How we treat what you share

The short version

We built yern to be the opposite of the apps that wore you out. Privacy is the first principle, not a setting. We never sell your data. We never run ads. We never show one person another person's private information.

What we collect

Your account details (email, and a display name and birth date you provide).

What you tell us about yourself: your personality answers, your head and heart and core-need preferences, your music, the aesthetics you pick, your photos, and the prompts you write.

What your friends share about you, if you invite them: their answers to a short set of questions, which we aggregate. You only ever see a warm summary, never who said what.

How you use the app: the matches you see, the choices you make, and the conversations you have. Messages are visible only to the two people in them.

How we use it

We use what you share for one thing: to introduce you to people you might genuinely connect with. That is the whole job. We also use your email to reach you about your place on the list and your account.

We do not sell your data to anyone, for any reason. We do not show advertisements. We do not use your data to build profiles for third parties.

Personality and peer-review data inform matching. They are never shown to other users as raw scores, and your friends' individual answers are never shown to anyone.

Collecting before you have an account

If you join the waitlist, you can choose to answer a short personality taster and invite friends to describe you. Those answers are stored with your waitlist email and used only to build your profile when you join. You can skip all of it, and your place on the list stays exactly where it is.

We also keep plain counts of how the site gets used before anyone has an account: how many people joined the list, how many finished the taster, how many friend links were opened, how many flyer codes were scanned. Each count stores a category, a number, and a one-time random id that is never used again, so a count carries no name or email and can never be linked to another count. We do not store your IP address or the code you arrived with next to these counts.

If you scan a flyer QR code, your browser keeps that flyer's code for 30 days so a signup can be credited to the right neighborhood. It holds the code for the flyer and nothing about you, and clearing your browser data clears it.

We count visits to yern.dev through Vercel, the company that hosts the site. Vercel records the page address, the site you came from, your browser and device type, and a city-level location worked out from your connection. It sets no cookies, the way it recognizes a repeat visit expires after 24 hours, and it does not follow you to other sites. Private links, like a friend's review link or a shared date plan, are stripped out of the visit counts. We run no ad networks and no advertising pixels, and we never send your answers or your email to an analytics service.

How it is protected

We design so that one user's private data is not reachable by another. Every table that holds your data has row-level security policies, and your psychological profile, your peer reviews, your contact details, and your messages sit behind them.

Those are controls, and controls can have defects. We have found and fixed defects in ours, and we expect to find more. No system is perfectly secure, and we will tell you about a breach as the law requires.

Sensitive judgments are never automated into a verdict about you. Any wellbeing prompt is an invitation you can decline.

Your control

You can see and edit what you have shared. You can delete your account, and we remove your personal data on the timelines the law requires. A download of your data is coming when the beta opens. Until then, email privacy@yern.dev and we will send you what we hold.

Cancellation is one step. We will never put obstacles in the way of leaving.

Questions

Reach us at privacy@yern.dev and a person will answer.