Version 2026-09-25.8. You must accept these before an account is created and before you can send anything to anyone.
Awake does not conduct criminal background checks on its members.
That statement is required, in those words and in that formatting, by the internet dating safety statutes of Texas (Bus. & Com. Code ch. 106), New Jersey, New York, Illinois and Connecticut, which require any dating service that does not screen its members to say so plainly. We do not screen. We also do not verify that anyone is who they say they are.
Awake is an online technology service. It is software: it shows you who is in the room at the same time as you and lets you talk to them. That is the whole of what it does.
It is not a matchmaking service, an introduction agency or a dating consultancy. It does not select, screen, vet, endorse, recommend or introduce anybody to anybody. It does not promise that you will meet anyone, and it takes no part in, and no responsibility for, anything you go on to arrange. Who you talk to and who you meet are your decisions, and the person at the other end is a stranger whose account nobody has checked.
One thing that description does not do is change which laws apply. The internet dating safety statutes named above apply to what a service does for members in those states, and the UK's Online Safety Act applies to services that let users talk to each other. Neither makes an exception for calling yourself technology, which is why the disclosure at the top of this page is given rather than argued around.
While this service is new, the room contains example profiles so that a first visitor can see what a full room looks like instead of an empty page. They are not real people and nobody is pretending otherwise:
They will be removed once there are enough real people in the room. If you would rather see only real people, the count tells you how many there are.
This service is for adults. By accepting these terms you confirm you are at least 18 years old.
What we actually do to check that: we ask, and you tick a box. We do not currently operate photo-ID checks, facial age estimation, credit-card checks or open-banking checks. Under the UK's Online Safety Act 2023, Ofcom's guidance treats dating services as user-to-user services owing highly effective age assurance, and a self-declared tick does not meet that standard. This service therefore is not suitable for public operation in the UK as it stands, and is run as a private demonstration only.
These are required safety notifications, and they are also simply true.
Deliberately very little. The design of the product is the privacy policy.
| Your messages | Not kept. A conversation exists only while it is open. Closing it deletes it for both people, and it is deleted anyway when either of you leaves the room. There is no inbox, no archive and no transcript to be read later by anyone, including us. |
| Voice notes | Deleted with the conversation they were sent in, file and all. |
| Your photograph | Kept while your account exists. Cropped in your browser before it is sent, which also removes the location data cameras write into image files. A person looks at it before you appear in the room — see below. |
| Your email address | Required, because it is how you get back into your account on another device and the only way we could ever tell you something happened. It is never shown to anybody in the room and never given to anyone else. You are sent one message to confirm it is yours; until you click that link, nothing else can be sent to it. Deleting your account deletes the address. |
| Being emailed | A separate tick box, and it starts unticked. Having an account and agreeing to be written to are two different things, and we will not treat one as the other. It covers only being told that somebody wants to talk to you — there is no newsletter and nothing is sold to anybody. You can turn it off whenever you like without losing the account. |
| Sign-in passphrase | Optional, and worth setting: without one your account lives only in the browser you made it in. The passphrase is not kept at all — what is stored is a slow one-way hash of it, which cannot be turned back into what you typed. There is currently no way to reset it. Lose it and the account is gone. |
| Name, age, one line | Kept while your account exists, and shown to anyone in the room. |
| Country, area, postcode | Kept while your account exists. Used only to work out who is near you. Never shown to other members as text. |
| Man or woman | Kept while your account exists. Used by the matching buttons. |
| How often you have talked | A number per pair of people. No record of what was said, only that it happened. |
| Answers to the question | Not private. The question in the room is a group conversation: everyone inside the same scope reads your answer — your postcode, your area, your country or everyone, depending on which question you answered. It is not kept either: a new question arrives about every twelve minutes and the answers to the old one are deleted with it. |
| Bumps | A bump says "I would like to talk to you", and the person you bump sees that it was you — your name and your picture, in a list only they can open. That is the point of pressing it. Everyone else sees only the number of people currently bumping them, shown on their picture; nobody but the person bumped ever sees who. A bump lasts thirty minutes and is then gone: it is a record of who wants to talk to somebody now, deliberately not a lasting count of how often anybody has been fancied. Pressing it again takes it back straight away. |
| Your points | One point for each question you have joined, however much you said about it. Kept while your account exists, and shown to other members next to your name. It is a count of how often you turned up. |
| Whether you are here | A timestamp, refreshed while your tab is open, forgotten 45 seconds after you close it. |
Using a dating service says something about your sex life or sexual orientation. Under UK and EU data protection law that is special category data (Article 9), which may only be processed with your explicit consent. Ticking the box is that consent. You can withdraw it at any time by deleting your account, which removes your profile and photograph.
Awake puts one question about dating to everybody in a scope at a time, and anyone there can answer it. Four are running at once — one for your postcode, one for your area, one for your country and one for everybody — and which you see follows the how near buttons. Treat it as a room you are speaking in front of, not a message to one person: put nothing in an answer you would not say out loud to every stranger within that scope. The same rules below apply to answers as to anything else here.
Breaking any of these ends your access without notice.
Every new or changed photograph waits until a person has looked at it. Until then you are not in the room and nobody can see you. There is no automatic check worth having here: software can tell you a face is present, and cannot tell you whose it is, how old they are, or whether the picture belongs on a dating site. So somebody looks.
That person is whoever runs this installation. They see your picture, your name, your age, your one line and roughly where you are, and they can let it in or refuse it. There is no moderation team and no response time — on a quiet day a photograph may wait a while, and that is the honest cost of checking them at all.
Block is on every person, under their picture. It works both ways at once: you stop seeing them and they stop seeing you, anything open between you is deleted, and neither of you can message or bump the other. They are not told that you blocked them — from where they are standing you have simply left the room. You can undo it.
Report is beside it. It asks what happened, blocks the person at the same time, and sends the report to whoever runs this installation. Nobody else sees it.
A report keeps a copy of what the reported person said to you.
That is the one exception to everything above: this service deletes what is said, and a report is where it does not, because a report with no evidence behind it cannot be acted on. It is kept until it has been dealt with, and it is visible only to the operator.
What this still is not: there is no moderation team and no promise of a response time. One person reads these, when they read them. If somebody is in danger, tell the police — this is a report button, not an emergency service.
Awake runs on a private machine on a local network. It is not a public service, it has no company behind it, and it makes no promise of availability, security or continuity. There are no passwords: a token stored in your browser is the whole of your identity here, so anyone with access to your device has access to your account. Do not put anything here you would mind a stranger reading.
You may see what is held about you, correct it, or delete it. Deleting your account removes your profile, your photograph and your presence. The counts of how often you spoke to people are deleted with it.