Safety
Safe to walk into blind.
Tangent is built for the person who would never download a dating app — and who definitely doesn't want their photo circulating. So nothing on this page is a toggle to find or a promise to take on faith. It's the architecture, and it's specific on purpose.
Students only, verified
Every account is tied to a real UofT email and verified before anything else happens — no exceptions, no outsiders, and everyone is 18 or up. One account per person, as your real self: lying about student status or age is grounds for removal.
We're precise about what that proves, too: verification confirms student email, not character. That honesty is why everything else on this page exists.
Your photo stays yours
Your name, your photo, your program and prompt answers are hidden from every other user by default. They unlock for one person at a time, only on a mutual yes — after a blind conversation, or when you both tap keep-in-touch after meeting at an activity. One no, from either side, locks that reveal permanently, and nobody ever learns who voted what: a no looks identical to a vote that simply expired.
And this is enforced where it can't be bypassed. Row-level security rules inside the database itself refuse to serve your profile to anyone before a mutual yes. It isn't an interface hiding a photo — it's a database that won't hand it over.
No catalog of people
There is no grid of profiles anywhere in Tangent — nothing to browse, nothing to search, no people-you-may-know, no friend requests. Activity listings show the table and the seats left, never faces.
Chat exists only between mutual Connections — two people who both voted yes. Nobody can cold-message you, because for a stranger there is no way to find you and no door to knock on.
One-tap report and block, reviewed by a person
Reporting is one tap away inside every live session — a persistent button, right there during the conversation — and it stays available afterward, from your recent session history and from any chat. Every report is reviewed by a trained person, and the person you report is never told who filed it.
A block takes effect the instant you tap it. Any live session ends immediately, and the other side sees only a neutral ending with no attribution. The reveal locks permanently, any Connection is removed, and the two of you will never be paired, suggested, or seated at the same table again — an exclusion written into the pairing queries themselves, not filtered in afterward. Blocks are permanent, and they survive account deletion.
Your data
The safest data is data we never have
Minimization is the design stance, not a compliance word. Here is what Tangent keeps, what it deletes, and what it refuses to touch.
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Calls are never recorded
Not stored briefly, not transcribed — never captured at all. If a voice conversation is reported, review relies on session metadata and the reporter's account. The audio doesn't exist to pull.
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Text sessions are kept briefly, then erased
Messages from text sessions are retained for a short, fixed period so reports can be reviewed, then permanently deleted on schedule — by a purge job that runs automatically, not a policy that waits for someone to remember.
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Your words never enter logs or analytics
Application logs and analytics record IDs and metadata only. Message contents, names, and emails never appear in either.
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Nothing collected beyond the app
No contacts, no location, no calendar access, no advertising identifiers. Tangent works without reaching into the rest of your phone.
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Delete your account any time
Deletion completes within 30 days of your request. Safety records — blocks, bans, reveal locks — are kept so the protections other people count on don't dissolve when an account does.
Moderation
When something goes wrong
When you report, you say what happened — real categories, not one vague form:
HARASSMENT HATE SEXUAL CONTENT THREATS IMPERSONATION UNDER-18 CONCERN
Every report is reviewed by a person. During the Wednesday and Sunday windows — the hours when strangers are actually talking — trained moderators are online watching the report queue live, not checking it the next morning.
Consequences scale with severity, and the ceiling is real: serious harm — threats, sexual harassment, hate — is a ban on the first confirmed report.
Something urgent, or something the app can't capture? Write to safety@tangentsocial.com — it reaches the people who run moderation.
The rest is written down
The community guidelines everyone accepts at sign-up are public, and so are the terms and privacy policy behind them.