to run the app: to decide whose profile you see, to show distance, and to generate the compatibility read described below. We do not use it to advertise to you, we do not sell it, and we do not share it for anyone else's advertising.
When you open a conversation with someone you have matched with, the app can show a short read on how you might get on, with scores across five dimensions and suggested openers.
To produce it, our server sends both profiles — including names, tags and the free text you have written — to Anthropic, the company that makes the AI model we use. It does not send your email address, your password, your exact location, or your messages to each other.
The result is stored on the match so it is generated once rather than every time, and is deleted with the match.
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We have no advertising partners and no analytics or tracking software in the app.
We use a small number of companies to run it:
| Who | What they handle |
|---|---|
| Supabase | Our database, file storage and sign-in. Everything in this policy is stored with them. |
| Anthropic | Receives the two profiles when a compatibility read is generated, as described above. |
| Resend | Delivers account emails. Receives your email address. |
| Expo | Delivers the app itself and hosts the web version. |
We may also disclose information if the law requires it, or where we believe in good faith that it is necessary to protect someone's safety — for example in response to a credible threat, or a report that someone using the app is under 18.
You can delete your account from inside the app, in the You tab. It is immediate and permanent. There is no grace period and no copy kept for you to recover.
When you delete, this all goes:
One thing we keep: reports made about you. If someone reported your account, that report — including the account identifier it was made about — is kept for up to 12 months after you delete, and then deleted.
We keep it because otherwise deleting an account would erase the record of it, and someone could misbehave, delete, and sign up again with nothing to show for it. Privacy law allows retaining information for exactly this reason. If you made a report and then delete your account, your identity is removed from it but the report itself remains.
If you are in California, the CCPA gives you the right to know what we have collected about you, to have it deleted, to have it corrected, to limit how we use sensitive information, and not to be treated differently for exercising any of those rights. Other places give similar rights.
In practice:
We will never restrict your use of the app, or charge you, for exercising these rights.
Your profile and activity stay until you delete your account. Reports are kept for 12 months as described above. Account emails sent through our email provider are retained by them for a short period as part of delivery.
Connections to the app are encrypted in transit, and data is encrypted at rest by our database provider. Access to your information is restricted at the database level rather than by the app alone — meaning a modified copy of the app still cannot read other people's messages, see who liked them, or read anyone's exact location.
No system is perfect, and we will tell you if something happens that affects your information.
Goths Only is for people aged 18 and over. We ask for your date of birth at sign-up and the database refuses to store a profile under 18.
If you believe someone using the app is under 18, report them — "They might be under 18" is the first option in the report list, deliberately. We act on those reports quickly, and we delete accounts we determine belong to minors.
If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will update the date at the top and tell you in the app before it takes effect.