What! You want my contacts !?!!

How DearReal works

There are good reasons for DearReal asking for your contacts. We do this to create the safest, most truthful and most privacy-conscious dating app.

Your contacts enable us to build your network on the app.
It lets you choose who you want to be visible to and hidden from on the app.
It also enables us to help you empower, vouch and matchmake.

This eradicates risks compared to Tinder 🤥, Bumble ​​👿, or Hinge💨.

DearReal states that its confidentiality is better than any other dating application. Then it requests access to contacts. Are you serious???
How can that be?

You don’t need to share your Phone Contacts to use DearReal!

DearReal can still work independently and let you choose from friends visible on the app. These friends will be able to matchmake you and vouch for you, and you will be able to do the same for them.

You might consider connecting your contacts as you continue to use the app. Linking your phone’s address book will uncover users with more conservative visibility settings (including yourself).

Synchronising will also enable you to matchmake beyond the DearReal users helping others 💘, offering them a free month Premium and offering you credits towards free Premium! We don’t send messages or collect personally identifiable information from your address book. Still, we make the app much easier to use.

By inviting your friends from your DearReal, they will be able to help you avoid the pitfalls of the usual dating applications and might find love 💘. But we don’t stop there; each of your invitations comes with a free month Premium and allows you to collect a credit. Two credits offer a free month Premium 🤴! In other words, you get a free month of Premium each time you invite two new users.

Finally, connecting contacts will improve matching recommendations for yourself and your network.

Your address book is safe with us.

Your friends’ last names and contact details never make it off your phone. The DearReal app scrabbles the information twice using two different one-way hashing mechanisms. This process ensures that no human can make sense of the data once it leaves your phone.

While this makes the information rubbish if we wanted to message or find your contacts, we put it to use if your friends ever join the app. When users onboard the app, we take their details through the same mobo jumbo and compare this with the output from your address book. We can decide who has invited who to the app.
We can set up who is comfortable being seen by whom and who knows who!

While DearReal cannot use the information to message anyone, you have the information on your phone to engage smoothly with your Friends. We make things easy for you by presenting your contacts optimally and helping you with all your messaging.

So you are not going to message my contacts?

We respect your privacy and data. We never message your contacts and couldn’t if we wanted to; as explained above, it is anonymised data.

We comply with the Uk, EU (GDPR) and US privacy regulations, including California’s most stringent CCPA rules. These regulations forbid us to message your contacts as they have not accepted our T&Cs.

You don’t have to take our word for it. Take it easy and test drive the app without connecting your contacts; to begin with; you won’t hurt our feeling :-).