Kindred is operated by Ryan Zlatkin. Your data is stored on a server we run, and nowhere else. Nobody sells it, nobody analyses it, and there is no advertising or analytics code anywhere in the app or on the server.
Kindred is also open to being self-hosted. If you are using an instance run by somebody else, they hold your data and they handle reports, and this policy describes the software rather than their practices. Only use a server run by someone you trust.
The server keeps only what the product needs to work:
The Community tab draws a real street map, and the picture of the streets comes from OpenStreetMap. This is the one place Kindred loads anything from somebody else, and it is worth being precise about what that means.
What OpenStreetMap receives: which square of the map your device asked to draw, and your device's IP address, in the same way any website you visit receives it. That tells them roughly which part of which city you were looking at.
What they do not receive: who you are. No account, no name, no email, no identifier of any kind is attached to a request for a map tile, and nothing tells them the square they just sent is anywhere near where you live.
The list of places — the cafes, parks and bars you can meet at — is fetched by our server, not by your phone, and then cached. Your device never asks anybody for them, so no third party learns which places you looked at or where you were when you did.
Your own position is never sent to anyone. It stays on our server, and what other members see is a point a few hundred metres away from it. See below.
You are not on the map unless you turn yourself on, and one tap takes you off it again. Switching off deletes the stored position rather than hiding it.
While you are on it, your pin is not where you are. It is a point chosen at random inside a circle of 300 to 800 metres around you, and that same offset is kept for hours at a time — so somebody watching your pin all afternoon learns nothing that one glance would not have told them. Your real coordinates are never written into the map's own records at all.
The website sets no cookies, runs no analytics scripts, and loads nothing from anybody else. It is worth separating from the app, because reading a page here is not the same as using Kindred: you have not told us anything yet.
The web server does keep an ordinary access log, on our own machine, shared with nobody. We read it to find out whether anything we post about Kindred actually brought anyone here. Each visitor's address is shortened before it is written down, so the log counts visits rather than identifying the people who made them, and it is rotated and deleted as it ages.
Some links we post carry a short tag, for example ?s=tt on the link in a TikTok profile. Nothing on this site records that tag any more. Addresses collected before the app opened still have one stored beside them, recording which post the link was in rather than anything about the person, and it is deleted when that address is.
On encryption. Traffic between the app and the server is encrypted in transit with HTTPS. Messages are not end-to-end encrypted, which means they are readable on the server. We would rather state that plainly than let the word "encrypted" imply more than it does.
Settings has a "Delete forever" option. It requires your password, and it erases your account, profile, photos, messages, matches and meetup history from the server immediately. There is no undo. Individual messages can be deleted for both sides from within a chat.
Ended matches keep their message history until you delete your account, so that both people can still read what was said.
Server backups are kept for 7 days and then destroyed. A deleted account may persist in those backups until they age out, and backups are only ever restored to recover from a failure, never to bring back an individual account.
Kindred is not for anyone under 18. Everyone confirms their date of birth at signup. Accounts found to belong to someone under 18 are removed.
You can see everything on your profile from within the app, correct it at any time, and delete your account outright from Settings. No request to us is needed for any of that.
Beyond that, you have the right to ask what we hold about you and receive a copy; to have it corrected; to have it erased; to receive it in a portable form; to object to or restrict how we use it; and to withdraw consent where we relied on it. Email support@kindredapp.ca and we will answer within 30 days. There is no charge, and we will not close or degrade your account for asking.
Kindred is operated from Ontario, Canada and is subject to Canadian privacy law (PIPEDA). If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, you may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
If you are in the United Kingdom, the European Economic Area or Switzerland, the same rights apply to you under the UK GDPR, the EU GDPR or the Swiss FADP, and you may also complain to your own national data protection authority. We process your information in order to provide the service you asked us for, and on the basis of your consent for anything optional — appearing on the map, for instance, which is off until you switch it on.
If this policy changes, the updated version appears at this URL with a new date at the top.