tieHearts

Privacy Policy

Last updated 6 September 2026 · Applies to the tieHearts mobile app and tiehearts.com

This policy explains what tieHearts collects, why, who else ever sees it, how long we keep it, and what you can make us do about it. It is written to be read by the person it is about, not by a lawyer. Where the law gives you a right, we say so and tell you how to use it.

The whole thing in nine lines:

Your phone number is your login. There is no password and no email.
We ask your date of birth once, to check you are 18 or over. Nobody ever sees it.
We ask your gender once. Nobody ever sees it, and it never affects anything.
We have no photos, no contact list, no location, and no advertising identifiers.
We never tell anyone who locked a feeling for them. Only that person can choose to say.
Your number reaches another user in exactly two situations, both of which you cause on purpose.
If someone enters your number and you are not on tieHearts, you may get one text. Reply STOP and we stop forever.
You can delete your account inside the app, in about ten seconds, without asking us.
We have never sold data and the company is not built in a way that would let us.

1. Who is responsible for your data

tieHearts is operated by TIE2INNOVATION PRIVATE LIMITED, a company incorporated in India. Under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (“DPDP Act’’), we are the Data Fiduciary for your personal data — meaning we are the ones who decide why and how it is processed, and we are the ones answerable for it. You are the Data Principal.

In this policy, “we”, “us” and “tieHearts” mean that company.

Detail	Value
Company	TIE2INNOVATION PRIVATE LIMITED
Registered office	35B, Shyam Vihar Phase 2, Najafgarh, New Delhi 110043
General contact	developertiehearts@gmail.com
Grievance Officer	Ravi Singh, reachable at developertiehearts@gmail.com

2. What we collect, and exactly why

Everything below is collected because a specific part of the app cannot work without it. There is no line item here whose purpose is “analytics”, “insights”, or “improving your experience”, because those phrases usually mean somebody could not name the real reason.

What	Why it exists	Who can see it
Your phone number	It is your only login. It is also how we know a feeling locked for a number belongs to you when you join. Shared with one other person only in the two cases in section 5.	You. Us. One other user, only in the two cases in section 5.
Your date of birth	To check you are 18 or over, which Indian law and both app stores require of a service like this. Checked once, on the server, before any account row is written.	Nobody but us. It is never displayed anywhere in the app.
Your gender	Asked once at sign-up so we understand who uses tieHearts. It is never shown to anyone, never used to match, sort, rank or suggest people, and never sent to any third party.	Nobody but us.
Your name or alias	What another person sees if — and only if — you reveal yourself, or you tie. You choose it and you can change it.	You, until a reveal or a tie.
The feelings you lock	The core of the product: who you locked for, which feeling, how strongly, and when.	You and us. The recipient learns only that somebody did, never who, unless you say.
A private label you add to a lock	Your own note to yourself, so you can tell your locks apart.	You only. It is never shown to the other person, at any stage, including after a reveal.
Secret-chat messages	To deliver the conversation and to investigate a report if one is made about it.	The two people in the chat. Us, only if the chat is reported or we are legally compelled.
A push notification token	To ring your phone when something happens. It identifies a device, not a person.	Us, and the push service that delivers it.
Purchase records	To give you what you paid for, to handle refunds, and because tax law requires us to keep records of sales.	Us, and the app store or payment provider that processed it.
Reports you make or receive	To act on abuse, and to show a regulator or a court that we acted.	Us. The person reported is never told who reported them.
Basic technical logs	App version, device type, coarse error and crash information, and the timing of requests — to fix crashes and to detect someone attacking the service.	Us.

What we deliberately do not collect

These are not oversights. Each one was considered and refused, and refusing them is part of what the product is.

No photographs. There are no profile pictures anywhere in tieHearts, at any point, for anybody.
No contact list. We never read, upload, or ask for your phone’s contacts. Every number in tieHearts was typed in by a person, one at a time.
No location. Not GPS, not coarse location, not inferred from your network.
No advertising identifiers, no ad networks, no third-party trackers, and no cross-app profiling. tieHearts shows no advertising at all.
No email address and no password, because your number signs you in and there is nothing else to lose.
No social media logins, so nothing about tieHearts can ever surface on another platform.

3. Our lawful basis, and how consent works

Under the DPDP Act, personal data may be processed on the basis of your consent or for certain legitimate uses defined by the Act. Here is which is which.

Consent covers everything you actively do: creating an account, locking a feeling, sending an invite, chatting, and receiving push notifications. Your consent is asked for before the thing happens, in plain language, and is specific to that purpose.
Legitimate use covers keeping records we are legally obliged to keep (tax records of a sale; the abuse ledger described in section 8), complying with a court order or a lawful government request, and protecting the security of the service.

You can withdraw consent at any time, and it must be as easy to withdraw as it was to give. Deleting your account in the app is a complete withdrawal and takes about ten seconds. You can also withdraw narrower consents — turning off push notifications in your phone’s settings stops us using your device token, and it costs you nothing else.

Withdrawing consent does not undo something that already happened lawfully while consent was in place. Most importantly, it cannot un-share a phone number that has already been shared — see section 5, which is the single most important paragraph in this document.

4. The promise we will not break

We never reveal who locked a feeling for someone. Not for money, not to the recipient, not to anybody, ever.

You can pay to ask an admirer to show themselves. You can never pay to be told. Only the admirer can answer, and if they choose to stay hidden, they stay hidden — and you have still received exactly what was described to you before you paid. There is no amount of money, and no customer-support request, that produces a name.

5. When your number is shared with another user

Your phone number reaches another tieHearts user in exactly two situations. Both are caused by a deliberate act, and there is no third.

1
You reveal yourself. Somebody has asked who you are and you choose to answer. When you do, they receive your name and your phone number.
2
You both feel the same way — a tie. If you lock a feeling for someone and they have already locked one for you, the tie forms automatically and you each receive the other’s name and phone number. This happens the moment the second feeling is written, without either of you tapping anything, because that is the point of the product.

Once a number has been shared, it cannot be taken back. The other person has seen it. They can write it down, screenshot it, or save it to their phone, and none of that is something we control or can reverse. Deleting your tieHearts account afterwards removes it from us; it does not remove it from them.

Blocking works inside tieHearts and nowhere else. If you block someone after a reveal or a tie, they can no longer reach you through this app — not in chat, not with a new feeling, not at all. It does not stop an ordinary phone call or an ordinary text message, because that is your phone network, not us.

This is why a reveal is worth thinking about before you tap it, and why we ask you to confirm.

6. The invite text: when somebody else enters your number

This section explains the one part of tieHearts that can involve a person who never signed up. We are setting it out in full because it deserves to be understood by both sides.

How it happens

tieHearts has no search, no browsing, no profiles, and no directory. You cannot find a stranger here. The only way to lock a feeling for someone is to type a phone number you already have. If that number does not belong to an existing tieHearts account, the feeling waits, and we may send one text message to that number telling the person that something is waiting for them.

What the sender promises before we will send anything

When you enter another person’s number, you are making a set of promises to us and to them. They are set out in the Terms of Use, section 6, and in summary you confirm that:

the number is one you already have, obtained honestly, from a real relationship or acquaintance — not bought, scraped, guessed, or taken from a list;
you are entitled to use it to contact that person;
you are not using tieHearts to reach somebody who has asked you to leave them alone, and no order of any court or authority restrains you from contacting them;
you are not doing this to harass, frighten, embarrass, prank, defame or pressure anyone; and
you accept that if you break those promises, the consequences described in the Terms follow — including that we may hand your identity to the police or a court.

You are the person who decided to contact them. We are the messenger. That distinction is why we keep a record of who caused every message, and why we can answer for it.

What the message actually says

The text does not name the sender. It does not say which feeling was locked, or how strongly. It does not say anything a person standing next to you could read off your lock screen and use against you. It says that somebody has locked a feeling for you on tieHearts, gives a link that explains what tieHearts is, and tells you how to stop.

The wording is fixed. Under India’s telecom rules every template must be registered in advance with the DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) platform operated by the telecom providers, and a registered template cannot be changed without re-registering it. So the message you receive is the message that was approved, and it is the same for everyone.

The limits we put on ourselves

Limit	What it means
One per feeling	A message is earned by somebody actually locking a feeling. Nothing is sent on a schedule, and nothing is sent to “re-engage” you.
A minimum gap	Feelings arriving close together do not each buy their own text. The next message carries the count instead. Nobody can make a stranger’s phone buzz on demand.
A hard ceiling	A number that has received five of these and not joined will never receive a sixth. Somebody who has had five has decided.
STOP is permanent	Reply STOP and that number is on our opt-out list for good. Not for thirty days, not per sender, not until you change your mind. Permanent.
DND is respected	Messages are sent through a registered Indian telecom route and are subject to the national Do Not Disturb preferences you have set with your operator.

If you received one of these and you are not a user

You have rights here even though you never signed up, and you do not need to install anything to use them.

Reply STOP. That is the fastest route and it is permanent.
Or write to us at developertiehearts@gmail.com and ask us to suppress your number. Same effect.
You can ask us to delete what we hold about you. We hold your number, the fact that a message was sent to it, and when. We will delete it on request — except that your number stays on the opt-out list, because that list is the only thing that guarantees we never message you again. Keeping one number on a suppression list in order to honour your own request is the narrowest possible retention, and removing it would defeat the purpose.
You can ask us who sent it, if something is wrong. We will not hand out a sender’s identity on request — that would destroy the product for everyone and could put innocent people at risk. But if you tell us you are being harassed, we investigate, and where there is a genuine safety concern or a lawful order from the police or a court, we disclose. We always know who caused every message. An anonymous message nobody can trace is not a feature, it is a harassment tool, and we did not build one.

7. Who else touches your data

tieHearts runs on a deliberately small number of outside services. Each one receives only what it needs to do its job, is bound by contract to process it only on our instructions, and none of them is permitted to use it for their own purposes.

Service	What it receives	Where
Supabase — database and sign-in	Everything listed in section 2. This is where tieHearts lives.	Singapore (ap-southeast-1)
Expo push notifications and Google Firebase Cloud Messaging	Your device token and the contents of a notification. A notification carries only that something is waiting, the feeling type and a broad intensity band — never a name, never a number.	United States
An Indian SMS provider registered under the DLT framework	Your phone number and the registered message template, for sign-in codes and invites only.	India
Google Play (and, in future, the Apple App Store)	Purchase and refund information. We never receive your card details — the store handles payment and tells us only that a purchase succeeded.	Per the store’s own policy

We have never sold personal data and we never will. We do not run advertising, we do not share data with data brokers, and we do not operate any business line that would create a reason to.

Sending data outside India

Our database is hosted in Singapore and our push notification providers operate from the United States. This means your personal data is processed outside India. The DPDP Act permits transfer to any country the Central Government has not restricted, and we will move promptly if any country we use is restricted. Wherever the data sits, the protections in this policy apply to it.

When we are legally compelled

We will disclose data where we are required to by Indian law — a valid court order, a lawful direction from a government agency, or a legal obligation. We will also disclose where it is genuinely necessary to prevent serious harm to someone. Where we are permitted to tell you that this has happened, we will.

8. How long we keep things

The DPDP Act requires us to erase personal data once the purpose it was collected for is served. Here is what that means in practice.

What	Kept for	Why
Your account, profile, locks, chats and notifications	Until you delete your account, or until your account has been inactive long enough that keeping it serves no purpose	It is the service. Deleting is immediate and in your hands.
Purchase and tax records	As long as Indian tax and company law requires	We are legally obliged to keep records of sales. This is a legal obligation, not a choice.
The invite ledger — that a message was sent to a number, when, and who caused it	Retained after account deletion, in reduced form	It is the only record that can answer “who sent me this?” if somebody is later harassed. Removing it would make the service untraceable, which is precisely what we refuse to be.
The opt-out list	Permanently	It is what guarantees we never message that number again. Deleting it would break the promise it exists to keep.
Reports and the record of what we did about them	Retained after account deletion, in reduced form	To show a regulator or a court that we acted, and to stop somebody deleting their account to erase a record of abuse.
Technical and security logs	A short rolling window	Fixing crashes and detecting attacks. They age out on their own.

9. Deleting your account

You can delete your account yourself, inside the app, without asking us and without explaining yourself: Profile → Delete my account. If you no longer have the app, the instructions are at tiehearts.com/delete.html.

What is destroyed: your profile, your name or alias, your date of birth, your gender, every feeling you locked and every private label on it, every secret-chat message you sent, your notification tokens, and your login. This is irreversible. There is no restore, no grace period, and no copy kept in the background for us to change our minds about.

What survives, and why: only the four narrow items in the table above — tax records, the invite ledger, the opt-out list, and abuse reports. These are reduced so they no longer describe you as a person, and they exist because the law requires them or because deleting them would let somebody erase evidence of harm to someone else.

What we cannot reach: a phone number that was already shared with another user through a reveal or a tie is now in that person’s possession. See section 5.

10. Your rights, and how to use them

Under the DPDP Act you have the following rights over your personal data. You do not need a reason and you will never be charged.

Right	What it lets you do	How
Access	Ask for a summary of the personal data we hold about you, what we are doing with it, and who we have shared it with.	Email us
Correction and completion	Have inaccurate or incomplete data corrected. Your name or alias you can change yourself in the app at any time.	In the app, or email us
Erasure	Have your personal data deleted, subject only to what the law makes us keep.	In the app, in about ten seconds
Withdraw consent	Stop us processing data you previously consented to. As easy as giving it.	In the app, or email us
Grievance redressal	Complain about how we handled your data and get an answer within a fixed time.	See section 11
Nominate	Name another person to exercise these rights on your behalf if you die or become incapable of doing so yourself.	Email us

One honest limit: because a phone number is the only identifier we hold, we have to be certain a request really comes from the owner of that number before we act on it. We will verify, usually by sending a code to the number in question. This protects you.

11. Complaints — the Grievance Officer

If you are unhappy with anything about how tieHearts handles your data or your safety, you can complain, and we are bound to timelines.

Grievance Officer
Ravi Singh
TIE2INNOVATION PRIVATE LIMITED
35B, Shyam Vihar Phase 2, Najafgarh, New Delhi 110043
developertiehearts@gmail.com

In line with the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021:

we will acknowledge your complaint within 24 hours; and
we will resolve it within 15 days of receiving it.

Some complaints move faster than that. A report of harassment or of content that puts someone at risk is acted on as quickly as we can, not at the end of a fifteen-day clock.

If we do not satisfy you, you may escalate to the Data Protection Board of India, which is the authority established under the DPDP Act to hear exactly these complaints. You are also free to pursue any other remedy the law gives you. Nothing in this policy takes away a right you have under Indian law.

12. Age — and what happens if somebody lies

tieHearts is for adults. You must be 18 or over.

This is not a preference. Under the DPDP Act anyone under 18 is a child, and processing a child’s data lawfully requires verifiable parental consent along with a ban on tracking and on behavioural advertising directed at them. Google Play’s policies additionally restrict apps whose function conceals a user’s identity from being available to minors. tieHearts is not designed for children, is not directed at them, and we do not want their data.

What we actually do

We ask for your date of birth at sign-up, before an account exists.
The check runs on our server, not in the app, so it cannot be bypassed by editing the app or intercepting a request. A date of birth under 18 is refused and no account row is written at all.
The first date you give is the one that stands. It cannot be changed afterwards from inside the app, so nobody can sign up with a false age and quietly correct it later, or the reverse.
Your date of birth is never shown to anyone, never used to rank or suggest people, and never shared.

If someone gets in by giving a false date of birth

We are honest about the limit here, because a policy that pretends otherwise is worth nothing. A date-of-birth gate is the standard the law and both app stores require of a service like ours, but it is a declaration, and a determined person can lie to it. We do not currently demand government ID, because collecting identity documents from everybody to catch a few would create a far larger privacy risk than it solves — and the DPDP Act’s own principle of data minimisation points the same way.

So we treat a false declaration as something to detect and undo:

Anyone can tell us. If you believe an account belongs to someone under 18 — including a parent or guardian telling us about their own child — write to the Grievance Officer. You do not have to prove it first; a genuine concern is enough for us to look.
We act on signals too, not only on reports, and we may suspend an account while we check.
When we find one, we close it and delete its data, and any purchase made on it is refunded.
Lying about your age is a breach of the Terms, and we are entitled to close the account permanently for it.

If you are a parent or guardian and you think your child has an account here, email the Grievance Officer. We will treat it urgently, and we will not ask you to jump through hoops to be believed.

13. How your data is protected

Encrypted in transit. Every connection between the app and our servers uses TLS.
Encrypted at rest on our database provider’s infrastructure.
Row-level access rules on the database itself. The rules that decide who can read what are enforced by the database, not by the app, so a modified copy of the app cannot talk its way into somebody else’s data.
The most private rows are never written to your phone’s storage. Data about who locked what for whom is held only in memory while the app is open, and is cleared when you sign out or delete your account. It is not cached to disk where another app or a forensic tool could find it.
Sign-in is a one-time code to your number. There is no password to steal, reuse or leak.
Rate limiting and abuse throttles on sign-in and on invites, so nobody can use us to bombard a number with messages.
Least access internally. Very few people can reach production data, and they do so only to fix a fault or investigate a report.

No service can promise it will never be breached, and we are not going to pretend to. What we can promise is that we hold as little as possible, so that there is as little as possible to lose — which is why there are no photographs, no contact lists and no location data anywhere in this document.

If there is ever a breach

If a personal data breach occurs, we will notify each affected person and the Data Protection Board of India in the manner and within the timelines the DPDP Rules require. Our notice to you will describe, in plain language, what happened, what data was involved, what we have done about it, and what you should do.

14. Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a way that affects you, we will update the date at the top and tell you in the app before the change takes effect. If a change requires fresh consent under the DPDP Act, we will ask for it rather than assume it. We will never make a change retroactive.

15. Contact

Anything at all: developertiehearts@gmail.com.

For a formal complaint, address it to the Grievance Officer at the same address and say so in the subject line, so the 24-hour and 15-day clocks in section 11 start properly.

Companion document: the Terms of Use, which sets out the rules of using tieHearts — including, in section 6, the promises you make when you enter somebody else’s phone number.