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Privacy statement

Which data Matched by Barry keeps about you, why, for how long, who gets to see it and what you can do about it yourself.

Version
v1.0.0
Status
In force since 11 September 2026.
Last updated
15 October 2026

1. Who we are and how to reach us

Matched by Barry is a service of Neutral BV, a private limited company under Belgian law. Its registered office is at Haringrodestraat 54, 2018 Antwerp, and it is entered in the register of legal entities of Antwerp, Antwerp division. Its company and VAT number is BE 0833.158.140.

Neutral BV decides why and how your data is processed, and is therefore the controller within the meaning of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). You can reach us at support@matchedbybarry.com.

2. What Matched by Barry is not

This service is not a medical, psychological, support or emergency service.

We do not follow your conversation live and we cannot call for help on your behalf. What you write does pass an automated check. That check looks for one thing: signs involving minors. It does not read how you are doing, it makes no diagnosis and it alerts no one. If you need urgent help, call 112.

Nobody follows the chat on the website live either. A team member can read such a conversation afterwards, to correct a wrong answer or to assess a signal from the automated check (section 10.1).

If you are worried about yourself or about someone else, use the report button. A team member reads what you report.

We do not verify the identity of our members and we run no background checks.

3. Which data we process

We process the data you provide yourself and the data that arises when you use the service. If you do not give us the data below, we cannot deliver the service.

  1. Account data: your email address, your name, your language, your country and your sign‑ins.
  2. Profile data: your age, your home base with a search radius around it, your languages, who you are, who you are attracted to and what you are looking for.
  3. Photos: the photo you upload, the automated assessment of it and the portrait made from it.
  4. What you tell Barry: your messages, his replies and what he notes about you from them.
  5. What you ask in the chat on the website: your questions, Barry's answers and how the conversation went, without your name or your IP address; beside the order screen it is linked to your account (section 10.1).
  6. Data about suggestions and matches: the suggestions you received, your answers to them and the messages you send in a match.
  7. Payment data: your plan, your payments and your invoices.
  8. The safety trail: what the automated check noticed, and the reports and blocks between members.
  9. Technical data: your sessions with your IP address and a description of your device, error reports and logs.

4. Sensitive data

Your gender and your sexual orientation are sensitive data. So are the sensitive things you share yourself in the conversation, such as your health, your religion, your origin or your political opinions.

We process these only with your explicit consent, which we ask for separately at the start (Article 9(2)(a) GDPR). Without that consent Barry cannot search. You can withdraw it as easily as you gave it. Withdrawing takes effect for the future and does not affect what happened before.

5. What we use them for, and on what ground

  1. Delivering the service: your account, your profile, your conversation with Barry, the suggestions and the matches. Ground: the performance of our contract with you (Article 6(1)(b) GDPR).
  2. Having your photo assessed automatically, so that Barry puts you forward to people who match you in looks. Ground: our legitimate interest in suggestions you both say yes to (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR). If you object, we stop the assessment, erase what it produced and put you forward without it.
  3. Answering your questions in the chat on the website, keeping that chat safe and within its limits, and improving the answers. Ground: our legitimate interest, and yours, in answering a question you ask yourself before you decide whether to use the service (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR). If you ask it beside the order screen, with your account, the ground is the step you take yourself before you buy a plan (Article 6(1)(b) GDPR).
  4. Using sensitive data so that Barry can search and make suggestions. Ground: your explicit consent (Article 9(2)(a) GDPR).
  5. Taking payment for your plan and for anything you buy on top, drawing up your invoices and keeping our books. Ground: our contract, and for the invoice and the bookkeeping a legal obligation (Article 6(1)(c) GDPR).
  6. Securing the service and our members, including the protection of minors: the automated check, reports, blocks, fraud prevention and our logs. Ground: our legitimate interest in a safe service and in the protection of other members (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR).
  7. Sending you the emails and notifications the service needs. Ground: our contract.
  8. Letting you know that your plan is ending. If no next plan is lined up, about a week before the end we send you at most one email, one push notification and one message from Barry (only if you can answer him in the conversation). If you have asked us to delete your account, you get none of the three. Once your plan has ended, one more email follows. Ground: our contract.
  9. Getting in touch with you again on our own initiative when you have not been around for a long time. Ground: our legitimate interest in reaching out one more time to a member who has stopped using the service (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR).
  10. Keeping track of how the service is used. For that we use only internal numbers (of your account, a suggestion, a match or a payment) and fixed values and counts about what happened or what you chose. That way we see how long your plan runs, whether it was an extension and whether a new plan followed once it ended. Your name, your email address and what you write are never part of it, and no cookie is involved. Ground: our legitimate interest in knowing how the service is used (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR).

6. Who gets to see your data

If Barry puts you forward to another member, that member sees the data that is on the suggestion. If you say yes to a suggestion, we let that member know. If you say no, that member is not told.

Your data also goes to the kinds of recipients below. Most of them work under a processing agreement and only on our instructions. Four of them do not. The payment service provider has its own duties around payments, fraud and money laundering. Our hosting partner decides for itself about the usage and connection data it keeps about its own service. The sign-in service you can log in with and your browser's push service also have a say of their own in what happens with that data.

  1. our own staff, in so far as their role requires it, in Belgium;
  2. suppliers of hosting, storage and infrastructure, in the European Union (the app and the database run in Frankfurt) and in part in the United States;
  3. suppliers that process our error reports, in the European Union;
  4. a supplier that turns the place you give us into coordinates, in the European Union;
  5. suppliers of AI services, in the European Union and in the United States;
  6. a payment service provider, in the European Union;
  7. email suppliers, in the European Union, in Switzerland and in the United States;
  8. a supplier that checks photos for inappropriate content, in the European Union;
  9. suppliers that record how the service is used, in the European Union and in the United States;
  10. the sign-in service you can log in with and your browser's push service, in the European Union or in the United States, depending on the service you use;
  11. police, judicial authorities and supervisory authorities, when the law obliges us to hand over data or when we have to report a suspicion of a criminal offence. Ground: a legal obligation (Article 6(1)(c) GDPR) alongside our legitimate interest.

7. Transfers outside the European Economic Area

Some of your data is processed outside the European Economic Area. The countries where that happens are the United States and Switzerland. That is the case at least for the automatic assessment of your photo and for the portrait made from it: that processing takes place in the United States today.

For Switzerland, the European Commission has decided that the country offers an adequate level of protection. Transfers there rest on that decision.

For the United States there is no such decision in general. If the recipient has joined the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, the transfer rests on the decision the European Commission took for that framework. If it has not, the transfer rests on the European Commission's standard contractual clauses.

If you want a copy of the safeguards that apply to a transfer, ask for it at support@matchedbybarry.com. We send it to you without the commercial terms it contains.

8. How long we keep data

We keep your data for as long as your account exists, apart from data we clear earlier because we no longer need it. If you delete your account, we erase your profile, your photos, your conversation with Barry and your messages, apart from what we must or may keep for the reasons below. If a recipient processes that data for its own purposes, for example after a safety report, that recipient decides for itself how long it keeps it.

For your invoices and your accounting records the law sets the period. We keep your invoices and the payment data that belong to them for at least ten years, counting from 1 January after the year of the invoice, because VAT law requires it. We keep our other accounting records for at least seven years.

Anything else we keep for longer, we keep only for these reasons. Because we have to be able to show that we asked for your consent and your confirmations. Because a trail protects another member, or allows us to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim (Article 17(3)(e) and Article 9(2)(f) GDPR). And because we have to be able to account for what the automated check did. So that safety trail also stays when you delete your account.

If your account was stopped for safety reasons and erased afterwards, one further thing stays behind: an irreversible fingerprint of your email address, so that we recognise that address when it signs up again. Ground: our legitimate interest in keeping out those we removed for safety reasons.

We keep a conversation in the chat on the website for thirty days. After that we delete it, unless the automated check noticed a signal involving minors in it that has not been looked at yet: then it stays until a team member has done so. The signal itself is then kept like the safety trail above, without your question. A conversation beside the order screen also goes with your account, if that comes first.

9. Automated decisions about you

Suggestions come about fully automatically. No person looks at them before a suggestion appears on your screen, so a machine decides who you are put forward to and who you are not.

A pair first has to pass a number of checks that must hold in both directions: age, gender, distance, a shared spoken language, and whether either of you has blocked the other. The assessment a model gave your photo also helps decide who you get to see. The AI transparency page goes into that further.

What goes into it: your profile data, your preferences, your photo and what you told Barry yourself. What you can change about that yourself: your search radius, your age range, who you are looking for, your languages, your photo, whether you turn on Sapio mode and whether your photo is assessed.

Such a fully automated decision is allowed because it is necessary in order to perform our contract (Article 22(2)(a) GDPR), and for the sensitive data on the ground of your explicit consent. You may ask us to have a decision reviewed by a person, you may give your point of view and you may contest the outcome: email support@matchedbybarry.com.

10. That you are talking to an AI

Barry is an AI chat and says so in the conversation. The AI transparency page goes into that in more depth.

10.1. Chat on the website

On our website and beside the order screen you can ask Barry questions about the service: how it works, what it costs, what happens to your data and how safe it is. You do not need an account for that. Barry answers with what we gave him about the service. He sees no member data, and he does not use what you tell him there to get to know you or to search for you.

Of such a conversation we keep your questions, Barry's answers, when it took place and whether that was on the website or beside the order screen, the language and how it ended. We keep no name, no email address and no IP address with it, and we set no cookie of our own for it. If you ask your question beside the order screen, the conversation is linked to your account.

To count how many questions you ask in a day, on the website we turn your IP address and the date into a code from which that address cannot be read; beside the order screen we count per account. That code exists only in our counters and disappears after two days. On the website, before the first question of each conversation, your browser passes a bot check (section 11), which also sees your IP address for that purpose.

What you type goes to our supplier of AI services in the United States (section 7) and through the automated check from section 2. If you mention something sensitive about yourself in a question, such as who you are attracted to, your religion or your health, we do not use it to get to know you: it goes into no profile and is not used to search for you. It stays with the conversation and goes with it, except in a test question as described below.

A team member can read a conversation afterwards, to correct a wrong answer or to assess a signal from the automated check. That is possible only with a reason, and we record who read what. If Barry gave a wrong answer, a team member can rewrite your question into a test question, without names or contact details. We keep that test question after the thirty days as well, to check that Barry answers that question correctly from then on.

Because we keep no name, address or account with a conversation on the website, we cannot find it on a request without data we do not have. If you tell us when you asked what, we look it up and handle your request. If that does not work, we cannot carry out access, rectification, erasure, restriction and portability for that conversation (Article 11(2) GDPR). After thirty days it is gone in any case. A conversation beside the order screen is part of the copy of your data you can ask us for.

11. Security, cookies and your browser

We take appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect your data.

We use only cookies and storage that are needed to deliver the service. The law does not require consent for these, but it does require that we explain them.

  1. A session cookie from our sign-in layer keeps you signed in: thirty days. That same layer sets short-lived technical cookies that make signing in possible.
  2. Cookies remember which language you chose: one year.
  3. In your browser's storage: your notification settings and how you left the screen.
  4. The bot check on the sign-in page, and before the first question of each conversation in the chat on the website, sets its own cookies, on its own domain. On the website it loads only when you open the chat. Those cookies are outside our control.
  5. The chat on the website stores nothing in your browser. The conversation lives only in the page's memory: reloading the page starts a new conversation.
  6. On the public pages we count visits and page speed without cookies, through our hosting partner: a temporary tally per visit, without a cookie, name or account, that is discarded within a day. There is no tracker in it and no advertising network.

12. Your rights

You have the rights below. We handle your request within one month of receiving it. If your request is complicated, we may extend that period by two months, and we tell you so within the first month (Article 12 GDPR). You exercise these rights in the app or through support@matchedbybarry.com.

You may object at any time to a processing that rests on our legitimate interest, for reasons connected with your particular situation. If your objection is about the messages we send on our own initiative to get in touch with you again, we stop them as soon as you ask, without you having to give a reason. We keep sending the messages that your account, your payment and the safety of the service need, for as long as you have an account.

  1. Access: you may know which data we process about you and get a copy of it. If you ask us who received your data, we name those recipients.
  2. Rectification: you may have incorrect data corrected and incomplete data completed.
  3. Erasure: you may have your data erased, apart from what we must or may keep on the grounds in section 8.
  4. Restriction: you may have a processing halted while there is a discussion about it.
  5. Portability: you may receive the data you provided yourself in a common machine‑readable format.
  6. Objection: see the paragraph above.
  7. Withdrawing your consent: for the sensitive data in section 4, with effect for the future.
  8. Human intervention in an automated decision, with your point of view and your contestation: see section 9.
  9. Complaint: you may always lodge a complaint with the Data Protection Authority, Drukpersstraat 35, 1000 Brussels. If you live elsewhere in the European Union, you may also go to the supervisory authority of your own country.

13. Children

Matched by Barry is for adults. You have to be 18 or older to have an account. We ask for your date of birth and refuse anyone younger.

The chat on the website does not ask your age. If you say there that you are under 18, Barry tells you the service is for adults and closes the conversation.

14. Changes to this statement

The version and the date are at the top of this page. If something substantial changes, we raise the version and adjust the date. We let you know about a change that substantially affects your rights or our processing. Changes apply only to the future.

15. When documents contradict each other

If two of our published texts contradict each other about the handling of your personal data, what is written in this Privacy statement applies. The same goes when our website, an email or Barry says something else.

This statement exists in Dutch and in English. If the two texts differ, the Dutch one prevails.

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