SELECTIVE SINGLES

Privacy Policy

Effective from 15 August 2026

Selective Singles — Privacy Policy

Version: v2.3 · Effective from 15 August 2026

Replaces: Privacy Policy v2.2 dated 14 August 2026.

1. About this policy

Selective Singles Ltd (Company No. 17060568, registered office 167–169 Great Portland Street, London, W1W 5PF — "Selective Singles", "we", "our", "us") is committed to protecting your privacy, discretion, and personal information.

This policy explains what information we collect about you when you use our website at selectivesingles.co.uk, attend a consultation, or become a member, and how we hold and process that information.

We operate in accordance with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018. Selective Singles Ltd is registered with the UK Information Commissioner's Office under registration number ZC152962.

Selective Singles is an approved member of the Association of British Introduction Agencies (ABIA) and adheres to its code of practice on member privacy.

2. The information we collect

We collect the following categories of personal data about prospective and active members.

2.1 Identity and contact data

Legal name and (where you tell us) preferred name
Date of birth
Email address, postal address, telephone number
Confirmation of your identity — see section 4.2. We never hold a copy of your identification document; we record only what was checked, by whom or by which provider, and when.

2.2 Profile and matching data

Age, gender, sexual orientation, faith and faith importance
Occupation, education level, lifestyle details
Relationship history, family circumstances, what you are seeking in a partner
Photographs you choose to upload to your private member portal
Internal notes our consultants take from your consultations
Match preferences and "deal-breakers"

2.3 Special category data

Some of the profile data above falls within the UK GDPR's definition of "special category data" — for example, information about your sexual orientation, religious or philosophical beliefs, and (occasionally) health-related preferences such as fitness or dietary requirements.

We process this special category data on the legal basis of your explicit consent (UK GDPR Article 9(2)(a)), provided when you join the service. You can withdraw this consent at any time by contacting us, which will result in the closure of your membership.

2.4 Payment data

Stripe customer ID and subscription ID
The fact and amount of payment
We do not see or store your card number, expiry date, or CVV — these are handled directly by Stripe, who is PCI-DSS Level 1 certified.

2.5 Technical and usage data

IP address, browser type and operating system
Audit timestamps (e.g. when you opened, signed, or were emailed a document)

2.6 Cookie data

The cookies we use are described in Section 9.

3. How we use your information

We use your personal data for the following purposes:

Purpose	Legal basis
To arrange and conduct your private consultation	Performance of a contract
To assess your suitability for membership	Legitimate interest in operating a vetted introductions service
To create your member profile and identify potential matches	Performance of a contract
To share limited profile details and a photograph with potential matches	The consent you give when you join, that your profile and photograph may be shown to members we consider suitable. Contact details are a separate matter — see section 4.4 — and are exchanged only when both of you have said yes.
To communicate with you about consultations, matches and membership	Performance of a contract
To process payments	Performance of a contract
To send you the welcome, NDA invitation, Membership Agreement, and statement emails described elsewhere in our service	Performance of a contract
To keep accurate records and meet our legal and accounting duties	Compliance with legal obligation (e.g. HMRC tax records)
To protect our service from fraud, misuse, or abuse	Legitimate interest in protecting members and the brand
To improve our service and develop new features	Legitimate interest in service improvement, never relying on special category data for this purpose

4. Sharing your data with third parties

We never share your personal data with another member or any other third party for marketing purposes. Where we share data to operate our service, we do so only with the carefully chosen sub-processors below, each of whom is contractually required to protect your data and process it only on our instructions.

4.1 Sub-processors

Provider	What they process	Where data is processed
Stripe Payments Europe Ltd	Card payments, subscription billing	EU (Ireland) and US, under approved transfer safeguards
Resend, Inc.	Transactional emails (NDA invites, welcome, statements)	US, under Standard Contractual Clauses
Vercel Inc.	CRM hosting (the site itself and our internal systems)	UK (London region, LHR)
Supabase, Inc.	The database holding your profile, and storage for your photographs and signed documents	Ireland (EU), on Amazon Web Services infrastructure
Pipedream, Inc.	A small workflow service that forwards contact-form submissions from our public website to our CRM	US, under Standard Contractual Clauses
Google LLC (Workspace)	Our private@selectivesingles.co.uk inbox and the team's internal email	EU and US, under Standard Contractual Clauses
Anthropic PBC	Assists our consultants in reading member files when considering who to introduce — see section 4.3	US, under Standard Contractual Clauses. Anthropic does not use this material to train its models; it is retained only briefly, for abuse monitoring.
Cloudflare, Inc.	DNS and content-delivery for selectivesingles.co.uk	Global edge network, with the EU/UK as preferred regions

4.2 Identity verification

Every member is verified before we make any introduction. Verification is not required in order to join, to pay, or to be considered for a match — it is required before another member is given your contact details, and before you are given theirs.

There are two ways it is done, depending on your membership:

Select and Complimentary members verify themselves through Stripe Identity, a regulated identity-verification service. You photograph your identification document and your face on Stripe's own pages. Stripe holds those images; we never receive them. We are told whether the check passed, the type of document used, and its last four characters.
Signature and Exclusive members are verified by a member of our own team, who sees your document during a video call. Nothing is photographed, uploaded or stored. We record the type of document, its last four characters, who checked it and when.

In both cases what we keep is a record that the check happened — never the document itself.

4.3 Where software helps our consultants think

Matchmaking here is done by people. A consultant spends an hour with you, writes down what you told them, and holds all of it in their head alongside everyone else on our books. That last part is where it strains: by the time our books hold a few hundred people, no one person can properly re-read every file every time somebody new joins.

So our consultants have an assistant, built on a language model provided by Anthropic PBC. When a consultant asks it about you, it reads your file — your answers, what you wrote in your own words, and the notes our consultants have made about you — and reads the files of the members currently available to be introduced to you in the same way. It then writes the consultant a short argument for the two or three it thinks are worth considering, quoting what in the files led it there.

This means your file is read alongside other members' files, and theirs alongside yours. That is the nature of matchmaking and it is what our consultants have always done by hand. What we send is the material that bears on compatibility. It is given your first name and an initial rather than your surname, and none of the structured record we hold of your full address, your contact details, your payment information, your photographs, or your identity check. Your town and county do go, and roughly how far that is from the other person, because distance is central to whether an introduction is sensible at all. One honest caveat: our consultants' notes are written in ordinary prose, so a name — a former partner's, an employer's, occasionally your own — can appear inside a note. Our staff are instructed to keep notes to what bears on matchmaking, but we would rather tell you that than claim a guarantee no free-text note can honour.

It suggests to a consultant, and nothing more. It cannot contact you. It cannot make an introduction, and it cannot cause one to be made — a suggestion enters exactly the same queue that our own matching software feeds, and a consultant still has to approve it, exactly as they always have. You are still asked before your details go to anybody. No one is ever accepted, refused, ranked or charged anything on its say-so.

If you would rather your file were not read this way, write to private@selectivesingles.co.uk. We will mark your record and it will not be read — neither when we are looking on your behalf, nor when we are looking on anybody else's. Your matches will be found by hand and by our own matching software, as before.

4.4 Other sharing

We may share your data with:

Other members, but only the limited profile details that you have agreed in advance can be shared, and (for contact details) only when both parties have said yes to an introduction
Our professional advisers (lawyers, accountants), where strictly necessary
Law enforcement and regulators, where required by law

We will never sell your personal data to anyone.

5. International transfers of your data

Some of our sub-processors (Resend, Pipedream, Stripe, Google, Anthropic) process data outside the UK, in the US or other countries. Where we do this, we rely on:

The UK Government's "adequacy regulations" for the EU and a small number of approved countries; or
The UK International Data Transfer Agreement (IDTA) or the EU Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) approved by the UK ICO; or
The UK extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, where the receiving organisation is certified to it.

You can request copies of the safeguards in place by writing to us at the address in Section 12.

6. How long we keep your data

Category of data	Retention
Identity verification document	Never retained by Selective Singles. Where Stripe Identity is used, the images are held by Stripe under their own retention policy. We keep only the record of the check — the outcome, the type of document and its last four characters, who or what carried it out, the date, and any note made by the member of staff who saw it — for as long as you are a member, plus 6 years thereafter.
Member profile and match preferences	Until you ask us to delete it, or for 24 months after the end of your last paid membership term — whichever is sooner
Photographs on your member portal	Same as your profile; deleted with the profile
Internal consultation notes	Same as your profile
Payment and accounting records	6 years from the end of the financial year in which the payment was made (HMRC requirement)
Email send records (audit log of who we emailed and when)	6 years
IP address recorded against an enquiry or a signature	Kept with the record it belongs to, as evidence of who signed and from where. We run no analytics and keep no browsing logs.
Enquiries that did not convert into a membership	24 months from the last contact, then deleted
Referral attribution data (which referrer link a prospective member arrived via)	12 months

One thing worth being straight about: these periods are applied by us on review, not by a machine that deletes on a timer. Nothing is kept because we have forgotten it, but nothing vanishes automatically either. You can ask us to delete your data at any point, sooner than any of the above — see Section 7.

7. Your rights

Under the UK GDPR you have the following rights:

The right to be informed — this policy is part of how we honour that right.
The right of access — to obtain a copy of the personal data we hold about you ("a subject access request").
The right to rectification — to correct inaccurate or incomplete data.
The right to erasure ("the right to be forgotten") — to ask us to delete your data, subject to our overriding legal obligations (e.g. tax records).
The right to restrict processing — to ask us to limit how we use your data while a query is resolved.
The right to data portability — to receive a machine-readable copy of the data you have provided us with, so you can transfer it to another service.
The right to object — to processing carried out on the basis of legitimate interest, including direct marketing.
The right not to be subject to automated decision-making — we do not use automated decision-making or profiling in a way that produces legal or similarly significant effects. Our matching software ranks and suggests; every introduction is proposed, vetted and made by a human consultant, and so is every decision about your membership. Where software helps a consultant read the files (section 4.3), it only ever suggests to that consultant, who decides. You may ask us not to use it on your record.
The right to withdraw consent at any time, where the legal basis for processing is consent.
The right to complain to the ICO — see Section 11.

To exercise any of these rights, please write to us at the address in Section 12. We will respond within one calendar month and there is no charge for a reasonable request.

8. How we keep your data secure

We take reasonable and proportionate technical and organisational measures to protect your data, including:

All connections to our website, member portal and CRM use encrypted (HTTPS) connections.
Our database is hosted in the EU (Ireland) and access is restricted to authorised consultants. We do not use passwords at all: signing in requires a one-time code, emailed to an authorised work address at the moment of use. There is no password field anywhere in our service and we will never ask you for one.
Our staff and contractors are bound by written confidentiality undertakings and are trained on data protection.
Member photographs and signed documents are encrypted at rest in our EU (Ireland) storage and are served only through short-lived signed links, never from a public address.
We never email identification documents to or from our team. Verification is handled exclusively by our verification provider's secure flow.
Our suppliers are required to maintain equivalent or better security standards.

Despite all reasonable care, no online service can guarantee absolute security. You can help by keeping your member portal link private and contacting us at once if you suspect any compromise.

9. Cookies

A cookie is a small text file stored on your device by your browser. We use the following:

Strictly necessary

sb-<id>-auth-token — set on members.selectivesingles.co.uk once you have signed in with the one-time code we email you. It is what keeps you signed in; without it the portal cannot work. It is set by Supabase, who host our database, and it holds nothing but your session. Where the session is too large for one cookie your browser will show it split in two, as …-auth-token.0 and .1 — the same thing, in two halves.
sb-<id>-auth-token-code-verifier — a short-lived value used only to complete a sign-in, discarded as soon as you are through the door.

Functional

None. We do not set any cookie for referrals, preferences or convenience. Where a Referral Partner introduced you, that is recorded against your enquiry when it is created, not tracked in your browser.

Analytics

We do not currently use third-party analytics cookies (e.g. Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel). If we add any in future, we will update this policy and seek your consent first.

You can disable cookies in your browser settings. Doing so may mean parts of the member portal stop working.

10. Direct marketing

We will send you transactional emails relating to your enquiries, consultations, memberships and matches — these are not marketing.

We may, with your consent, send you occasional updates about Selective Singles events, service improvements or new offerings. You can opt out at any time using the unsubscribe link in any such email, by replying to the email asking to be removed, or by writing to us at the address in Section 12.

11. Complaints

If you have a concern about how we have handled your personal data, please contact us in the first instance (see Section 12) so that we can try to resolve it. Our internal complaints procedure is set out in our Terms of Service.

If you remain unhappy, you have the right to complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office:

Information Commissioner's Office Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF 0303 123 1113 ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint

12. How to contact us

For any privacy question, request, or complaint, please write to our Data Protection contact at:

Selective Singles Ltd 167–169 Great Portland Street London W1W 5PF Email: private@selectivesingles.co.uk Telephone: 01789 334 911

13. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. The "Effective from" date at the top of the policy shows when the current version came into force. We will email active members about any material change and post a notice on selectivesingles.co.uk at least 14 days before the change takes effect.

A historical record of previous versions is available on request.