Privacy Policy

Bohri Connect Version 1.0 · Effective 15 August 2026 · Last updated 19 August 2026

In short

We are a matrimonial platform for the Dawoodi Bohra community. Everything below comes down to a few commitments:

• We never sell your data. Not to advertisers, not to brokers, not to anyone.
• We never use your photographs in advertising. Ever, under any circumstances.
• Your phone number is never shown to another member unless you send it yourself.
• Your identity documents are deleted within 7 days of being checked.
• We never ask for your contacts and have no access to your address book.
• When you delete your account, it is deleted. A small, listed set of exceptions is explained in section 9.
• We use analytics to see how the app is used — never who you viewed, never anything you wrote. It is off on the sign-up and deletion pages, and you can switch it off entirely in Settings.
• Crash reports tell us what the software was doing when it stopped working. They carry no message, no name, no photograph, and are not tied to your account. Separate switch, same place.
• Profile text is checked automatically before it is published, and nothing you write privately is. A machine can publish your words; only a person can refuse them. Section 5.1.

1. Who we are

Bohri Connect is operated by iByte Apps Limited, a company registered in England and Wales, company number 09504342, registered office Barton Seagrave, Northamptonshire, NN15, England.

For UK data protection law, we are the data controller for your information.

2. Who can use Bohri Connect

You must be 18 or older. If the law where you live sets a higher age of majority, that age applies to you.

We verify age against identity documents. If we believe an account belongs to someone under 18 we remove it and delete the data. We do not knowingly collect information about children.

3. What we collect

3.1 Things you give us

We deliberately do not collect income, caste, political views, smoking or drinking habits, or astrological information. Nobody can filter on them because we never ask.

3.2 Identity and verification

Biometric data. The verification selfie uses facial recognition. That is special category data under UK GDPR Article 9 and requires your explicit, separate consent, which we ask for on its own screen before anything is captured.

• We keep one still photograph of your face, the outcome of the check, and a match score.
• It is kept for as long as your profile exists. This changed on 14 August 2026 — it used to be deleted once the check passed. It is kept now because it is the reference every photograph you add is compared against, including photographs you add months from now. It goes when your account goes, under section 9.
• It is compared to your own profile photographs by software (Amazon Rekognition), and sent to Amazon for the length of that comparison only. It is never compared to anybody else's face, never added to any database, and never used to search for you. See 5.2.
• A moderator can also see it, and does whenever the software is unsure.
• You can see it too — Settings → Your data, in the app. View only: a selfie that could be swapped after your photographs had been checked against it would not be a check at all.
• You can withdraw consent at any time by deleting your account.

Identity documents. Encrypted, viewed by one named reviewer, and permanently deleted within 7 days. We keep only the outcome. We never store the document number.

Community verification photos are used for verification only and are never shown on your profile.

3.2a Where you live

We ask for your location once, and only once. You can decline and type your town instead — nothing in the app is closed to you if you do.

What we keep: the town or suburb, the county or district it sits in, the country, and the coordinates of that one reading.

⚠ Other members never see your street, and never see a distance. The number of miles between two people is never shown anywhere in the app — not on a profile card, not on a full profile, not after you match.

We do not use it to decide who you are shown, either. Profiles are ordered by what you have in common — shared interests, whether you both want children — and never by who happens to live nearest. Your location is used for one thing only: if a member has chosen to search within a set distance, we work out whether you fall inside it. Nothing else in the app reads it.

What other members see:

We check where you are when you open the app. Which country you can search in depends on where you live, and that only means anything if it stays true — so when you open BohriConnect we look at where you are and compare it with the region on your account.

What that does not mean, and these are the parts worth reading:

• We never check when the app is closed. There is no background location. The app asks your phone where it is only while you are actually using it.
• We keep no record of where you have been. No list of places, no dates, no trail. Where a check suggests you may have moved, we count how many separate days it looked that way — nothing about where you were on any of them.
• Almost every check costs nothing and leaves your phone. If you are within about 60 miles of where we already have you, nothing is sent anywhere at all.
• A holiday does not move you. Your region only changes if it looks like you have genuinely moved — several separate days over several weeks. A fortnight away changes nothing, and we tell you plainly if it ever does change.

You can also change your location yourself in Settings.

Turning a reading into a town name means asking somebody who knows the map. We use Google for that, and it is listed with our other processors in section 6. What we send them is a pair of coordinates and nothing else — not your name, not your account, not your device, not your phone's connection. The request goes from our servers, not from your phone, so Google is never told which of our members asked or where they were connecting from.

We do not keep your exact reading. Before anything is saved we round it to roughly a kilometre — enough to know that Barton Seagrave is nearer to Kettering than to Leicester, nowhere near enough to point at a house. The precise reading exists for the few seconds it takes to name your town, and is then gone. It is never written down, so there is nothing precise about your home in our database for anybody to lose, leak or be compelled to hand over.

When you delete your account, the coordinates go with it. They are not in any of the exceptions in section 9.

3.3 Your contacts — we do not collect them

The app does not ask for access to your contacts and never reads your address book.

An earlier version of this policy described a "hide me from my contacts" feature, in which numbers were scrambled on your phone and only the scrambled values sent to us. That feature has been removed and no such data was ever collected. There is no contacts permission in the app.

We have never messaged anyone's contacts and never will. No invitations, no "your friend has joined", ever.

3.4 Things we collect automatically

3.5 Things others tell us about you

• Reports. If another member reports you, we hold what they said and the relevant conversation.
• Referrals. If you joined through an agent's link, we record which agent, once, at signup.
• Family share links. If someone opens a link to your profile, we record their mobile number so we can tell you who has looked.

4. What we do with it

4.1 Running the service

Creating your account, showing you profiles, delivering interests and messages, generating your daily set, applying your filters, taking payment.

4.2 Keeping people safe

This is the part that matters most on a platform like this one.

• Every message is scanned automatically as it is sent, looking for patterns associated with fraud — particularly requests for money and contact details shared very early in a conversation.
• Messages matching certain patterns may be blocked and you will be told.
• Other patterns are flagged silently for a moderator to review. We do not tell you which, because publishing it would teach the people we are trying to catch.
• Photographs are checked automatically before they appear, and a person looks at them too — see section 5.2, which explains exactly who checks what, and when.
• Profile text is checked automatically before it appears, and anything the check is unsure of goes to a person. Section 5.1 explains what is checked and what the check can and cannot do.
• Reports are reviewed by a named moderator who must recuse themselves if they know either party.

4.3 Moderation access to your conversations

Our moderators can read a conversation when it is attached to a report. They cannot browse conversations at will, and every time one is opened it is recorded — who opened it, when, and for how long.

4.4 Understanding how the app is working

During our launch period, a single named administrator can view a member's complete activity, including messages, in order to understand how the product is being used and to find faults.

• This is controlled by a setting that cannot be changed from within our administration tools.
• Every view is recorded, with the time and duration.
• It is scheduled for review on 15 February 2027, six months after launch, after which it will be turned off and replaced with aggregate statistics that cannot identify anyone.
• Our lawful basis is legitimate interests — operating and improving a new service. You may object at any time (section 10), and we will stop unless we have compelling grounds not to.

Note to you, not to members: this clause exists because the capability exists. If you turn the flag off before launch, delete this section. If you keep it, this wording must stay — an undisclosed capability of this kind is the single largest regulatory exposure in the product.

4.5 Improving the product

Aggregate statistics — how many people complete signup, which step they leave at, how many interests become conversations. These cannot identify you.

4.6 What we never do

• We never sell your personal information. To anyone, for any purpose.
• We never use your photographs, prompts or messages in advertising or marketing. Not on social media, not in the app stores, not anywhere.
• We never share your profile with anyone outside the app, except through a family share link that you create.
• We do not show advertising in the app.
• We do not use your data to train artificial intelligence models. Where AI is involved — feedback on your prompts, or the profile check in section 5.1 — your text is processed for that one purpose and is not used to train anything, ours or anybody else's.

5. AI features

Some features use automated processing:

5.1 Checking profile text before it is published

Everything you write for your profile — your description of yourself, what you are looking for, your job title, your qualification, where you studied, and your prompt answers — is already read before it appears, because nothing on a profile is published unchecked. Until now that reading was done entirely by a moderator. It is now done first by OpenAI, and only then, if needed, by a person.

This applies to profile text only. Your messages and your notes are between you and one other person, and we do not send them anywhere. See 4.2 for what happens to messages, which is a different process running on our own servers.

What the check can do: if your text is clear, it is published — often within a minute of you saving it, rather than after a wait for a moderator.

What the check cannot do: it cannot reject anything, and it cannot tell you anything. If it has any doubt at all, your text goes to a moderator to be read by a person, exactly as it would have before this existed. Every rejection you will ever receive was written by a human being.

We do this because it lets us look at every profile properly. The things we are looking for are the things a moderator was looking for anyway: contact details and social handles, somebody else's phone number, advertising, demands for money, pressure to move the conversation off the app, anything suggesting the writer is under 18, slurs, sexual or abusive language, and political or sectarian campaigning. Our community guidelines describe each of these; the automatic check adds nothing to that list.

Ordinary life is not flagged. Naming your community, your sect, your language or your country is not a slur. Practising your faith is not campaigning. Your job, your salary band, a divorce, a disability or your family circumstances are not, on their own, anything at all.

If the check is unavailable, nothing is published. When OpenAI cannot be reached, or answers in a way we cannot read, your text simply waits for a moderator. It is never published on the strength of a check that did not happen.

5.2 Checking your photographs

Every photograph you upload is checked automatically by Amazon Rekognition before it appears. It looks for three things: what is in the picture, whether anything is written on it, and roughly how old the people in it appear to be.

If it finds nothing, your photograph is published. Often within a minute of you uploading it, rather than after a wait for a moderator.

If it finds anything at all, your photograph waits for a person, exactly as it would have before this existed. The automatic check can publish a photograph; it can never refuse one. Every refusal you receive was decided by a human being who looked at your picture.

A person still looks afterwards. Photographs that publish automatically go into a queue our moderators work through, and one can be removed later if something was missed. You are told if that happens, and why.

We check that your photographs are of you, and software does that comparison. Each photograph in your profile grid is compared against your verification selfie by Amazon Rekognition. If they match closely enough, your profile can go live without anybody reading it.

Anything the software is unsure about goes to a person, and is never refused by software alone. A photograph it cannot match is held back — not deleted, not marked as false — and a moderator looks at it. There are ordinary reasons a real photograph of you does not match: a childhood picture, a group shot where you are small, a heavy filter, or simply a covered head, which these systems are measurably worse at. None of those is dishonesty, and none of them is treated as dishonesty.

Photographs attached to prompts are not compared to your face at all. They can be a place, a meal, a view, or your friends. They are still checked for the things section 5.2 describes.

About faces, precisely

We want to be exact here, because "facial recognition" means several different things and only some of them are true of us.

• We do estimate an age range from faces in your photographs — a rough band, not a birthday — so that a picture which looks like a child's is put in front of a person immediately.
• We do count faces, so that a group photograph is not silently used as your main picture.
• We do compare your photographs to your own verification selfie, using software. This changed on 14 August 2026; before that a person did it by hand.
• We do not identify who you are from your face. Nothing here matches your face against a database, against other members, or against any photograph outside your own account. The comparison is always your face against your own selfie, and never against anybody else's.

What we send to Amazon, and what we do not

We send the image and nothing else. Not your name, your age, your location, your account identifier, or any other photograph. Amazon is asked what is in a picture; it is not told whose picture it is, and it cannot be, because we never send anything that would say.

Your photographs are not stored by Amazon. They are sent for the length of one request and are kept only by us, under section 9's retention rules. Amazon does not train on them — this is a configuration commitment on our account, in the same way as section 5's promise about OpenAI.

Your verification selfie is sent to Amazon, for one purpose only. It is sent alongside one of your own photographs so the two can be compared, for the length of that request, and Amazon does not keep it. This changed on 14 August 2026 — it used to stay on our systems entirely.

It is never compared to anybody else's face, never added to a database, and never used to search for you anywhere.

We keep it for as long as your profile exists. It used to be deleted 30 days after a moderator had looked at it. It is kept now because it is what every future photograph you add is checked against — including photographs you add months from now. It goes when your account goes, under section 9.

You can see it. It is in Settings → Your data, in the app. You can look at it whenever you like; you cannot replace it there, because a selfie that could be swapped after your photographs had been checked against it would not be a check at all. Re-verification replaces it (section 4).

If the checker is unavailable, nothing is published. Your photograph waits for a moderator. It is never published on the strength of a check that did not happen.

What we send to OpenAI, and what we do not

Writing help, compatibility highlights and the profile check in 5.1 use OpenAI's API. We are deliberately narrow about what leaves our systems.

When you ask for writing help, we send the text you typed and the question you were answering. That is all. We do not send your name, your age, your city, your country, your gender, your marital status, your photographs, your account identifier, or anything else from your profile. OpenAI is asked to improve a sentence and is told nothing about whose sentence it is.

The profile check sends the same two things — the text and the question it answers — and nothing else. Not your name, your age, your location, your photographs or any identifier. OpenAI is asked whether a sentence contains a phone number; it is not told whose sentence it is, and it cannot be told, because we never send anything that would say.

Compatibility highlights send answer codes, not sentences. Where you and another member have each answered the same structured question, we send the two sets of answers as codes — not your words, not your names, not your profiles. The result is stored and never generated again for that pair.

We never send your private messages to OpenAI. Message screening (section 4.2) runs on our own servers.

OpenAI does not train on anything we send. We use their API under settings that exclude our data from model training and, where offered, from retention. This is a contractual and configuration commitment, not a preference.

Writing help and compatibility only happen if you use them. If you never tap writing help, nothing you type is ever sent for it. The profile check in 5.1 is different, and we want to be plain about it: it runs on profile text you have submitted, whether or not you asked, because publishing unchecked profiles to strangers is not something we are willing to do. It does not run on anything private.

No decision that materially affects you is made by a machine alone. Photo rejections, text rejections, suspensions and bans are all made by a person. What software decides by itself is only ever to publish — your words, your photographs, or your profile — all of which you wrote or uploaded and asked us to publish. It can hold something back for a person to look at. It cannot refuse you. You have the right to ask for human review of any automated decision (section 10) — and for profile text, a human review is what a refusal already is.

6. Who else sees your information

We do not sell your data and we do not share it for anyone else's marketing. We do use other companies to run the service, and they only ever process data on our instructions:

Each is bound by a written data processing agreement.

Other members

Other members see your profile as described in the app: your first name, age, city, photos and prompt answers. Some details unlock only when interest is mutual. Your phone number, your email address and your date of birth are never shown to another member.

When the law requires it

We may disclose information where we are legally required to, or where it is necessary to prevent serious harm — including to law enforcement in cases involving fraud, threats of violence, or the safety of a child. Anything involving a child is reported without exception.

7. Where your information goes

We are a global community and our members are in many countries.

Your profile, your messages and your photographs are stored in the United Kingdom. Our servers and databases are hosted here, by Fasthosts Internet Limited.

Some of the companies listed in section 6 process data outside the UK. The photograph checks in section 5.2 run in Europe. The profile-text check in section 5.1 and the email we send you both run in the United States, and Apple, Google and Firebase operate globally. Where we transfer personal data out of the UK we rely on the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, together with the additional safeguards described in section 5: the checks are sent the minimum they need and never your name. That mechanism is for the transfers to the United States. European processing needs none of it — UK law already treats Europe as providing an equivalent standard of protection.

One exception, stated plainly: your verification selfie is sent to Amazon, alongside one of your own photographs, for the single purpose of comparing the two. It stays in Europe — your face does not cross the Atlantic. It is sent for the length of that comparison, is not stored there, and is never compared against anybody else. Section 5.2 explains why.

For members in India, we comply with the DPDP Act 2023 in addition to UK law.

8. How we protect it

• Encrypted in transit and at rest
• Mobile numbers and email addresses encrypted in our database, not stored in plain text
• Access limited by role — most staff cannot see your name or contact details at all
• Every access to sensitive information is logged, including by administrators
• Two-factor authentication required for staff accounts
• All location data is stripped from your photographs before they are stored, so your photos cannot reveal where they were taken

No system is perfectly secure, and we will not claim otherwise. If a breach occurs that is likely to put you at risk, we will tell you and the ICO within the required timescales.

9. How long we keep things

When you delete your account

Your profile, photos, prompts, conversations, interests, share links and your verification selfie are deleted immediately.

Three things survive, each for a stated reason:

1. A scrambled version of your email address, for 30 days — and of your phone number, if you verified one. So someone removed for serious misconduct cannot immediately re-register. Neither identifies anything on its own.
2. Moderation records, if you were reported or subject to enforcement. Needed for appeals and for the safety of others.
3. Your success story, only if you explicitly agreed to it. If you told us you were leaving to marry and ticked the box allowing us to contact you, we keep your name and number for that purpose alone. You can ask us to delete it at any time. If you did not tick it, nothing is kept.

10. Your rights

Under UK GDPR and the DPDP Act you can:

How: privacy@bohriconnect.com, or "Download my data" in Settings. We respond within 30 days.

If you are unhappy: contact us first, then the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk) in the UK, or the Data Protection Board in India.

11. Notifications and marketing

• Service notifications — interests, matches, messages, moderation outcomes. Configurable in Settings, except moderation outcomes, which cannot be switched off.
• We do not send you reminders to come back, streaks, or messages about people you have not heard from. This is a product decision, not just a privacy one.
• We do not send marketing emails unless you have separately asked for them.
• If someone opens a family share link, they are asked separately and optionally whether they wish to hear from us. Unticked by default.

12. Cookies and analytics

We never use advertising cookies, and we never allow anyone to build an advertising profile of you from what you do here. That has not changed and will not.

12.1 On our website

Our website uses cookies that are strictly necessary to make sign-up, share links and account deletion work.

We also use Google Analytics to understand how people find and use the public parts of the site — how many arrive, which pages they read, and where they stop. This sets cookies and tells Google your IP address, your approximate location, and which pages you opened.

It is switched off on the pages where it would identify you:

• the sign-up flow, including the page an agent's referral link opens
• this policy and our terms
• the account deletion pages

We exclude those deliberately. A referral link contains the code of the agent who gave it to you, and the sign-up pages carry your name and email — none of that goes to Google.

12.2 In the app

We use Google Analytics for Firebase to see which screens are used, where people get stuck in sign-up, and which features go unused. It records an app instance identifier, your device type and approximate region.

It never records:

• who you viewed, liked, passed on or matched with
• anything you wrote — messages, notes, prompt answers
• your name, photographs, phone number or email address

We do not use it to track you across other companies' apps or websites, and we do not enable Google's advertising features on it.

12.2a Crash reports

When the app stops working, we send a report to Firebase Crashlytics so we can find out why. A report contains the technical trace of what the software was doing at the moment it failed, your phone model, your operating system version, the app version, and an installation identifier that is specific to this app on this handset.

It never contains:

• anything you wrote — messages, notes, prompt answers
• your name, photographs, phone number or email address
• who you viewed, liked, passed on or matched with
• your account identifier — a crash is not tied to your account

The one thing we attach on purpose is which plan you are on, because some faults only affect one, and a plan describes thousands of people rather than one.

12.3 Turning it off

Analytics and crash reports are two separate switches in Settings → Your data, and you can change either at any time. Nothing else about the app changes when you do.

Turning crash reports off also deletes any report still waiting on your phone to be sent. Neither switch removes what has already been sent — see section 10 for asking us to delete it.

On the website, refusing analytics cookies leaves everything working.

13. Changes

If we make a material change we will tell you in the app and by email, and ask you to accept the new version before continuing. Every version is dated and previous versions are available on request.

14. Contact

Bohri Connect is an independent platform. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated on behalf of any religious authority or institution.