This is a working draft. Legal counsel will review it before we open to our first members. It describes the principles yern is built on today.
We built yern to be the opposite of the apps that wore you out. Privacy is the first principle. We never sell your data. We never run ads. We never show one person another person's private information.
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.
We use what you share for one thing: to introduce you to people you might genuinely connect with. That is the whole job.
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.
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 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.
You can see and edit what you have shared. You can delete your account. It locks immediately, and you have 30 days to change your mind. After that we erase it. We are still finishing the automated tooling, so until it ships each permanent deletion is completed manually. Some safety and legal records survive in a form that cannot identify you. 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.
Reach us at privacy@yern.dev and a person will answer.