Privacy policy

Pearmo is built so that you can date without putting your face or your personality profile on the internet. That principle drives how we handle data, so here is the summary before the detail:

• You appear to other people as an animal character, not a photo. There is no public photo grid and no public profile, so nothing about you is visible outside the app.
• Your personality trait scores are visible only to you. Matches never see them. Compatibility is calculated on our side and only the result affects who you are shown.
• Who you are open to dating is used for matching and is never shown to anyone, ever.
• Chat and photo sharing each stay locked until both people agree.
• We do not sell your personal data, we do not use it for advertising, and we do not use it to train AI models. There is no advertising tracker, no analytics SDK and no crash reporter anywhere in the app.
• Your data is stored on Supabase infrastructure in Singapore, which means it leaves Sri Lanka. That is explained in full below.
• You can request a copy of your data, correct it, or ask us to delete it, and you can delete your account from inside the app.

The rest of this page is the detail behind those points. It covers this website and the Pearmo mobile app, including the closed beta.

Pearmo is not a company. It is a project built and run by Sanuth Mandepa and Chanka Dewmina Herath, two people in Colombo, Sri Lanka. There is no registered business behind it yet, and we would rather say that plainly than imply otherwise. If Pearmo is incorporated later, we will update this page and tell you before your data moves to a new controller.

For the purposes of Sri Lanka's Personal Data Protection Act No. 9 of 2022, that means the two of us are personally the controllers of the data described here. Nobody else has access to it.

For any question about this policy, or to exercise any of the rights described below, email pearmo.app@gmail.com. That address reaches both of us and nobody else.

Pearmo is currently an invite-only closed beta with a small group of testers. Several parts of the finished product are switched off, which changes what we collect:

• National identity document verification is disabled. We do not ask for, receive or store your NIC or any other government ID during the beta.
• There are no profile photos. You have an animal character and nothing else. There is no photo upload anywhere in the beta build.
• There is no audio introduction recording.
• There are no payments. Nothing in the beta costs money, and we hold no payment or card details of any kind.
• Beta signups are collected through a Google Form. Your first name, phone number, email address and answers are stored in Google's systems under Google's terms until we delete the responses, and only the two of us can open that sheet. The form also has email collection switched on, so it separately records the Google account address you are signed in with, which may not be the address you typed.
• When the closed beta ends, we delete the beta test data outright, including accounts, profiles, messages, connections, matches and any verification images. Nothing is carried over into a public launch; you would sign up again from scratch. We will tell you before we do it.

Everything else in this policy applies to the beta exactly as written.

Your phone number

Pearmo signs you in with your mobile number and a one-time SMS code. We do not ask for a password and we do not collect an email address inside the app. Your number is how your account is identified, and the code is delivered by Text.lk, a Sri Lankan SMS gateway, which necessarily sees your number and the code in order to send the message. Your number is never shown to other users.

Your age

Your date of birth. Other people see your age as a number, never the date itself. We use it to enforce the 18+ rule and to honour the age range you and other people are open to.

Who you are, and who you are open to

Your gender, the genders you are open to being matched with, the age range you are open to, and what kind of relationship you are looking for.

We want to be specific about this because it matters in Sri Lanka. Under the PDPA, information that reveals your sexual orientation is special-category personal data, and we treat it as the most sensitive thing on your account. Who you are open to is used for one thing only: deciding who to show you and who to show you to. It is never displayed on your profile, never shown to another user, never included in any export or report we generate, and never shared with anyone outside the two of us. It is deliberately excluded from the internal view the app uses to read other people's profiles, so it is not technically possible for one user's device to fetch it about another user.

Personality questionnaire answers

You answer a short set of statements on a five-point scale. We do not store your individual answers. Your device converts them into six trait scores (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, emotional stability and attachment security), and only those six numbers are saved. They are used to calculate compatibility, they are shown to you, and they are shown to nobody else. Like the field above, they are excluded from the view other users' devices can read.

Profile content

The animal character you pick, a short piece of text about yourself, the province or area you choose from a list, your music genres, what you value in a partner, and the hours you would rather be shown to people. This is what other people in Pearmo see, so treat it as public within the app.

Your location is a region you choose from a list. Pearmo does not use GPS. The app requests no location permission at all, and we do not derive your position from your device.

Verification: selfie and liveness check

If you choose to verify your account, the app asks you to centre your face, blink and turn your head, then take a single selfie. Under the PDPA the biometric processing involved here is sensitive personal data, so:

• The liveness check runs entirely on your own phone using on-device face detection. No video is recorded and nothing from that step is ever uploaded to us or to anyone else. All that leaves your device is a yes/no result.
• The selfie itself is uploaded to a private storage area that only you and we can read. It is not public and no other user can request it.
• One of us looks at it by hand to confirm you are a real person. There is no third-party verification vendor, no automated face matching, and no facial-recognition search against other users.
• Once we have approved or rejected it, a scheduled job deletes the image. We keep the outcome (approved or rejected, and when) as our record that a review happened. We do not keep the picture.
• It is never displayed on your profile. Other people see only that your account carries a verification badge, and the app states plainly what that badge does and does not mean.
• It is never used for advertising, and never used to train any machine-learning model.

Messages and interactions

Messages you exchange once chat unlocks, icebreaker game contents, and the record of which consent gates you and a match have opened. We keep these to run the service, to help you if something goes wrong, and to investigate reports of abuse. We do not read your messages routinely, but we can technically read them. Pearmo is not end-to-end encrypted, and we would rather you know that than assume otherwise.

Reports, ratings and trust score

If you report someone, we keep the report, who made it, and what it was about. After a connection ends you can rate it, and those ratings feed a trust score on the rated account. Ratings are anonymous to the person rated. They cannot query who rated them or how. The trust score is used internally to decide who gets shown to whom; it is not displayed on anyone's profile.

Safety check-in

If you use the check-in feature, we store the time you set and the optional free-text note of who you would call. Read that carefully: Pearmo never contacts that person. The check-in is an alarm that sounds on your own phone and nothing more. We do not call, text or notify anyone on your behalf, and a missed check-in is simply marked as missed in the app.

Technical data

Our hosting provider logs the usual things a server logs, including IP address, request times, device and app version, and we use those to keep the service running and to spot abuse. That is the extent of it. The app contains no analytics SDK, no advertising identifier, no crash-reporting service and no push-notification tokens; notifications in Pearmo are generated locally by your own phone, so nothing about them reaches us.

This website

pearmo.com uses Vercel Analytics and Vercel Speed Insights to count page views and measure loading speed. Both are cookieless and neither builds a profile of you across websites, which is why this site shows no cookie banner. If you join the waitlist here, we collect your email address and use it only to tell you when Pearmo launches. There are no advertising trackers on this site.

• Performance of our agreement with you, including creating and running your account, matching you with other people, and delivering the features you use.
• Your consent, for the selfie and liveness verification, for each photo reveal, and for waitlist emails. You can withdraw consent at any time. Withdrawing verification consent means we cannot verify your account, but you can still use Pearmo unverified.
• Our legitimate interests, including keeping the platform safe, preventing impersonation and abuse, fixing what is broken, and understanding in aggregate how the product is used, weighed against your privacy each time.
• Legal obligations, where Sri Lankan law requires us to keep or disclose something.

We do not sell your personal data and we do not share it with advertisers. There is no data broker, no ad network and no AI training partner in this list. These are the only parties involved:

• Other Pearmo users, but only the profile content described above, plus anything you specifically choose to reveal to one match.
• Supabase, the database, sign-in, file storage and server functions behind the app. Supabase runs our project on Amazon Web Services infrastructure in Singapore. This is where essentially all of your data lives.
• Text.lk, a Sri Lankan SMS gateway that delivers your sign-in code and so receives your phone number. This is the one provider in this list that is inside Sri Lanka.
• Vercel, which hosts this website and the private page we use to review verification selfies.
• Google, during the closed beta only, because the signup form is a Google Form and its responses sit in a Google Sheet that only the two of us can open.
• Law enforcement or a regulator, where we are legally required to hand something over, or where we believe in good faith it is necessary to prevent serious harm to someone.

Each of these providers may use your data only to provide their service to us. If we ever add another one that touches personal data, we will name it here before it goes live.

Separately from all of that, we may use anonymised, aggregated patterns, such as “a third of new users stopped during onboarding”, to improve the product and in material we show investors. That is counts and percentages only. Your name, number, selfie, messages, profile and trait scores are never part of it, and nothing in it can be traced back to you.

Your data does not stay in Sri Lanka. Our Supabase project is hosted in Singapore, on Amazon Web Services infrastructure, and that is where your profile, messages, trait scores and any verification image are stored and processed. Our website and the internal review page are served by Vercel from its global network.

We rely on these providers' own contractual and technical safeguards to keep that data protected to the standard this policy describes, and we chose a regional host rather than a distant one deliberately. If you are not comfortable with your data being stored outside Sri Lanka, please do not create an account. This is the one thing we cannot offer an alternative to.

• We keep account and profile data for as long as your account exists.
• We keep verification selfies until a review decision is made, then a scheduled job deletes them. We keep only the decision and its date.
• We keep messages for the life of the connection they belong to. Deleting your account does not delete them from the other person's side; see below.
• We keep reports, ratings and trust score after account deletion, because a moderation record that vanishes when the reported person deletes their account is not a moderation record.
• We delete beta signup form responses when the closed beta ends, or sooner if you ask.
• We keep waitlist emails until launch, or until you ask us to remove you.

You can delete your account from inside the app, under Settings. We want to be precise about what happens, because 'delete' means different things in different apps and most of them are vaguer than this:

• Deleted immediately: every file you uploaded, including any verification selfie, any photo or any audio, is removed from storage, not just unlinked. Your display name, your text about yourself, your character, and your region are wiped, your profile is switched off, and your verification badge resets to unverified.
• Kept: your reports, the ratings others gave you, your trust score and your report count. This is deliberate. If deleting your account erased that, anyone could clear a record of harassment by deleting and signing up again with the same number.
• Kept: the messages you sent. Deleting your side of a conversation would also delete the other person's side of it, and we do not think one person should be able to erase someone else's history. Your old messages stay visible to whoever you were talking to, attached to a deleted account. This is how mainstream dating apps handle it too.
• You can sign up again with the same phone number afterwards and build a new profile. It will be a genuinely fresh profile, but it remains the same underlying account, so the moderation history above stays attached to it.

If you would rather we deleted everything by hand, including the messages, email pearmo.app@gmail.com and ask. We will do it, but we cannot do it silently from your side, because it affects someone else's conversation too.

If you only want a break, Settings also has a pause switch that hides your profile without deleting anything, and is fully reversible.

Under the Personal Data Protection Act No. 9 of 2022 you have the right to:

• Ask what personal data we hold about you and get a copy of it.
• Have anything inaccurate or incomplete corrected.
• Ask us to delete your personal data.
• Withdraw consent you gave earlier, including for verification or waitlist emails.
• Object to processing we carry out on the basis of our legitimate interests.
• Complain to Sri Lanka's data protection authority if you think we have handled your data unlawfully.

To exercise any of these, email pearmo.app@gmail.com. We will respond within the period the PDPA requires. We may need to check that you are who you say you are first, so that we do not hand your data to the wrong person. We have not appointed a Data Protection Officer; with two people and a closed beta there is no one to appoint, and the address above reaches both of us directly.

Data is encrypted in transit. Verification images and private files sit in storage areas that are not publicly readable, and access to them is restricted per user at the database level. Only the two of us hold administrative access, and nobody else has ever had it.

Pearmo is early software built by two people, and we would rather set your expectations honestly than claim a security posture we cannot back up. It is not end-to-end encrypted. It has not had an external security audit. If a breach affects your personal data, we will tell you and the relevant authority as the PDPA requires, and we will tell you what actually happened rather than the smallest true version of it.

Pearmo is strictly for people aged 18 and over. During the closed beta, age is what you tell us, since national ID checking is switched off, so we are relying on your word and on the selfie review to catch anything obviously wrong. We do not knowingly hold data about anyone under 18, and if we find an underage account we delete it and its data.

We will update this page when our practices change, and change the date at the top when we do. If a change materially affects your rights, we will tell you directly rather than relying on you noticing.

Anything about your data, this policy, or a request under the PDPA: pearmo.app@gmail.com.