HelloAcross helps people find pen pals around the world. This page explains what we store about you, who can see it, and what you can do about it. We don't sell your data, share it with advertisers, or use tracking cookies.
What we store
- Your account: your email address, a secure hash of your password (never the password itself), and when you agreed to the Terms of Use.
- Your profile: username, display name, profile photo, bio, date of birth, gender, country, state or province, city, the languages you speak and are learning, interests, and what you're looking for on HelloAcross.
- Your Pen Pal preferences: the ages, gender, and regions you'd like to meet.
- Activity: the last day you used HelloAcross (not the time or what you did).
- Pen Pal requests and connections: who you asked or were asked by, any note sent with a request, and whether it was accepted, declined, withdrawn, or removed.
- Messages you send and receive, and whether you've read the ones sent to you.
- This or That games: invitations, choices, skips, optional explanations, and game results. We also store your Premium expiration date and audit records of admin grants or revocations.
- Blocks and reports you make, notifications, and your notification settings.
- Scrapbook pages you add: their title, story, photos, country, type, and review status.
Who can see what
- Signed-in members in your age group can see your profile (but never your email or exact date of birth; they see your age) in Discover and on your profile page, unless you've blocked each other. Your Pen Pal preferences are only used to suggest people and are never shown to anyone.
- Age separation: ordinary members cannot discover or open the profiles, photos, scrapbook pages or forum content of the other age group. Authorized staff can inspect content for moderation and support through review tools.
- If you're under 18, links, email addresses, phone numbers and social media handles in your bio, in the titles and stories of your scrapbook pages, and in your forum posts and replies, are filtered in ordinary member views; authorized moderators can inspect the originals. Forum discussions are separated by age group.
- Only you see your notes on requests you receive, your notification settings, and your activity day (which is only used to sort Discover by Recently Active).
- Messages are visible to you and the person you're writing to, and may be reviewed by authorized moderators when investigating a report. Nobody is told when you've read a message.
- This or That is private to the two players. Your partner sees a question's choice and explanation only after you have both answered or skipped it. Submitted answers are final. Your data download includes your own answers.
- Approved scrapbook pages are shown on your profile and in Scrapbooks from around the world (Discover → Scrapbooks) to signed-in members of your age group (never anyone you've blocked or who has blocked you), with credit to your @username, and may be the Community Photo of the Day. New profile photos are checked by an admin before anyone else sees them. All photos are stored without location and other hidden data.
- Staff accounts are reserved for moderation, have no public pen-pal profile and cannot send private social messages. Staff use separate ordinary member accounts for personal pen-palling, subject to the same age and contact rules as everyone else. Official moderation notices are labeled as coming from HelloAcross.
- Moderators can see your account details (including your email address), and the messages and request notes between you and someone you report, or who reports you, so they can deal with the report. When a scrapbook page is reported, a copy of its text (title, story, country and type) is kept with the report, even if the page is later deleted. Admin actions are logged.
Keeping HelloAcross safe
To stop password guessing and spam, we briefly keep counts of sign-in attempts and requests by account and by IP address. These are kept in memory for up to a day and are not stored with your profile.
Staff must provide a reason to review account details, report evidence, forum threads or scrapbook content outside their own age group. We record these cross-age reviews with the staff account, purpose, time and relevant member or report reference. Staff can open their own content and content in their own age group directly. Only cross-age staff image views write moderation access records. Earlier adult-to-minor profile-view records remain safety records; ordinary cross-age profile access is now unavailable.
Reports and moderation records, including reviewed birth-date corrections and staff access logs, can remain after an account is deleted. Some retained report text or correspondence may contain personal information. These records are not necessarily anonymous. They are restricted to authorized staff and are not all included in the self-service download.
Retention depends on the type of record: active account data is kept while your account exists, deletion removes the categories described below, correspondence can remain with recipients, and necessary billing records can remain for dispute handling or legal obligations. Contact us about retention or deletion requests. Do not assume account deletion erases all evidence straight away.
Safety records are deleted automatically on this schedule, counted from when a report is resolved:
- Reports we didn't uphold (no rule broken, not enough evidence, or a duplicate): what was written is removed after 1 year, and the rest of the record after 3 years.
- Reports that led to action (content removed, a warning, a suspension or a ban): deleted after 3 years.
- Reports of grooming, child exploitation, threats or immediate danger: deleted after 6 years.
- Records of staff actions (the moderation log): deleted after 3 years.
Some records are kept longer: while a report is still open; while the member it's about is suspended or banned, and for the periods above after that ends; and when we must keep a record for a legal reason, such as a request from the police or a report to a child-safety authority, until that reason ends. Backups of our database are kept for a short time and then overwritten.
Maps
Profile country maps and Digital Letters maps use illustrations served directly by HelloAcross. Markers show country centres, never anyone's city or precise location. Your browser does not contact an external map or tile provider to display these maps. Digital Letters routes illustrate simulated delivery, not live location tracking.
Cookies
We only use the cookies HelloAcross needs to work: one to keep you signed in, and one that protects forms from being submitted by other websites. No tracking or advertising cookies.
Emails
We email you about account and billing matters, including email confirmation, requested password resets and adult purchase authorization.
Your choices
- See and change your profile, preferences, and notification settings at any time.
- Download your data: Account Settings → Personal data → Download gives you a file containing the supported account, profile and activity records. It is not a complete copy of every safety or internal record; contact us about additional access requests.
- Delete messages for yourself; the other person keeps their copy.
- Leave a game to stop playing. You can delete finished games from your own history; your pen pal keeps their copy. Stored game records remain part of your data download until either participant deletes their account, which removes the game and answers for both players.
- Delete your account: Account Settings → Personal data → Delete. Your profile, photo, preferences, connections, requests, blocks, notifications, and scrapbook pages are removed, and your email can be used again. Messages you sent stay with the people you wrote to, shown as from "Deleted member". Reports and moderation records may be retained for safety, including text that identifies people, as explained above.
Contact us
Questions about these pages, your data, or someone's behaviour on HelloAcross? Email safety@helloacross.com. To report a member or a letter, the Report button on it is fastest.