Privacy Notice

Align ("we", "us") operates the Align matchmaking and community platform. This policy explains what we collect, why, how long we keep it, and the control you have over it.

Who we are

Align Matchmaking Ltd (registered in England and Wales, company number 17422625), registered office 21-23 Wyeverne Road, Cardiff, Wales, CF24 4BG is the data controller for the personal data described on this page. If you have a question about how we handle your data, or you want to exercise any of the rights set out below, contact us at support@align-app.co.uk.

If you are not satisfied with how we have handled your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint.

Data we collect

• Account: email address, and a password (stored only as a hash) or, if you sign in with Google or Apple, the account identifier they give us (for Apple, also a token we use to disconnect Align from your Apple account when you delete yours), and where you provide it, a phone number.
• Signing up: the email address you give on the first page of sign-up, before your account exists. We email it a code to check it is yours and, unless you tell us not to on the page where you type the code, one reminder if you stop before the end. It is deleted when your account is made, or a week after you last used it.
• Profile: name, date of birth, gender, city, education, occupation, height, ethnicity, marital status, whether you have children, languages, interests, how you practise your faith, whether you wear niqab if you tell us, biography, and photographs.
• Location: the city we confirm from your internet address or, if you allow it, from your phone's location, and a position rounded to about a kilometre, used to measure distance for introductions. Your exact position is never stored.
• Income: if you choose to give one, a wide income range, in your own currency and in bands set for the country you live in. It is optional and stored encrypted.
• Assessment: your answers to the compatibility journey, how long each answer took and the language it was given in, and the persona and readings worked out from them. If you choose to answer a few of the questions again about three weeks later, those answers are kept apart and used only to check the questions; they change nothing anybody sees.
• Guardian details: where you choose to provide them, your wali's name and email address.
• Gift cards: if you buy one on our website, your name and email address, to send you the code and for any refund. They are stored encrypted, and the member who uses the card is never shown them.
• Verification: if a community centre verifies you, the report it files: its interview with you, what any referees said about you, the readiness checks it confirmed (for a brother, for example, that he can provide a fair mahr) and its remarks. A brother can share his report with a sister he is introduced to and her guardian, one introduction at a time. A referee's name and phone number are never shown to anybody else. While the centre is part way through, what it has written so far is kept for that centre alone, and deleted when it decides or after 30 days untouched. A verification is held in person or on a video call; a video call takes place on the centre's own video-call service, through the link it gives you, not through Align, and we do not record it. If you miss a verification appointment, or cancel it less than 24 hours before, the centre can report that to us: we keep the report, and you are told.
• Usage: messages and voice notes you send through the platform, a record of each voice call (who called whom, when and for how long, never the sound), your introductions and your answers to them, bookings, check-ins, reports you make and reports made about you, and app analytics events used to improve the product.
• Technical: IP address, device and browser information, and your phone's registration for notifications. The app also sends an identifier for the phone or browser you use it on; we keep only a scrambled form of it, and use it for one thing: if an account is banned for breaking our rules, the devices it was used on cannot be used to open another account.

How we use it

To create and operate your account; to generate matches and compatibility results; to enable messaging, bookings and guardian features; to process payments; to keep the platform safe and investigate reports; to send service messages such as verification and password reset; to send one reminder to somebody who stops part way through signing up, unless they asked us not to; and to meet legal obligations. Our lawful bases are performance of our contract with you, your consent (for optional features such as guardian access), our legitimate interests in safety, product improvement and helping somebody finish a sign-up they started, and legal obligation.

How the assessment checks itself. Each night, software looks at members' answers together to check that every question still works: for example, that no answer is chosen by nearly everybody and that the questions about one thing agree with each other. What it produces are figures about questions, never about a person, and nobody at Align reads your answers for it. A question shown not to work stops counting until a person at Align has looked at it. Once enough members have finished, where your answers place you (how organised you are, for example) is worked out against members of your own sex who have finished too. A guardian and a centre are never shown where you are placed.

How introductions are chosen. Software reads your answers, works out your persona and a set of compatibility scores, and suggests up to five people a day whose answers sit closest to yours, within the filters you choose. While Align is still small, the search area widens by itself to find five; your other filters widen only if you say yes, and an introduction from outside them says which one it is outside. It uses what you tell us, what you write about yourself, and which kinds of introduction members have gone on with, but never how you look, and no person reviews each suggestion. You are shown why you were matched with each person and you decide whether to go ahead; you can change your answers, filters and search area at any time. A community centre you share your profile with can also introduce you to another of its members itself. Somebody who has not opened the app for 90 days is suggested to nobody until they open it again.

Messages are checked automatically as they are sent. Phone numbers, links, email addresses and social media handles are held back, because contact details are not exchanged on Align. A message that reads like a request for money reaches the other person as normal, with a quiet warning under it and a way to report it; nothing is blocked and the sender is not told. If the same person asks more than one member for money within a month, those flagged messages are passed to our staff as a report (see "When our staff can see your account").

Some patterns put an account in front of our staff. A report that somebody may be under 18, reports from more than one member, being blocked by several members, asking more than one member for money, trying again and again to send contact details that were held back, or two verification appointments missed in a month, as centres reported them. What our staff see first is the pattern, as counts ("reported by three members", "five messages held back"). To check it, they can open the messages that raised it: the ones held back for carrying contact details, or flagged as asking for money, and nothing else from those conversations. A person looks and decides: nothing is suspended automatically, and a flag that needs nothing is cleared with a note of why.

Sensitive information

Some information you provide, including data revealing religious belief and ethnic origin, is treated as a special category under data protection law. We process it on the basis of your explicit consent, given when you create your account (the data consent on the last page), and solely to provide the matching service you signed up for. You can withdraw consent by deleting your account.

Photographs

Photographs are stored on our servers and are gated: other members see a silhouette or a blurred version until the stage at which the app discloses the full image. A community centre you share your profile with sees your photograph on it, unless you have chosen to keep it hidden until you share it with one person. This gating is enforced on our servers, not only in the app. Members can still capture what they are shown; we cannot prevent that on every platform, and you should not upload anything you would not want seen.

Each photograph you add is checked automatically, on our servers, to confirm that it shows one real person: a face, not a drawing, and nobody else in the frame. It is also checked by software for nudity and sexual content, and a photograph that fails that check is not accepted. The checks look at nothing but that one picture, and do not compare it with any other photograph or identify who you are. When the software refuses a photograph, or accepts one it is unsure about, we keep a note of that and of its scores (never the refused picture itself), so that a member of our team can look if it happens more than once. If you wear niqab you can say so, and your photographs are then not asked to show your face. You then show us once that you are a real person, whichever way you prefer: with a centre, in person or on a video call, or with a private face check, in which you look into the camera and turn your head when asked. The few pictures it takes are checked in the same way and deleted the moment they have been checked. They are never stored, never seen by a person and never compared with anything; we keep only the fact that the check passed and when.

When you sign up in the app, everybody does the same face check, with the app's own camera, to show us a real person is signing up: someone who turns their head when asked, which a photograph held up to the camera cannot do. Its pictures are checked and deleted exactly as above: never stored, never seen by a person, never compared with your photographs. If you put it off, your introductions wait until you have done it, or until a centre has verified you.

Who we share it with

With other members, only as the app describes (for example, a match sees your profile, and a member you are introduced to sees where your answers place you on the six sides of the assessment, such as how organised you are, drawn beside their own and never as a score, and how well your answers and theirs fit, area by area; a community centre or mosque you approach sees only the minimal details needed to verify your community standing via their secure portal; a guardian you have consented to sees the limited view shown in the app). A woman who involves her guardian (wali) decides how far he is involved. He sees the member she is in conversation with: that member's profile as she sees it (photograph, age, city, work and study, marital status and children, sect and how often he prays, height, languages, interests, and what he writes about himself), his community verification and, where she has switched them on, the compatibility reading and the milestones of the introduction (a verification booked or completed, both members saying they would like to marry, a nikah booked). He never sees her own photograph, any other member's photograph, or anyone she has not started a conversation with. He sees her messages only if she switches on the weekly transcript: once a week, what she and the member she is talking to wrote that week, starting from the moment she switched it on (a voice note appears only as its length, never the recording). The member she is talking to is told when it starts, and it shows on her profile to members she is introduced to, so a man writing to her knows; switching it off withdraws every transcript, including those already read. She can change or withdraw his access at any time in Settings under Your wali. If you choose to share your profile with a community you have joined, that centre's staff can see your profile much as a member you are introduced to sees it (your photograph, name, age, city, occupation, education, height and background, marital status and children, your short bio, interests and languages, how you practise your faith, how far you are through the assessment, and whether you are verified) so they can suggest introductions within their community. If you keep your photograph hidden until you share it with one person, they do not see it either. They never see your contact details, your guardian's details, your income range or your conversations, and you can withdraw that sharing at any time in Settings under Communities. People you are introduced to see roughly how far away you are, never where, and "Active this week" if you have used the app in the last seven days, never a time. You can hide that label in Settings, and then you do not see anybody else's either. With service providers who host, email, process payments, deliver notifications to your phone, look up which city an internet address or a phone's location is in, relay a voice call when the two phones cannot reach each other directly, or receive crash reports (the error and where in the code it happened, never your messages, photographs or personal details), under contract. A voice call itself is carried between the two phones and its audio never reaches us. With authorities where we are legally required, or where necessary to protect someone's safety.

An income range you give is shown to one member at a time: only inside an introduction you have both accepted, and only once you have both chosen to share yours. Until then neither of you sees the other's, and if either of you stops sharing, both are hidden again. It is never shown to a guardian, to a community centre, or in a support session, and you can remove it from your profile at any time, which stops every share.

Participating Mosques and Community Centres do not receive or store full user databases, chat logs, or financial information. Align manages all data security, encrypted storage, and regulatory compliance directly.

We do not sell your personal data, and we do not share it with advertisers.

Retention

We keep your data while your account is active. When you delete your account, your profile, photographs and answers go straight away, and your matches and messages within 30 days; our database backups are kept for 30 days, so each of these leaves them 30 days after it is deleted. We keep a limited record where we must for legal, tax or safety reasons: a record of each payment, which stops naming you, and for example a record of a serious safety report. Delete your account lists what goes when, and what we keep. The pictures the face check takes to show you are a real person are never kept at all.

If you stop using Align, we delete your account. After 90 days without opening the app, you are not suggested to anybody until you open it again. When you have not opened it for two years, we delete your account in the same way as if you had deleted it yourself, which also ends any community membership you have and any plan, Lifetime included. We tell you in the app and by email 14 days before, and opening the app is all it takes to keep your account. An account suspended for breaking our rules is kept, so that nobody can come back by staying away.

Device identifiers are kept, in their scrambled form, while your account exists, and deleted with it. If an account is banned, the identifiers of the devices it was used on are kept for as long as the ban lasts, even if the account is deleted, and removed if the ban is lifted.

Security

Passwords are hashed. Sensitive profile columns are encrypted at rest. Access to production data is restricted. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security, but we will notify you and the relevant regulator of a qualifying breach as the law requires.

When our staff can see your account

A very small number of named people at Align Matchmaking Ltd, the company's directors and named members of staff, can open an administrative console that shows member accounts. Each of them signs in with their own account and an authenticator app; there is no shared password, and every action any of them takes is recorded against the individual who took it, with the time and the reason they gave.

To investigate a problem you report, or a safety concern, one of them can open a read-only view of your account as you see it. That view lasts one hour, requires a written reason that is logged, and cannot be used to act as you: nothing can be sent, accepted, agreed or changed from it, and using it does not mark your messages as read or show you as online. Anything that genuinely needs changing is changed by a named member of staff, under their own name, in the record.

Your conversations are closed to that view, and there are two ways one opens. The first is a report. When you or somebody you were introduced to reports the other, from your conversation or from a profile, the report keeps a copy of your last twenty messages as they stood at that moment, and the member of staff looking into it can read that conversation in full, so that what was said is read in context. Only the conversation that was reported opens, never your others. The second is a pattern our automatic checks noticed: if the same person asks more than one member for money within a month, or keeps trying to send contact details that were held back, what we see is the messages that raised it, and nothing else from those conversations. Opening the read-only view is recorded against the member of staff, with the reason they gave, and so is every time anyone reads a report's copy of the messages or the messages behind a flag. Your income range is not included in that view either.

If you are suspended and appeal, the member of staff deciding your appeal can read the whole of a conversation that was reported to us, so that what was said is read in context. Only a conversation that was reported, only while your appeal is open, and each time it is opened it is recorded against their name. Voice notes are shown as their length, never played. Your other conversations stay closed.

We use this only where it is necessary: to investigate something you have raised with us, to look into a report about safety or misuse, or where we are required to. It is not used to browse accounts, and doing so would be a disciplinary matter and, for the individual concerned, a criminal offence under section 170 of the Data Protection Act 2018. If you want to know whether your account has been accessed this way, ask us using the contact details below and we will tell you.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you have the right to access, correct, delete, restrict or object to our processing of your data, to withdraw consent, and to data portability. You can edit or delete your data at any time in the app (Settings → Account Settings → Delete account permanently erases your personal data; Delete your account has the steps, and what is deleted and kept). You can download a copy of your data yourself, from Settings → Account Settings → Download my data: we email a link to your confirmed address that works for 72 hours, and the file holds everything about you and the messages in your conversations, but nothing private about anybody else. You may also request a copy by emailing support@align-app.co.uk. You have the right to complain to your data protection regulator; in the UK this is the Information Commissioner's Office.

International transfers

Our servers and some providers may be located outside your country. Where data leaves the UK or EEA we rely on appropriate safeguards such as standard contractual clauses.

Children

Align is strictly for adults aged 18 and over. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18; if we learn that we have, we will delete it.

Changes

We will update the effective date above when this policy changes and give notice in the app for material changes.

Contact

support@align-app.co.uk