Data Principles
& Privacy

Last updated: June 2024

Introduction

By understanding what matters to you, Matchbox allows you to match with people who are most compatible with you from a values perspective. The following pages contain our data principles and privacy notice, which describes the information we process to make Matchbox work.

Here, you can find specifics regarding the information we collect (what we collect, how we collect it, and how we use it), how we protect that information, whether or not we share that information, and how you can manage information about you. We also outline how participation is voluntary for Matchbox—and what you can count on when you participate, as a result.

When we use the terms “Marriage Pact”, “we”, “us”, or “our” in this Privacy Notice, we are referring to The Marriage Pact, Inc. When we use the term “Matchbox”, we are referring to the web application that posts or links to this Privacy Notice.

What kinds of information do we collect?

We collect a few types of information from you as part of your participation in Matchbox. First and foremost, when you submit the Matchbox questionnaire, your responses comprise a few types of data that we collect from you directly:

  • Contact information: we ask you to fill out your name and phone number.
  • Demographic data: we may ask you to answer some questions about what groups you’re a part of in the broader population. This may include information like your gender identity, your sexual orientation, or your age.
  • Values data: we ask you to answer a series questions, covering matters of principle and preference, on a scale of 1–7.

While you use Matchbox, we may collect limited, anonymous analytics data, including your IP address and whether or not you take certain actions our website. Note: These analytics are kept separate from responses that you submit for Matchbox events, and we use custom-built collection scripts to ensure we collect only as much data as we need. In order to protect your privacy, we stay away from analytics platforms run by big ad-tech companies (read: no Google Analytics, no Facebook button).

Finally, after you participate in Matchbox, we may ask you to answer questions to provide feedback data—this might include your thoughts and comments on the match we gave you, or it could include your feedback on other experiences you have as part of Matchbox.

How do we collect this information?

This information is all received via official Matchbox questionnaires on match.box. Your answers are only recorded when you hit “Submit” at the end of the form.

How do we use this information?

Contact information helps us communicate with you—most importantly, to let you know who your match is. When matches are announced, both you and your match may simultaneously receive each other’s contact information. We may share your contact information with our authentication provider, Auth0, and our messaging provider, Twilio, in order to verify your identity and send you messages.

We use demographic data principally for matching. For example, we allow participants to express preferences on the gender identity of their match. We may also use participants’ demographic data in statistical analyses, for example, to understand whether our questions are free from bias.

We use values data for matching—it allows us to predict whether you align with a prospective match on your fundamental principles and your deeply held values.

We use analytics data to improve the design of Matchbox. Understanding how and why you participate helps us make the experience better for you and for others.

We use feedback data to improve the design of Matchbox. Understanding how and why you participate helps us make the experience better for you and for others.

We do not share your information.

How is this information protected?

Because there are sensitive questions involved here, privacy is extremely important. We’ve worked hard to design privacy into our systems anywhere and everywhere we can.

At a high level: all data is kept encrypted. No human reads individual participants’ answers to make matches, and our algorithm makes matches using a completely anonymized version of the required data; randomized unique identifiers for each participant take the place of any personally identifiable information.

The responses we collect from you are encrypted both in transit and at rest. Here’s how the full process looks for your data:

  1. Before you submit your responses at the end of the questionnaire, your responses exist only on your device.
  2. When you submit your responses, they travel to our servers encrypted under TLS.
  3. Your response data is written down in databases running on servers operated by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Your personally identifiable information (PII)—your name and email address—is stored in one database (“Database A”), while your question responses are stored in a physically separate database (“Database B”). Data in the two databases are correlated using randomized, unique, anonymous identifiers for each participant. Both databases are stored encrypted at rest, which means that the data on the server’s disk would be uninterpretable to anyone who doesn’t have the key. You can read about the security practices employed by AWS here.
  4. Once everyone’s responses have been collected, the host of the event requests matches from our algorithm. The matching algorithm receives only the anonymized data from Database B, and matches participants based on their anonymous unique IDs. The resulting matches are stored in Database B, still using only anonymous IDs.
  5. When we email everybody their matches, we use participants’ unique identifiers to re-combine the anonymous computed matches in Database B with the user info from Database A, so that we can tell everyone who their match is. We don’t write down this de-anonymized match data anywhere—we use it in-memory to compose a message to each participant, and we upload those emails to Twilio, our messaging provider, to send to each of you (read about Sendgrid’s security policies here).

We also take care with the un-sexy parts of security that are still important—for example, all of our accounts use long and unique passphrases, and are protected by multi-factor authentication everywhere possible.

We do not share this information

We will never sell information about you. And beyond sharing contact information with your match, we will never share any of your responses in a way that could let you be individually identified by it. See “Your privacy is not for sale” in “Principles”, below, for more on this.

Note: Your name and phone number may be shared with your match when you’re matched with someone.

Note: We lean on service providers for critical infrastructure like sending emails and text messages, and for operating our servers. That means that, as part of running Matchbox, those infrastructure providers will necessarily handle your data on our behalf. We transmit information to and from these service providers in encrypted form, and all data are stored encrypted at rest. Take a look at “How is this information protected?” to learn more.

How can I manage information about me?

Your question responses are recorded when you submit them. If at any time you’d like to delete your information, please send an email to hello@match.box with the subject line “MATCHBOX: DATA DELETION”.

Principles

Participation is voluntary.

Participating in Matchbox is entirely voluntary, and you may withdraw from the event at any point.

Your privacy is not for sale.

We won’t sell access to you (or your attention) to advertisers. We will never allow the data you share with us to be given to advertisers—your Marriage Pact data will never be brokered nor sold. We won’t correlate your responses with information about you from third parties, and we won’t give third parties access to Marriage Pact information to correlate with external data about you. This means, for example, you won’t get targeted ads based on your answers to our questions.

Who We Are

The Marriage Pact was first created in fall 2017 as part of a class project for ECON136: Market Design, at Stanford University. That fall, 58% of everyone at Stanford participated. The next year, 65%. The next, 71%. As of May 2024, a Marriage Pact has now taken place at 62 schools, with more than 500,000 people participating.

Today, the Marriage Pact is maintained by a small (but growing) team based in New York City. Matchbox is among the first new experiences created by the Marriage Pact team. We hope it will be a fun way to create memorable experiences and meaningful connections between people.

Closing Words

We’ve outlined the data policies above because we think it’s the right thing to do. It is our best-faith effort to do the right thing! If you have questions about any of this, you can DM us on Instagram @matchbox.party or email us at hello@match.box.