Trust
Your data, in plain language
Bearing asks what you believe about politics, faith, medicine and sex, and then matches you on it. Under privacy law that is a special category of data with its own rules, and this page is the version of those rules you can read before you decide anything.
Article 9
Why this needs its own permission, and not a checkbox
Most of what an app holds about you is ordinary personal data. Four of the things Bearing holds are not.
Political opinions, religious and philosophical beliefs, health, and sex life are what the law calls special category data. Processing them is prohibited outright unless a specific exception applies. The exception this product runs on is your explicit consent, and explicit is a term of art rather than an adjective: it has to be a separate, specific, unbundled, freely given affirmative act. A line inside a terms acceptance does not qualify.
So it is its own screen, with its own decision, after the account exists and before the first values topic. Refusing is a button of the same weight as agreeing — not a link, not a smaller word underneath. And the exact wording that was on the screen is stored alongside the record of what you decided, which is what lets us show you later precisely what you were asked.
The other half of the same rule is Article 7(3): it has to be as easy to withdraw the consent as it was to give it. One button per category, no waiting period, effective in the same request. A consent screen promising a withdrawal the software cannot perform would not merely be an unimplemented feature; it would undermine the lawful basis of everything behind it.
Verbatim
The exact words you are shown
Quoted rather than summarised, and rendered from the same text the screen uses and the record stores. This is the document; everything else on this page is us explaining it.
Explicit consent to answer the values topics
The topics you are about to answer cover your political opinions, your religious or philosophical beliefs, your health and medical choices, and your sex life. Under the GDPR that is special-category data, and it needs your explicit permission — separately from the terms you accepted when you created the account.
Here is exactly what happens to those answers. They are stored in a separate database schema that is not reachable from the app, the website, or any browser; only the matching engine reads them. Nobody at Bearing browses them. They are never sold, never used to target advertising, and never shared with a third party.
Another member sees an answer of yours in one case only: you have both agreed to roll out the chart in a conversation, at the same time, and every one of those reads is logged with your name on it. Until then, matching happens on numbers derived from your answers, not on the answers themselves.
You can withdraw this consent at any time, one category at a time, from your privacy settings. It is one button per category and it takes effect in the same request. Here is precisely what that button does, because a withdrawal you cannot picture is not one you can meaningfully agree to:
- Every answer you have given in that category is deleted, and so is every earlier version of it in your answer history. Deleted, not hidden, not flagged, not kept somewhere quieter.
- The numbers we actually match on are rebuilt in the same instant and in the same transaction, with that category's bits set back to zero. There is no moment where the answers are gone and the matching still uses them.
- A chart you have already rolled out to somebody stops showing those answers from that moment. What they have already read cannot be un-read, and we will not pretend otherwise.
- The log of who opened your chart, and when, is kept. It holds no answer of yours, it is the record of other people's access to you rather than of your beliefs, and it stays in your export.
- Your consent records are added to and never edited. The law requires us to be able to show what you were asked, what you agreed to, and when you took it back.
- If the category held any of the ten topics everybody answers, your profile leaves matching until you have answered the ten again. Nobody sees you while that is true, and your account is not paused or closed.
- You can give the consent again whenever you like, immediately, with no waiting period and nothing lost for having changed your mind. The answers themselves are gone, so you would be answering those topics fresh.
- Your account, your photographs, your matches and your conversations are untouched, and so is every answer in the categories you did not withdraw.
I give my explicit consent for Bearing to process my answers about the categories listed above, for the purpose of matching me with other members.
Recorded as version art9-v2. What is stored with your decision is that text, joined in that order, rather than a reference to a version number that could later point at something else. Your data export contains it.
And if you say no
The second button reads “I do not consent”, and pressing it leads to this, which is the whole of it:
Refusing is as easy as agreeing, and it costs you nothing else: your account stays, your photos stay, and you can come back to this screen whenever you like. What you cannot do without it is answer the topics, and the topics are the entire product — so there is no partial version of Bearing to send you to.
We would rather say that plainly than build a version of the product with the topics switched off, which would be a worse product sold to you as a compromise.
The four categories
What each one actually covers
The category names are the law's words. These are the subjects that sit under each of them, and they are the unit you withdraw.
Political opinions
Religious and philosophical beliefs
Health, including medical choices
Sex life and sexual orientation
The inconvenient part of that list
Those groupings are coarser than the law is. Withdrawing a category deletes some ordinary personal data alongside the special-category data — your view on public transport leaves with your view on alcohol, because both sit in the same subject group and a subject group is the smallest thing the database can delete by.
We could have made the groups narrower and left the borderline answers in place. We did not, because that direction of error is the dangerous one: an answer about medicine left behind in a mixed group is a special-category answer held with no permission covering it. Deleting a little more than strictly necessary is the member’s own request going slightly further than asked. The reverse is us keeping something we were told to destroy.
Two of the assignments are genuine judgement calls and are written down as such in the source rather than presented as obvious: money questions count as political opinion, and abortion is filed under health even though it plainly reveals political and religious belief too.
Doing it
Where the buttons are, once you have an account
Both of these are inside the app, so they need a signed-in account. Nothing on either screen is paywalled, at any tier, ever.
Privacy settings — withdrawing one category
One button per category, with a preview of exactly how many answers it is about to delete before you press it. The other three categories are untouched, and so is your account, your photographs, your matches and your conversations. You can give any of them again immediately afterwards, though the answers themselves are gone, so you would be answering those topics fresh.
/app/settings/privacy
Export and delete — all of it at once
The export is one JSON file containing everything held about you, including the log of who opened your chart and when — which is the one part of it you could not reconstruct from the product’s own screens. The delete is a real delete rather than a hidden or suspended account.
/app/settings/data
This page covers the consent and nothing else. The privacy notice is the long version — what is held, who touches it, how long it is kept, and which parts of it are still a draft waiting on a lawyer. The terms are here.