Privacy policy

Who this applies to. ByahMe is the data controller for everything described below. Write to support@byahme.com for any request about your own data, and to complaints@byahme.com to report somebody else's conduct.

1. What we collect

You give us: name, date of birth, gender, height, marital status, children, city, area, country, residency status, religion, sect, biradari, mother tongue, education, occupation, employer type, income band, family background, partner preferences, your About text, photographs, a mobile or WhatsApp number, an email address, and a guardian's name and number if you nominate one.

We do not collect: CNIC, passport or any other identity document. There is nowhere on this site to upload one, and we have no facility to store one.

When you pay, we also hold: the reference the payment provider gives the transaction, the amount and the date. Card and wallet details are entered on the provider's own secure page and never reach our servers, so we hold no card number at any time. There is nowhere on this site to upload a receipt and we never ask you for one.

We record automatically: your IP address at registration and at payment, the requests you send, accept and decline, logins and failed login attempts, photograph uploads and views, and administrative actions taken on your account. We do not log the pages you browse or the searches you run.

What we remove from what you give us: every photograph is re-encoded before it is written to disk. That discards the EXIF metadata a phone attaches to a picture — including the GPS coordinates of where it was taken, which for most people is their own home — along with the camera model, serial number and timestamp. Images are also scaled down, because nothing on this site displays a photograph larger than it needs.

2. Photographs and contact numbers

This is the part that matters most, so it is stated exactly, including what we do not do.

• Photographs are stored outside the public web directory. There is no URL that serves them directly.
• The only route to a photograph is a script that checks, on every single request, whether you are the owner or hold an accepted request from that member. Anything else is refused.
• They are not encrypted at rest. They are file-permission restricted and unreachable from the web, and we would rather describe that accurately than use a word that sounds stronger than what we do.
• No photograph is released to another member except on your explicit acceptance of a specific request.
• Unlocked photographs are watermarked with the viewing member's ID, so a leaked screenshot traces back to whoever leaked it.
• Your mobile number is never displayed on your profile. It is released only to a member whose request you have accepted. If you nominated a guardian, their name and number are released alongside yours rather than instead of it, so give a number you are willing to be reached on.
• Every unlock and every view of a photograph is recorded in our audit log. That log is ours, not yours: you cannot see who has looked, and we will not pretend you can. What you can do, at any time, is take the access back — open Requests and press Remove access on any request you accepted.
• Our staff cannot release your photographs or your number to anyone. There is no administrative override, and no paid tier that bypasses this.

3. Why we process your data

• To create and display your profile to other members — performance of our contract with you.
• To operate the request and matching system — performance of our contract with you.
• To confirm your email address, and to prevent fraud and abuse — legitimate interest.
• To take payment, and to keep the payment records that tax law requires us to keep — contract, and legal obligation.
• To send service notifications; marketing only where you opted in — legitimate interest, and consent.
• To respond to reports, complaints and lawful requests from authorities — legal obligation.

Some of what you publish is, in legal terms, special category data — religion, sect and health-adjacent detail you may write about yourself. You provide it deliberately in order to be matched, and it is processed on the basis of your explicit consent, given when you publish the profile. You can withdraw that consent by deleting the field or the profile.

4. What is verified, and what is not

Two separate things happen, in this order, and they are not the same. First, automatically: we send a link to the email address you registered with, and clicking it is what makes your profile live. Second, afterwards: a rishta consultant reads what you have published, and reads it again when you change it substantially, for consistency, duplication and misuse. That review looks only at what you have already chosen to publish: it collects nothing additional about you, requires no document from you, and adds no data to your record beyond any correction you agree to. Those two together are the whole of what we check, and neither is a guarantee of anybody’s identity or background.

Your mobile number is collected because it is the thing released when you accept a request — but it is never verified. We do not check employment, income, education, marital status, or identity. We will not sell you a badge implying we have investigated anybody, because we have not. Verification is yours to do, and our guide to verifying a proposal sets out how.

5. Who we share with

We do not sell, rent or trade member data, and we never share it with advertisers, marketing companies or other matrimonial services.

• Our hosting provider, which stores the data and sends our email on our instruction, and uses it for nothing of its own.
• Google, in two limited ways worth naming rather than hiding. The typefaces on this site load from Google Fonts, so Google sees the IP address of anyone who opens a page. And if we ever switch on the anti-robot check at registration, that will tell Google the same. No member data is sent to Google in either case.
• A payment provider, if and when card payment is switched on. It is not at present, so no third party is involved in payments today.
• Law enforcement, where legally compelled.

Other members see only what your profile shows, plus whatever you release by accepting a request.

6. How long we keep data

• Active profiles: for as long as your account exists.
• Accounts left unused: an account not opened for six months is deleted automatically, with its photographs. You are emailed a warning before that happens.
• Deleted profiles: removed immediately, not within 30 days. The moment you confirm the deletion, your biodata, your photographs and your whole request history are gone from our servers. We keep only a note that the profile reference existed and the date it closed, holding no name, photograph or contact detail.
• Payment records — the reference, amount and date: 7 years, as tax law requires. These survive the deletion of a profile, because a business must be able to account for money it has received.
• Audit logs — logins, requests, photograph views, administrative actions: kept for as long as the service operates. We would rather say that than publish a deletion schedule we do not yet run.
• Identity documents: none held. If you email one to us by mistake, it is deleted on receipt and not filed.

7. Your rights

You may access, correct, export or delete your data, withdraw consent, object to processing, or complain to a supervisory authority. Members in the UK and the EU hold these rights under the UK GDPR and the GDPR; we extend the same rights to every member, wherever they live, because operating two standards would be worse for everybody.

Most of it is self-service, and named here exactly as it appears on screen. Edit your profile on My profile. Take a released photograph or number back with Remove access on Requests. Disappear from every search with the Show my profile in search results checkbox on My profile. And delete everything yourself with Delete my profile under Settings — you do not need to ask us, and you do not need to wait for us. For anything else, email support@byahme.com and we will respond within 30 days. If you are in the UK you may also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office; if you are in the EU, to your national data protection authority.

8. Automated decisions

Nothing on this site makes an automated decision with a legal or similarly significant effect about you. Search ordering and the rotating selections on public pages are simple sorting, not profiling, and they never decide who may contact you — only you decide that, by accepting or declining a request.

9. International transfers

Our members are worldwide and our infrastructure may store data outside your country. Where data leaves the UK or the EEA we rely on standard contractual clauses or an equivalent safeguard.

10. Cookies

We set cookies that are strictly necessary for logging in and for security, and we store a small local flag recording that you have seen the cookie notice. We set no advertising cookies and run no cross-site tracking of our own.

One thing we will not gloss over: the typefaces on this site are served by Google Fonts, so opening any page makes a request to Google and discloses your IP address to it. It sets no cookie and it is not something we do in order to track you, but it is a third party learning that you visited, and you are entitled to know. We intend to serve the typefaces from our own server and remove even that.

Analytics are not currently enabled on this site. If we turn them on, this page will be updated before they run, and the notice will offer a way to refuse them without losing any functionality.

11. Children

The service is for adults aged 18 and over. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18, and any such profile found is deleted immediately. If you believe a profile belongs to a minor, write to complaints@byahme.com and it will be looked at the same day.

12. Security

Data is transmitted over HTTPS. Member data and photographs are held outside the public web directory with restricted file permissions, so no address serves any of them directly. We hold no payment receipts at all: there is nowhere to upload one and the provider keeps the record of the payment itself. Passwords are stored only as a one-way hash and cannot be read back by anybody, ourselves included. Administrative access is limited to what a support task requires, and is logged. No system is perfectly secure. In the event of a breach presenting a risk to members, we will notify the affected members and the relevant authority promptly rather than quietly.

13. Changes to this policy

When this policy changes materially we will update the date at the top of the page and, for changes that affect how your data is used, tell members by email before the change takes effect.

14. Contact

Privacy questions and data requests: support@byahme.com
Reports and complaints: complaints@byahme.com

Related: Terms · Refund policy · Safety guidance · How the request system works · About us