Privacy Policy

Who we are

Larking is a live video meetup service operated by the Larking team at golarking.com. Where this page says "we", "us" or "Larking", that is who we mean. Where it says "you", it means the person using the account.

A question about your information, a request to see it, correct it or delete it, anything else on this page — all of it reaches a person at hello@golarking.com. We are a small team, and a real person reads what arrives there.

The rules for using Larking live on a separate page: the Terms of Use. This page is only about information.

What you give us

Almost everything we hold is something you typed, picked or uploaded. This is the whole of it.

• Your account. Your name, your email address and your date of birth. The birthdate is the 18-and-over gate, and we keep the date rather than just the answer it gave. If you set a password we store it hashed — we cannot read it back, and neither can anyone who gets hold of the database.
• If you sign in with Google. Google hands us your name, your email address and the ID it uses for your account. We store that ID so the button recognises you next time. We never see your Google password, we never post anything anywhere on your behalf, and we ask Google for nothing else.
• Your profile. Your photos, your bio, the city you type in, your interest and intent tags, and the About-me answers: pets, what you are looking for, drinks, smokes, star sign. All of it is optional except the photos, and all of it is shown to other members.
• If you ask to host. The hosting request form: your group's name and kind, how often it meets, how many people you expect, what the occasion is, and whether we may share how it went. Your name and email come from your account.
• If you host a private Drop. The email addresses you put on its invite list, the labels on its invite links, any questions you add to its survey, and the note you add to its recap email. The addresses you list may belong to people who have no account — we send them nothing; they are only used to let that person in when they sign in with that address.
• If you report a problem. What you wrote, the page you were on, and your browser's name and version, so we can reproduce it. Signed in, it is tied to your account and deleted with it; signed out, we keep the email you leave, if any, so we can reply.
• Your settings. Your NSFW Mode setting, whether you want Drop reminder emails, whether you want a browser notification when a match lands, your colour theme and your timezone. These are private preferences and are not shown on your profile.

What happens during a Drop

Checking in to a Drop lets you add extras for that night: a "vibe tonight" line, what you are currently into, and a live selfie with a label. Those extras are shown to other people only during that Drop, and none of them ever joins your profile.

We do keep the check-in on file after the Drop ends — nothing deletes it — but it is only ever displayed inside the Drop it belongs to. Once that night is over, nobody sees it.

Around the calls we keep the interaction records the service is made of: your yes and pass answers during a Drop, the matches those produced, when each call started and ended, and whether a match went unanswered.

We also keep the messages you send to a connection, the reports you file and the reports filed about you, and the feedback you leave after a call — the vibe rating, whether you would like to talk again, and whether the other person showed content the call did not allow.

After a Drop you went live in, we ask a short, optional survey: whether you would come again, on a hosted Drop whether you would join one open to anyone, what would have made the night better, and any questions the host added. We keep your answers against that Drop.

A private Drop is reached through an invite link or an invited email address. When you come in that way we record that you were let in, and through which link.

What we log on our own

There is very little of this, and it is all here.

• The IP address you registered from and the approximate city it points to. The city comes from ip-api.com, which receives the IP address and nothing else — not your name, not your email, nothing about the account it belongs to. We use it to spot fake and automated signups, and it is looked up once, at registration.
• Cookies for your session and your preferences, and nothing else. No analytics, no advertising trackers, no pixels, nothing that follows you around the web. There is no third-party script on Larking measuring what you do here.
• Browser notifications, only if you turn them on. They are off until you enable them, your browser asks you before the first one, and you can revoke that at any time in your browser or in Settings.
• Invites. We record who invited whom, because that is what makes an invite link work and what tells a member their invite was used.
• Opening a Drop's invite link. We count each time one is opened, and note your account if you were signed in, so a host can see which link brought people and we can see who came through which. No IP address and nothing about your device is kept with it.

Who can see what

Other members see your profile card while a Drop is live, together with the check-in extras you added for that Drop. Someone you have connected with sees the messages you send them. That is the whole of what another member gets.

Your NSFW Mode setting is never shown on your profile and cannot be read off anything you appear in. A call is marked NSFW only when both members have the setting on and the Drop allows it — so the only person who can ever learn yours is someone who has it on too, in a Drop that permits it.

Someone hosting a Drop sees counts and nothing else: how many people checked in, how many were online, how many calls happened, how many came in through each invite link, the survey totals, and the answers to the questions they added themselves, with no names attached. They are never shown who. The invite list is the addresses they typed in themselves, and it never says which of them came.

Our team can see your account — including the IP address you registered from and the city it resolved to — when we are keeping the place safe: handling a report, checking whether an account is a bot, enforcing the rules. That is the trade, and it is the same one the terms describe: anonymous between members, visible to the people whose job is keeping the place safe.

Who else handles it

A handful of companies do a job for us, and each of them gets only what that job needs.

• Cloudflare carries the live video and audio of your calls between you and the person you matched with.
• Resend sends our email — the verification link, password resets, Drop reminders and recaps.
• Google, only if you choose to sign in with it. If you never touch that button, Google gets nothing from us.
• ip-api.com turns a registration IP address into a city. It receives the IP address and nothing else.
• DigitalOcean hosts the servers Larking runs on and stores the photos you upload.

We do not sell your information, and we do not share it for advertising. Nobody on that list is paying us for access to you.

How long we keep it

While your account exists, we keep what is described above. You can end that yourself: Settings › Security › Delete account, confirm, and the account is gone. There is no cooling-off period and no reactivation.

Deleting the account deletes what is attached to it, at the same moment: your profile and photos, your tags and About-me answers, your check-ins and their selfies, your presence and match records, your calls, the feedback you left, your survey answers, your hosting requests, the record of the private Drops you were let into, the messages you sent, and the reports you filed as well as the reports filed about you. A count of you opening an invite link stays with the link, with your account detached from it.

Two consequences worth knowing. Messages go with you, which means they also disappear from the thread of the person you sent them to. And a Drop you hosted or an invite link you created survives the deletion with your name detached from it — along with that Drop's invite list and survey questions — because those belong to the night and to the people who used them, not only to you.

What is left afterwards is small: copies can survive for a short while in routine backups until those roll over, and delivery logs for email we sent you expire on our email provider's own schedule rather than ours. We may also keep a minimal record where the law requires it.

The terms say that a removed account may not come back, and this is how that promise is kept: we do not delete an account we have banned. The ban is a mark we keep on the account itself, and a banned account cannot sign in, which is also why it cannot delete itself out of the record.

Your choices and rights

• See and change everything in Settings. Your profile, your photos, your tags, your About-me answers, your email address, your date of birth, your timezone and your theme are all editable, and anything optional can be cleared.
• Turn the notifications off. Drop reminder emails and the browser notification for a match are both switches in Settings › Preferences, and both can be off.
• Ask us directly. Write to us for a copy of what we hold about you, a correction, or deletion, and we will do it. You do not have to explain why.
• Complain to a regulator. If you are somewhere with a data-protection authority, you can take a complaint to them as well as to us. Asking us first usually gets you an answer faster.

All of it starts at hello@golarking.com.

Age

Larking is for people aged 18 and over. We ask for your date of birth when you set up your profile and we reject anything under 18.

No part of this service is meant for children, and we do not knowingly hold information about anyone under 18. If we learn that an account belongs to someone younger, we remove it and what is attached to it.

Changes to this policy

This page will change as Larking does. Any new thing we collect, and any new company that handles your information, belongs here before it starts — so if the list above grows, this page grows with it and the effective date at the top changes.

When a change is material we will tell you inside Larking before it takes effect, rather than quietly editing the page and hoping you look. Small corrections that change nothing about what we hold — a typo, a clearer sentence — we simply make.