Privacy & data rights

Data the app uses

Public Contact form and anti-abuse data

When you use the public Contact form, pen-pals.net processes the name you provide, email address, topic, subject, message, email-verification status, and limited request metadata used for spam, abuse, security, and evidence-integrity purposes. This can include the IP address observed by the server, hashed IP/correlation values, user-agent and browser client hints, Cloudflare country/Ray identifiers when available, referrer/origin, accepted language, and browser-reported timezone, UTC offset, clock, and language settings. Browser-reported values can be spoofed and are treated only as supporting signals, not proof of identity or location.

Why Contact security data is used

Contact data is used to deliver and verify your message, prevent repeated or automated abuse, correlate repeated submissions, investigate serious misuse, preserve evidence when a documented investigation or legal need requires it, and maintain an auditable record of privileged evidence access or export. Access to protected Contact evidence and investigation tools is restricted to authorised staff, with the most sensitive preservation, investigation, and export actions limited to administrators. These security and abuse-prevention activities are generally carried out on the basis of legitimate interests in operating and protecting the service, preventing fraud or unlawful use, and establishing, exercising, or defending legal claims where applicable.

Contact retention and investigations

Unverified Contact submissions use one-time email verification and expire after one hour; stale pending verification records are cleaned up automatically, and verified pending records have their submitted content scrubbed after the Contact ticket is created. Resolved Contact tickets are subject to the retention rules configured by administrators. Serious matters may be placed under a documented record-level or category-wide retention hold, including while an investigation is active. When a hold is released and an applicable retention rule allows deletion, the Contact ticket and dependent message/evidence records are removed together.

What other members can see

Public profile views use privacy-aware server checks. Members can control profile visibility, city display, activity status, response-rate display, communication modes, blocked users, and who can send new introductions. Verification shows only whether a profile is verified, not the private method used.

Community statistics

pen-pals.net may publish privacy-safe aggregate community statistics, such as how many Pen-Pals.net members are in a country or speak a language. These numbers describe this site's members only. They are not claims about the general population, and small cohorts are suppressed.

Download, correct, or delete data

Signed-in members can download a machine-readable account export from Settings. The export includes account, profile, settings, language and interest selections, communication history, notifications, blocks, photo-access records, and user-submitted reports where the app can safely provide them. Passwords, tokens, service credentials, other members' private profile fields, reporter identities, and protected moderator evidence are not included.

Members can correct profile information in profile setup and Settings. Permanent deletion removes the account, profile, owned data, notifications, photo permissions, blocks, and avatar references. Shared conversations may remain available to the other participant with the deleted sender shown as Deleted user. Some authentication, safety, or legal records may be retained only where the current provider or configured retention rules require it.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, privacy laws may give you rights to access, correct, delete, restrict, export, or object to certain processing of your personal data. pen-pals.net is built around those practical controls where possible: export, correction, deletion, privacy settings, blocking, and support requests.