Privacy Policy
Version 2026-10-10 · Last updated 10 October 2026
This policy describes what Nova Dating actually does with your information. It is written against the code that runs the service, not around it.
The short version
- We do not sell your data. There is no ad network in Nova.
- We do not share your profile, messages, location or filters with advertisers, data brokers or “partners”.
- Your exact location never leaves our database. Other members see a distance rounded to the nearest kilometre.
- Your phone number is never shown on your profile and is never visible to another member.
- You can download everything we hold and delete your account yourself, from inside the app, at any time.
Who we are
Nova Dating is a product of Viridian Dynamics, which operates www.nova.dating. Viridian Dynamics is the entity responsible for the personal information described in this policy — the data controller, and under Australian law the APP entity.
For anything in this policy, including a request to access or correct your information or a complaint about how we have handled it, write to Support@viridiandynamics.com.au. One address, read by the people who run the service.
Where your data is stored
Your account data — your profile, photos, messages, likes, notes and preferences — is stored on servers in Sydney, Australia. That is where the database, the authentication records and the photo storage all live.
Two honest caveats, because a flat claim of “Australian only” would not be true of every byte:
- The app itself is delivered from a global content network. Fetching the page or the app files may be served from, and logged by, a location closer to you. Those request logs can include your IP address. They do not contain your profile, your messages or your photos.
- Sending an SMS code, sending email and delivering a push notification all involve a third party and a telecommunications network, which route wherever they route. What reaches them is described under service providers.
What we collect
Information you give us
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Phone number | To sign you in, and to enforce a ban. It is stored by our authentication provider and, separately, as a one-way hash used only for ban matching. It is never shown to other members. |
| Date of birth | To confirm you are 18 or over and to show your age. Other members see the age, never the date. |
| Email address (optional) | To let you back in if you change numbers, and to send the notifications you have switched on. Confirmed by a link we email you. |
| Profile content | Your name, photos, bio, work, and the attributes you choose to answer — intentions, family plans, religion, education, exercise, drinking, star sign, languages, interests. All of it is optional except a name, a birthdate and one photo, and all of it is visible to other members. |
| Instagram handle (optional) | Shown on your profile as a link. We store the handle as text. We do not connect to Instagram, read your posts, or post anything. |
| Filters | To build your deck. Your filters are private — no other member can see what you are filtering for. |
| Messages | To deliver them. Readable by you and the person you matched with. We do not mine them, and we do not use them to target anything at you. |
| Verification selfie (optional) | To compare against your profile photos. Stored in a private bucket no other member can read, and deleted as soon as it has been reviewed. |
| Reports and blocks | To keep people safe and to act on abuse. The person you report is not told that you reported them. |
| Reviews | Emoji tags left by people you matched with. We store who left each one so that abuse of the feature can be investigated, but the subject only ever sees anonymous totals. |
Location
Nova needs a rough position to work: distance is the one thing nobody can type in honestly, and the deck is built from it.
- We ask your browser or device for your location, and only read it while Nova is open and in the foreground. The watch stops when you switch away and resumes when you come back. There is no background tracking.
- We store the latest coordinate only. Each update overwrites the previous one, so there is no location history to hand over, leak or sell.
- We do not send your coordinates to any third party, including geocoding services. That is why Overseas mode offers a fixed list of cities instead of a search box.
- Other members never receive your coordinates. The database returns a distance rounded to the nearest kilometre, computed server-side.
- If you use Overseas mode, your real position is not used for discovery at all — the city you picked is.
Information we collect automatically
- Last active time, so people can see whether you are around. Shown coarsely — “online now”, “3 hours ago” — never as an exact timestamp.
- Push subscriptions, if you turn notifications on: an endpoint supplied by your browser plus two keys. Deleting the subscription or turning notifications off removes the record.
- Operational logs from our hosting and database providers, used to keep the service running and to investigate abuse.
What we do not do
- We do not sell or rent your personal information to anyone.
- We do not run third-party advertising or embed ad trackers.
- We do not build advertising profiles from your messages or swipes.
- We never charge for access to your own data, or for any safety feature. Exporting your data, deleting your account, blocking, reporting and verification are free on every tier. Some discovery features — seeing who liked you, unlimited likes, rewinds and the detailed filters — are part of the paid tier; see the Terms of Service for exactly which.
- We do not keep a location history, and we do not track you when Nova is closed.
Who can see what
| Visible to other members | Never visible to other members |
|---|---|
| Your first name, age, photos, bio, work, the attributes you answered, interests, languages, verification badge, overseas-mode flag, a rounded distance, roughly when you were last online, the month you joined, and any note you chose to send with a like. | Your phone number, email address, date of birth, exact coordinates, address, filters, who you passed on, who liked you (unless you have Premium), your reports and blocks, who left which review, and your verification selfie. |
These boundaries are enforced in the database with row-level security, not just in the app. A member's session cannot read rows the policies do not grant, regardless of what the client asks for.
Notes you send with a like
A like can carry a short note. The note is sent to the person you liked and is stored with that like. They can read it whether or not they like you back — sending one is a decision to show them something, and it cannot be taken back once sent, in the same way a message cannot.
Notes are checked for links and Snapchat handles before they are stored, and refused if they contain any. They are included in your data export, and they are deleted with your account.
Likes you receive
Who has liked you is held back unless you have Premium. We mean that literally: on a free account the server does not send the app the identity of anyone who liked you — not the name, not the photo, not the account id, and not the note. The locked tiles you see are generated patterns, not blurred photos, because a blur comes off with a developer tool and would not be a protection at all.
The same restraint applies to notifications. On a free account the alert says somebody liked you, without saying who. We do store which account it was, so that the notification resolves properly if you later subscribe.
Matches, and the 72-hour window
When you match, we record the match, which of you owes the first message, when the window closes, and whether either of you has used a reopen on it. If nobody speaks inside the window the match becomes a missed match: it stays on your list, visible to you both, until one of you reopens it or one of you unmatches.
Unmatching is permanent and mutual. It takes the conversation out of both lists, stops either of you being shown to the other again, and cannot be undone by either side.
Shared profile links
If you leave profile sharing on, another member can send someone a link to your profile. That page is deliberately thin: photos, first name, age, bio and interests. It carries no distance, no city, no socials and no attributes. You can switch sharing off in your profile settings, which disables the link immediately.
Service providers
We use a small number of processors to run Nova. They act on our instructions and may not use your data for their own purposes.
- Supabase — database, authentication, file storage.
- Vercel — application hosting.
- An SMS provider — to send your sign-in code. It receives your phone number for that purpose.
- An email provider — to send confirmation and notification email, if you add an address.
- Your browser or device vendor's push service — to deliver push notifications you have turned on. It receives the notification text, which is why previews are kept short.
How long we keep things
Set out in full in the Data Retention & Deletion statement. In short: your account data lives as long as your account, verification selfies are deleted after review, your location is overwritten rather than accumulated, and deleting your account leaves behind only a hashed phone number and a timestamp so that bans cannot be shed.
Your rights
You can, from inside the app and without asking us:
- Access and export everything we hold, as a JSON file — Profile → Your data → Download my data.
- Correct anything on your profile, at any time.
- Delete your account and its data — Profile → Your data → Delete my account.
- Withdraw consent for location (your browser settings), push notifications, and email, independently of one another.
- Pause rather than delete, by turning off “Show me in the deck”.
Depending on where you live you may also have the right to object to processing, to restrict it, or to complain to a data protection authority. Write to Support@viridiandynamics.com.au and we will answer within 30 days.
Security
- Access to every table is governed by row-level security policies, so the boundary is in the database rather than in client code.
- Photos live in private buckets and are served through short-lived signed URLs, so a photo cannot be hotlinked or scraped by guessing a URL.
- Phone numbers used for ban enforcement are stored only as a salted hash.
- Links and Snapchat handles are blocked in bios and messages at the database level, because moving a conversation off Nova is how scams escape reporting.
No service is perfectly secure. If you find a vulnerability, please write to Support@viridiandynamics.com.au rather than disclosing it publicly, and we will work with you.
Children
Nova is for adults. You must be 18 or over. The database refuses to store a profile with a date of birth under 18. If you believe a minor is using Nova, report the profile and we will remove it.
International transfers
Member data is held in Australia and is not moved offshore for storage. If you are outside Australia, using Nova means your information is stored here — that is a transfer out of your own country, and signing up is your agreement to it.
The limited exceptions are the ones listed under where your data is stored: content delivery and the SMS, email and push paths. Where a provider handles data outside Australia we rely on the contractual safeguards that provider offers, and we take reasonable steps to ensure they handle it consistently with the Australian Privacy Principles.
Complaints
If you think we have mishandled your personal information, tell us first at Support@viridiandynamics.com.au. We will acknowledge it and tell you what we are doing about it.
If our answer does not satisfy you, you can take it to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, the regulator for the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), at oaic.gov.au. You do not need our permission to do that, and you do not have to come to us first — we would simply rather fix it than have it escalate.
Changes
We record which version of this policy you accepted. If we change it materially we will ask you to accept the new version rather than quietly swapping it out.