Dote is a small app for couples to save date ideas and keep memories of the ones they do. We built it to collect as little as possible. There’s no tracking, no ads, and we never sell your data.
If anything here is unclear, email hello@dote.day and a human will answer.
Who we are
Dote is made by Andrew and Nicole and run by Andrew Barber, trading as Pouch Apps, Clyde Offices, 48 West George Street, Glasgow G2 1BP, Scotland, UK. Andrew Barber trading as Pouch Apps (“Dote”, “we”) is the “controller” of the personal data described here, for UK data protection law and for the EU and Swiss equivalents. ICO registration number: ZC281880. Contact: hello@dote.day.
What we store
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Your name, email address and profile picture from Sign in with Apple or Google (Apple may give us a private relay email instead of your real one), or just your email address if you sign in with email | To sign you in and show your partner who added what |
| If you sign in with email: the sign-in code we send you (stored scrambled, never readable), and a scrambled form of the email address and IP address it was asked for | To sign you in without Apple or Google, and to stop anyone guessing codes or flooding an inbox. Codes stop working after 10 minutes and can be used once; the records go after an hour |
| Sign-in sessions, including the IP address and device type they came from | To keep you signed in and spot misuse of your account |
| Which couple you belong to, and invite codes | So you and your partner see the same Dote |
| Links and text you share or type into Dote, plus what we look up about a link (its title, description, the account that posted it, and a preview image address) | To turn it into an idea card |
| The idea cards, memories, notes, ratings and photos you and your partner add | That’s the app |
| If you do the organising for both of you: the name you give your partner, and who came on each memory, if you say | So the app can say “Send to Callum” and remember who was there. On a group date, the other couples see that first name with yours (“Steph & Callum”). You can change or clear either any time, and both go when you delete your account |
| Which places the two of you save, ❤️, plan, go to or share a story card of, and when. It’s kept per couple, not per person, and only for ideas with a place | We count how many couples save, plan and go to each place, to show what’s popular. A venue that claims its place on Dote for Venues sees those totals for its own place, with any number under 5 shown as “fewer than 5”. We never show who |
| Your answers to the five “Make Ideas yours” questions, if you take the quiz, and the date style worked out from both of yours (with what you save, ❤️, plan and remember) | To put the ideas you’ll like first on the Ideas tab. Your partner sees the lines about you both, never your answers. Venues never see it. You can retake or delete it in Settings → Our date style |
| Which Ideas tab cards the two of you marked “Not for us”, with the name you saw and when. It’s kept per couple | So they stay out of Ideas for you both, on every phone, until you show them again. It’s never counted towards what’s popular and venues never see it |
| A profile photo, if you pick one in Settings. It’s stored privately, only you, your partner and anyone on a group date with you can see it, and you can remove it any time (you’re back to your Google picture, or your initial) | So your partner sees your face in Dote |
| If Dote hits a bug: a crash or error report with your device type, operating system and app version, what went wrong, and an internal ID number for your account (never your name or email) | To find and fix bugs |
| A push notification token and whether you’ve switched partner nudges on | To send the notifications you asked for |
| The day you last used the app, iPhone or Android, and the app version | To see which app versions are still in use, and to help you when you get in touch |
| Which venue deals we’ve told your couple about (if you switched on Deals in Settings) | So you hear about each deal once, and at most one a week. Venues never learn who saw their deal |
| Whether you’ve switched AI features on or off (Settings → AI) | So nothing you save goes to an AI service once you’ve said no |
| Whether your couple has Dote Premium, which store it came from, and when it renews or ends. If we give your couple Premium for free, a record of when, for how long, who at Dote gave it and a short note of why | To unlock Premium for both of you, and to keep track of the free Premium we give |
| If you email us, including a bug report from Settings → Report a bug: your email address, what you write, and the details the app adds to a bug report (app version and build, update, phone model and system version, language, your internal ID number and the last error report’s ID). You see all of it before you send, and nothing is sent unless you do | To reply and to find and fix the problem |
| A note of which emails we’ve sent you and when (not what they said) | So no email goes twice. It’s filed under your internal ID number, never your email address. Deleting your account deletes these notes, except the one for the goodbye email, and by then that number doesn’t point to anyone |
| If you tell us why you’re leaving when you delete your account (optional): the reason you picked and any words you added, how long you’d had the account, iPhone or Android, and the day. Never your name, email or account number, so it can’t be linked back to you | To see, in aggregate, why people leave and what we could do better |
| If you join the waitlist on dote.day: your email address and the date you joined, nothing else | Only to tell you when Dote launches. Email hello@dote.day and we’ll delete it |
Who at Dote can see your account. The two people who run Dote can look up an account’s name, email address, when it joined, how many ideas it has (and how many are planned or done), how many group dates it’s been on, its Premium, the day it last used the app, iPhone or Android and the app version, and the town most of its places are in, in a private tool only they can sign in to. We do that only to help you when you get in touch, or to give a couple Premium for free. It never shows your ideas, notes, memories or photos.
Your location never leaves your phone. “Near me” filtering is done on your device and nothing about where you are is sent to us or stored.
We don’t collect contacts, browsing history, advertising identifiers, or anything from other apps.
On dote.day’s home page, “Date ideas near you” shows the guides closest to you using the rough town or city Cloudflare works out from your internet connection, not your device’s location, so you’re never asked. It’s only used to pick those guides: it isn’t stored, logged or sent anywhere. The same country is used to show Premium’s price in your currency on dote.day, and it isn’t stored or logged for that either.
If you change the display settings on dote.day (reading font, light or dark, contrast, motion, underlined links or roomier text), your browser remembers those display choices in its own storage on your device (not a cookie), and they’re never sent to us.
If you run a venue (Dote for Venues)
Businesses can sign in to Dote for Venues (venues.dote.day) to claim their place on Dote. This part is about the people who do that for a venue, not about couples.
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Your email address, and your name if you add one | To sign you in with a one-time code by email, and so we know who we’re talking to |
| Sign-in codes (stored scrambled, never readable), when they were asked for, and a scrambled form of the IP address they were asked from | To stop anyone guessing codes or flooding an inbox. Codes stop working after 10 minutes and the records go after a day |
| Your sign-in sessions | To keep you signed in for up to 30 days, or until you sign out |
| Photos of your place you upload, and that you confirmed they’re yours to share | To show them on Dote once they’re checked. We remove location and camera details first. An AI (Anthropic’s Claude) gives each one a quick check, and we look at any it isn’t sure about. Removing one deletes it |
Deals are free while Dote grows. If deals ever move to a paid plan (we’ll email you a month before) and your venue takes it, the seller is Andrew Barber, trading as Pouch Apps, and Stripe (stripe.com) takes the payment as our payment processor, under its own privacy policy. It’s for UK businesses only, and prices are what you pay (we aren’t VAT registered). We keep whether the plan is active, when it renews or ends, the amount and the billing country, never your card details.
We use it only to run Dote for Venues and to talk to you about your venue. Our legal basis is our contract with you (the venue terms), and our legitimate interest in keeping it secure. Your name and email are never shown to couples.
What venues see about couples: only totals for their own place (how many couples saved it, planned it and so on), and any number under 5 shows as “fewer than 5”. Never a name, an email, a date someone saved it, or anything about one couple.
To close your venue account and have your details deleted, email hello@dote.day from the address you sign in with.
Who helps us run Dote
We use a small number of services to run Dote. Each only gets what it needs:
- Cloudflare hosts the app, its database and your photos (private storage, only reachable through Dote), and sends Dote’s emails, including sign-in codes for the app and for Dote for Venues.
- Cloudflare Web Analytics and GoatCounter count visits to the dote.day website (not the app): the page, the site that linked to it, browser type, screen size, country and how fast the page loaded. Neither uses cookies or identifies you, so there’s nothing to consent to, and neither runs on invite, shared-memory or date links.
- Anthropic reads the text of a link or note you save so its AI (Claude) can fill in the idea card, reads suggestions you send in Shape Dote for a quick spam check, suggests a name for a memory when you add a second place to its day (from the places’ names, towns and the day of the week, never your notes or photos), and gives photos venues upload to Dote for Venues a quick check. Anthropic does not use this to train its models. For couples this is optional: see “AI is optional” below.
- Google helps us find the place an idea mentions (we send the place name and town, nothing about you), and runs Sign in with Google if you use it.
- Apple runs Sign in with Apple if you use it.
- RevenueCat manages Premium subscriptions. Payment itself is handled by Apple or Google; we never see card details.
- Stripe would take payments for Dote for Venues’ deals plan, if deals ever become paid (see “If you run a venue”). Nothing goes to Stripe while deals are free.
- Expo delivers push notifications to your phone.
- Fastmail hosts our email, so it holds anything you send to hello@dote.day.
- Sentry receives crash and error reports (device type, app version, what went wrong) so we can fix bugs. It’s stored in the EU and never includes your ideas, notes or links.
- MET Norway (the Norwegian Meteorological Institute) gives us weather forecasts for the places on your ideas. It gets the map coordinates of those places, rounded to about a kilometre, never anything about you. Weather data from MET Norway, used under CC BY 4.0 and shown in Dote as summaries.
- TikTok, Instagram and other websites you share links from: we fetch the public preview of that one link, the same as a messaging app does.
Some of these providers are in the United States. Where your data goes outside your own country, it is covered by an approved safeguard:
- If you’re in the UK: the UK–US data bridge, or the UK addendum to the standard contractual clauses.
- If you’re in the EU, the EEA or Switzerland: the EU–US Data Privacy Framework where the provider is certified under it, or the EU’s standard contractual clauses.
- Dote itself is run from the UK, which the EU treats as providing an adequate level of protection.
Email hello@dote.day if you’d like a copy of the safeguards.
AI is optional
Anthropic’s Claude is the only AI service Dote uses. You can switch AI features off for yourself in Settings → AI. With it off, nothing you save is sent to Anthropic: you get the link’s own title and picture (where there is one) and fill in the rest yourself, and suggestions you send skip the spam check and wait for a person to read them. A memory with a second place gets a simple name made from its places instead. Everything else works the same. The setting is yours alone: ideas your partner saves follow their own setting.
Why we’re allowed to use it
If you’re in the UK or the EU, the law asks us to have a lawful basis for using your data. Ours are:
- Contract. We use your data to provide the app you signed up for: your account, your couple, your ideas and memories, group dates and Premium.
- Legitimate interests. We keep Dote secure and working (sign-in checks, spotting misuse, crash reports), count how many couples save and plan each place (never who), and ask why people leave when they delete their account. You can object to any of this by emailing hello@dote.day.
- Consent. We send push notifications, tell you about venue deals and take your answers to the optional “Make Ideas yours” quiz only because you chose to switch them on or take part. You can withdraw consent at any time in Settings, on your phone, or by emailing us, and that doesn’t affect anything we did before.
AI features are part of how Dote fills in your idea cards, and you can switch them off for yourself at any time (see “AI is optional”).
No tracking, no selling
We don’t sell your personal data or share it for advertising, and we don’t track you across other websites or apps, so a Do Not Track signal has nothing to change. We don’t ask for, or use, anything about your health, religion, politics or sexual orientation.
Sharing a memory
Memories are private to the two of you (except a group date’s, which the group shares: see Group dates). If you switch on a memory’s “Public link”, anyone with the link can see that one memory’s title, date, place, your first names, ratings, a short excerpt of each note and its photos. Switch it off and the link stops working straight away.
“Make a story card” turns a memory into a picture for your stories. The card is made on your phone from the photos already there: nothing is uploaded to make it, and we don’t see where you share it. The app only tells us that a card was shared, so the memory’s place counts as a little more popular.
Group dates
If you invite other couples to a date, or say yes to an invite, everyone in that group date sees: the one idea it’s about (its title, place, price and picture as they were when the invite went out), the first names and profile pictures of everyone in it (and, if you do the organising for both of you, the name you gave your partner), the times suggested and each couple’s answer, any shared note, the ratings and takes each person writes about that date, and the photos added to that date’s memory. Photos are shared with the group unless whoever took one keeps it to the two of you (“Just us two”). The group never sees the rest of your Date Jar, your other ideas or memories, or anything you write about other dates. Whoever started it can call it off, and you can drop out at any time; when you delete your account, your place in group dates goes with it.
Leaving a space
Settings → Your partner → Leave this space takes you out of your couple and gives you a fresh, empty Dote on the same account. Your partner keeps the shared space: the Date Jar, plans, memories, places and photos. What you wrote there stays with them under your name (your notes and ratings on memories, replies, the ideas you added and photos you took), because it’s part of their history too. Surprises you were keeping for them are deleted, your ❤️s go, and plans still to come are cancelled. To be erased from their space as well, delete your account instead (below).
How long we keep it
Until you delete it or delete your account. Deleting something in Dote removes it from our live systems immediately. Our database provider keeps an automatic recovery history for disaster recovery, so deleted data can linger there for up to 30 days before it’s gone for good.
Deleting your account
Settings → Account → Delete account. It’s immediate and can’t be undone:
- If your partner is still using Dote, we erase you (your sign-in, email, name, picture, any profile photo you picked, notes, ratings and your date style answers). The ideas and memories you shared stay with your partner, shown as added by “a former partner”.
- If you’re the last one of the two, we delete everything: ideas, memories, photos, your profile photo, the lot.
- Either way, we ask RevenueCat to delete its record of you. Apple and Google keep their own records of what you bought, under their own terms.
Before you delete, Dote asks why you’re leaving. Answering is optional. If you do, we keep your answer anonymously, as aggregate insight only: nothing in it links back to you.
Once it’s done, we send one email to your old address to confirm it, then forget the address: no follow-ups, ever. If your partner still uses Dote, they get one email to say you’ve left and that your shared ideas and memories are still theirs.
No app to hand? Email hello@dote.day from the address you sign in with and we’ll do it for you. How to delete your account has both routes and exactly what’s deleted.
Cancelling a Premium subscription is done in your App Store or Google Play settings; deleting your account doesn’t cancel it for you.
Your rights
You can ask for a copy of your data, and to take it with you (that’s what Export my data is for: Settings → Account → Export my data gives you a download straight away, and Email me my data sends the same file to your email address, once a day), have it corrected or deleted, object to how we use it, ask us to restrict it, or withdraw a consent you gave. Email hello@dote.day and we’ll reply within one month. Deleting your account (above) gets you an email confirming it’s done. The export includes your sign-in sessions, the Apple or Google sign-in linked to your account (if you use one), which devices have notifications on, the emails we’ve sent you and your couple’s Premium, but never passwords or sign-in tokens. Photos are listed in it, and you can save each one from the app. If you’re unhappy with how we handle your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk or, if you live or work in the EU, to the data protection authority there (the list is at edpb.europa.eu). If you live outside the UK, you have whatever rights your own law gives you too: email hello@dote.day.
If something goes wrong
If personal data is ever lost, leaked or seen by someone who shouldn’t see it, we’ll tell the ICO within 72 hours where the law asks us to, and tell you without delay if it’s likely to affect you.
Age
Dote is for people aged 18 and over, wherever you live. By signing up you’re telling us you’re 18 or over. If we learn an account belongs to someone younger, we’ll delete it.
Changes
If we change this policy in a way that matters, we’ll tell you in the app before it takes effect.