Why We Publish This
Most companies keep their ethics internal — a slide deck, a values wall, a paragraph on a careers page. We publish ours because we want to be accountable to you, not just to ourselves. If we ever violate one of these commitments, you will have this page to point at.
These are not aspirational. They are structural. The design enforces them.
The Charter
Our success metric is departures, not sessions. We do not want inactive profiles. We do not want people here out of habit. We want people here because they are ready, and gone because they found what they came for. Pause mode hides your profile while keeping active correspondences open — no penalty, no countdown. Offboarding is a single screen: “It worked.” Users who delete are never emailed to return.
No “who viewed you this week” metrics. No “X people wrote to you” notifications designed to provoke anxiety. No ranking of profiles by desirability score. The card sequence is ordered by recency of profile activity, disclosed plainly in your settings. Nothing in this app is optimised to increase time spent inside it.
No daily card limits that punish you for not returning. No artificial scarcity — we will never tell you “last chance to write to her.” No streak mechanics. No push notifications timed to anxiety peaks. No re-engagement emails after a period of silence. You are never made to feel that not using this app costs you something. It doesn’t.
Profiles not active within three weeks are automatically paused and hidden from the Find screen. You are notified once: “Your profile is paused — tap to resume when you’re ready.” No penalty. No data lost. Bot detection runs continuously. This is reported to you as a trust signal in the app: “Every person you see was active this week.”
A plain-language explanation, available in Settings, describes exactly how profiles are ordered and who sees yours. No A/B testing of ranking without disclosure. If the ordering system ever changes, you are told in advance, not after. We do not run experiments on human connection without telling the humans.
When you tap “Not Interested,” the person you declined sees nothing. No notification. No “X passed on you.” The card simply does not reappear. The privacy of that decision is itself an ethical commitment: rejection is between a person and their own conscience, not a broadcast. A first message that goes unanswered for 30 days closes silently. Neither person is notified.
The design is the ethics. We don’t ask you to trust our intentions. We ask you to look at the product and see whether the commitments are visible in it. If they aren’t, write to us. We mean that.
Who This App Is Not For
Clarity about who an app is not built for is a form of respect toward the people it is built for.
Wildfire is not designed for people who approach dating as a numbers game, or who are not ready to invest real effort in another person. This is not a judgment of their worth. It is an honest description of a mismatch. The writing requirement and the Six Chapters profile system make volume-browsing genuinely tedious. The design is the door policy.
Questions or Concerns
If you ever believe we have violated one of these commitments, write to us at ethics@wildfiredating.com. We will respond, and we will take it seriously.