Soulmate Radar Data Principles and Privacy

Last Updated November 2022

Introduction

Marriage Pact, n. \’mer-ij ‘pakt\

An informal agreement between two people—if both parties remain unmarried and without prospects after a certain period of time—to simply marry each other.

Based on your values, the Marriage Pact college matching event algorithmically “interviews” all other participants at your school on your behalf to find the best person with whom you could make a marriage pact. Soulmate Radar is cut from the same cloth—how many times in your life have you walked past a potential soulmate, and you just didn’t know it? Soulmate Radar understands you and your values to make sure you never miss a candidate soulmate again. The following pages contain our data principles and privacy notice, which describes the information we process to make the Marriage Pact and Soulmate Radar work.

Here, you can find specifics regarding the information we collect (what we collect, how we collect it, and how we use it), how we protect that information, whether or not we share that information, and how you can manage information about you. We also outline how participation is voluntary at all stages of the Marriage Pact and how your privacy is not for sale—and what you can count on when you participate, as a result.

When we use the terms “Marriage Pact”, “we”, “us”, or “our” in this Privacy Notice, we are referring to The Marriage Pact. When we use the term “Soulmate Radar”, we are referring to the mobile application that posts or links to this Privacy Notice.

Privacy Summary

What kinds of information do we collect?

Sometimes we collect personal information automatically when you interact with our services and sometimes we collect the personal information directly from you, such as when you answer our questions about your values.

Our questions ask about some sensitive things. Here’s why: the idea behind Soulmate Radar is to find your compatible match—that person you could marry if you’re both 30 and still single. When you look at what matters in really long-term relationships (say, 50 years-long), it isn’t icebreaker questions like what music you listen to or what your favorite ice cream flavor is. It’s really about your core values—what you care about deep down. So in order to find that person for you, the Soulmate Radar asks about the things that really matter.

But it isn’t all heavy stuff. In Soulmate Radar, we ask three kinds of questions:

  1. Contact Information questions

  2. Demographic questions

  3. Values questions

In your answers, there are three main types of information:

  1. Contact information helps us to verify that you’re actually you. It includes your phone number during onboarding, and you can optionally add your email in settings.

  2. Demographic information helps us understand what groups you’re part of in the broader population. This may include information like your stated political affiliation, the languages you speak, or your school.

  3. Values information helps us understand your approach to life. This will include matters of principle and matters of preference.

Outside of the Soulmate Radar app itself, we may ask you to answer other kinds of questions:

  1. Feedback questions

  2. Other questions

In your answers, we’ll find the following kinds of information:

  1. Feedback information helps us understand why and how you use Soulmate Radar. This might include thoughts and comments on your matches, or it could include your feedback on other experiences you have as part of Soulmate Radar.

  2. Other information may be volunteered in response to other questions.

We use accounts in Soulmate Radar, which is created for you in onboarding. We use artificial internal identifiers we assign to your account to allow our systems to connect account information stored in different databases and tables. When your account is made, we keep note of basic information to help us better understand how you use Soulmate Radar, such as when you created the account, log in activity, account errors, and account deletion history.

We seek to collect pretty minimal information beyond what you volunteer directly in submitted responses to questionsSoulmate Radar doesn’t get your IP address, doesn’t use cookies, and doesn’t correlate your information with information about you from third parties. See the section titled Your privacy is not for sale in Principles, below, for more of our perspective on this important topic.

How is this information collected?

Contact information and demographic information is received in both onboarding and settings. Values information is received when you answer questions on your Soulmate Radar home screen. Your answers are only recorded when you submit by swiping your question response into the center of the screen.

Outside of Soulmate Radar, we have to keep track of some email data, like if you unsubscribe from the emails.

Some information is collected automatically that you wouldn’t provide yourself. For example, we collect log data, like how long you’re using Soulmate Radar or whether you’re encountering any errors. We collect analytics data, like which links led you to Soulmate Radar. Both of these are used to better understand how you’re using the app, to make improvements in the long run.

Location data in Soulmate Radar is only used to make your matches. Your location history isn’t needed, so it’s never recorded or stored. Your true location isn’t visible to anyone else (approximate only).

You’ll be able to identify Soulmate Radar because it is clearly marked and associated with Marriage Pact on the app store, the websites www.marriagepact.com, or the emails hello@marriagepact.com or just [your-school]@marriagepact.com.

If anything comes from outside those channels, it’s likely not from us. Be careful with fake emails, and especially be wary of fake requests for your information. If you aren’t sure if something is legit, please reach out to us via hello@marriagepact.com.

How is this information used?

We touched on how the information is used when we outlined it above, but we’ll expand on how we use your information here:

  1. We use contact information in a few ways. First, it’s how we verify that you’re actually you (via your phone number). You can optionally add your email in the app later if you’d like to verify your student status. If you reach out to us to give feedback or for support, or if we have exciting updates about Soulmate Radar to share, we’ll contact you via your email.

  2. We use demographic information to help us give you a better sense of where your matches fall in relation to the communities that are important to you.

  3. We use values information to help us assess your compatibility with potential matches. Sometimes, similarity in values is important. Sometimes, dissimilarity is important. Most often, there are much more complex interactions at play.

  4. We use feedback information to improve Soulmate Radar. By understanding how and why you participate, we can make Soulmate Radar better for you and for others.

  5. We use log and analytics data in order to better understand how you’re using Soulmate Radar and what errors you might encounter so we can improve the experience as a

    whole. By aggregating what we learn from analytics, we can better understand what improvements we can make.

  6. We use location information for your matches. We display candidate soulmates on your home radar screen based on location. When a candidate soulmate enters your bubble, we’ll let you both know.

  7. At this point in time, we can’t know what questions we’ll ask in the future, so we can’t know how we might use other information. That said, take a look at the last paragraph in

    what kinds of information do you collect? (above) and the section titled we do not share this information (below) for details and for our beliefs, and message us if you have any questions (our contact info is in Closing Words, below).

How is this information protected?

Because there are sensitive questions involved here, privacy is super important—so we’ve worked hard to design it into the system anywhere and everywhere we can. Matches are discovered purely via algorithm, so nobody looks at individual answers to questions to do it.

The security of the Marriage Pact as a whole depends on the security of each of our sub-systems. We use Mailchimp to send feedback emails; they outline their security here. We use Sendbird to support chat; they outline their security here. We use OneSignal to support notifications; they outline their security here. We’ve set up the algorithm to run on Amazon Web Services, which many other organizations use to house their data; they outline data privacy and security here. We use Mixpanel to measure basic analytics, they outline their security here. Just in case, we minimize the information we send whenever possible—that means sending as little information as possible.

The data itself is protected via both access controls and encryption. Data in transit is encrypted using TLS protocols. We also do the un-sexy parts of security that are still important, like avoiding public wifi, using long and unique passphrases, and using multi-factor authentication everywhere we can.

Soulmate Radar isn’t meant for children under 13, which is why we ask for your birthday. If you’re under 13, please hold off from using Soulmate Radar—we’ll delete all information associated with accounts of children.

We do not share this information.

We’re not about advertising, so your information stays with us. And beyond sharing your first name with your match, we’ll never share information about you in a way that could let you be individually identified by it. The “why” here matters, too—take a look at the section called Your Information is not for sale in the Data Privacy Principles below, for our views on this topic.

Because your values information and demographic information may be unique to you, we recognize that removing contact information from your responses alone does not qualify as “anonymizing” it. This is why we strive to follow a standard of protecting personal information broadly (rather than the more narrowly scoped “personally identifying information”).

Note: There are a couple obvious cases in which parts of your information may be seen by others:

  1. Your first name is shared when you’re matched with someone, and your initials may appear on other people’s radar screens.

  2. An employee at Marriage Pact may have access toyour data if they’re building or debugging the services that use it.

  3. We may be forced to share information with legal advisors and law enforcement if required by the law—for example, to help prevent fraud or criminal activity, comply with any lawful requests or legal processes, or protect our users’ safety.

  4. We lean on service providers for critical infrastructure like email, chat, and hosting our servers. That means that, as part of running Soulmate Radar, those infrastructure providers will necessarily handle your data on our behalf. Take a look at “How is this information protected?” to learn more.

How can I manage information about me?

If at any time you’d like to update your information, you can do so in settings. Your question responses are recorded when you submit them. If at any time you’d like to delete your account, you can do so in settings, as well.

Data Privacy Principles

Participation is Voluntary.

Participating in Soulmate Radar is entirely voluntary, and you may withdraw from the experience at any point in time. If you disable background location, you’ll stop getting matches. If you want a clean break, just delete your account in two taps from the settings menu in the app.

Your Information is Not for Sale.

The information you share with us is not for sale. We’re not about advertising, and we’re especially not about propaganda, so we don’t do advanced population segmenting and we don’t sell access to you (or to your attention) to advertisers (state-sponsored or otherwise).

Further, we’re about determining marital backup plans—not social credit scores—so your Marriage Pact information is self-contained. We don’t correlate your responses with information about you from third parties, and we don’t give third parties access to Marriage Pact information to correlate with external data about you.

Who We Are

The Marriage Pact was first created in Autumn of 2017 by Liam McGregor and Sophia Sterling-Angus as part of a class project for ECON136: Market Design, at Stanford University. That fall, 53% of everyone at Stanford participated. The next year, 63%. The next, 73%. As of February 2021, a Marriage Pact has now happened at 30 schools, with more than 90,000 people participating and 45,000 matches.

Making the Marriage Pact, we are a small (but growing) team composed almost entirely of full-time students. Soulmate Radar is one of the first new experiences made by the team. We hope it will be a fun way to create the kind of connection we’re all missing right now.

Updates to This Privacy Notice

We will update this Privacy Notice from time to time. When we make changes to this Privacy Notice, we will change the “Last Updated” date at the beginning of this Privacy Notice. If we make material changes to this Privacy Notice, we will notify you by prominent posting at the beginning of this Privacy Notice.

Closing Words

We’ve outlined the data policies above because we think it’s the right thing to do. It is our best-faith effort to do the right thing! If you have questions about any of this, you can DM us on Instagram @marriagepact or email us at hello@marriagepact.com.