What we know about you, and what we do with it

HeritageMingle is operated by Digistudios24. For data protection purposes we are the controller of the information described here.

Use the contact form about anything on this page. A person reads it.

When you create an account: your first name, email address, date of birth and a password. The password is stored only as a one-way hash, so nobody at HeritageMingle can read it, ourselves included.

Whatever you choose to add to your profile: the city you live in, your country and region of origin, your occupation, education, languages, a short biography, your gender, and photographs.

Four things we treat with extra care because the law requires it: your religion, your ethnicity, your tribe, and your origin. These are what data protection law calls special-category data.

A private number from one to ten describing how connected you feel to your heritage, five ratings covering family, career, faith, marriage and children, and where you expect to be living in five years.

What you are here for: friendship, dating, a serious relationship, marriage, professional connections, or any combination of those.

What you do here: introductions sent and received, messages and the pictures inside them, communities you join, posts and comments you write, events you say you are attending and check in to, and the people you save, pass on, block or report.

Technical records needed to run the service: your session, the time you were last active, and ordinary server logs.

No third-party analytics, no advertising trackers, no social media pixels. There is no tracking cookie on HeritageMingle. The only cookies we set keep you signed in and stop other websites submitting forms as you.

We do not read your messages, except a specific message that has been reported to us, or where the law requires it.

We do not sell your information. Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to anybody.

Every question about religion, ethnicity, tribe and origin is optional. Skipping one is a permanent answer rather than a reminder to come back later.

Where you do answer, we rely on your explicit consent and nothing else. You give it by filling the field in. You withdraw it by clearing the field, which removes the value.

Fields you hide are left off your profile rather than shown blank, because an empty row labelled "Faith and religion" tells people something too.

Religion, ethnicity and tribe are hidden by default. You have to turn them on deliberately.

If somebody filters for a trait you have hidden, you still appear in their results. Excluding you would leak the answer by implication, and would quietly cost you visibility for using a privacy control we offered you.

The one-to-ten heritage connection number is never shown to anyone. It affects who we suggest and nothing else.

We never ask your sexual orientation. We do ask your gender, and we do ask whether you are open to dating, a relationship or marriage. Put those two answers together and the people we introduce you to reveal something we never put in a form.

The law treats that inference exactly as it treats an answer. So we treat it the same way: it rests on your explicit consent, we record when it became possible and when it stopped, and you can see those moments in your data export.

You control it directly. Removing the romantic options from what you are here for, or leaving your gender unstated, ends the inference. You keep friendship and professional connections either way.

We do not store a conclusion about your orientation anywhere, we do not share one, and nobody at HeritageMingle sees a field describing it. What exists is the pair of answers you gave and the matching they produce.

To provide the service you asked for, which in law is performance of a contract with you. That covers your account, your profile, matching, messaging and events.

Your explicit consent, which is the only basis we use for religion, ethnicity, tribe and origin.

Our legitimate interest in keeping people safe, covering moderation, investigating reports, and acting on accounts that break the rules. Anyone using a platform like this expects us to do that.

Legal obligation, where we are required to keep or hand something over.

Other members see your profile as your visibility settings allow. You can check exactly what that looks like: your profile has an "as others see it" view that renders the page the way a stranger receives it.

Photographs are not kept at a public web address. Every request is checked against who you are and whether either of you has blocked the other.

Messages are visible to you and the person you are speaking to, and to nobody else unless a specific message is reported.

Moderators can see reported content and the account behind it, including from people who have blocked them. Otherwise blocking a moderator would be a way to escape review.

Blocking is silent. The person blocked is never told, and nothing in the product reveals it to them.

Hostinger, who host the application, the database and our email. Their servers are where your information lives.

A payment provider, if and when you subscribe to Heritage Plus. They receive what they need to take the payment. We never see or store your card details.

That is the whole list. No analytics provider, no advertising network, no data broker, no marketing platform.

Your data sits on our hosting provider's servers. If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area, your information may be processed outside your region, and we rely on the standard contractual clauses our provider offers for that.

While your account is open we keep what you have given us, because the service needs it to work.

When you delete your account it disappears from everyone immediately and is scheduled for erasure. Thirty days later it is permanently deleted, along with your profile, your photographs and the files behind them. The thirty days exist so an account taken over by somebody else can be recovered.

Your messages are emptied rather than removed. The words and pictures go. The fact a conversation happened stays, because the other person did not ask to lose their own history.

Records of moderation decisions outlive the account, stripped of personal detail. A safety record that vanishes with the account is not a safety record.

See it. Everything on your profile is visible to you at any time.

Correct it. Every field is editable from Settings.

Take it with you. Settings has an export that hands you a machine-readable file of your account, your profile and your connections.

Delete it. Settings has account deletion. It asks for your password, warns you plainly, and actually deletes.

Withdraw consent. Clearing a sensitive field removes the value. Turning off its visibility hides it from everyone.

Object, or ask us to restrict what we do. Use the contact form and say what you want.

Complain. In the UK, to the Information Commissioner's Office. In the EEA, to your national supervisory authority. In Canada, to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. You do not have to come to us first, though we would rather you did.

HeritageMingle is for adults. You must be 18 or over, we ask your date of birth when you register, and accounts we find belonging to anyone younger are removed.

Passwords are hashed and never stored in readable form. Photographs sit outside the public web root and are served only after a permission check. The connection between your browser and HeritageMingle is encrypted.

No system is perfect. If something happens that puts your information at risk, we will tell you and the relevant regulator inside the time the law allows.

If we change something that matters we will say so here and update the date at the top. If a change means using your information in a way this page does not already cover, we will ask you first.