Law Enforcement Guidelines

These guidelines are for law enforcement agencies, regulators and other government authorities seeking member records from Orthodate. They are published so that a valid request reaches the right place in the right form and is answered quickly.

If you are a member of the public, this is the wrong page. To report a member, use the report control on their profile or in your conversation, or write to us through the contact form. If someone is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services.

Nothing on this page is a waiver of any right or objection, including objections to jurisdiction, service or scope, and nothing here is legal advice.

Orthodate is operated by Wedocore Inc., a company incorporated in the United States. Legal process must name Wedocore Inc. as the recipient — process addressed only to “Orthodate” may be rejected, as Orthodate is a trading name and not a legal person.

Email to the address above is the fastest route and is accepted for service of process where the law of the requesting jurisdiction allows it. Please send the request as a signed PDF from an official government domain and put the case or reference number in the subject line. We do not accept requests made by telephone, by social media, or from a personal email account.

We disclose member data only where we are compelled to by valid legal process, or in the emergency circumstances described in section 5. The type of process determines what we can produce.

• Basic subscriber information — such as the email address and mobile number on the account, the account creation date, and the IP address and timestamp of recent connections — requires at minimum a subpoena or an equivalent legally binding order.
• Non-content records — such as profile fields, verification status, moderation and enforcement history, subscription status, and metadata showing that two accounts exchanged messages and when — require a court order or equivalent.
• Content — the text of messages, photographs, verification selfies and profile answers — requires a search warrant issued on probable cause by a court of competent jurisdiction, or its equivalent.

Requests from outside the United States should be made through a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, letters rogatory, or another recognised channel for cross-border cooperation. We may also respond voluntarily to a foreign request where doing so is consistent with US law, international norms and our obligations to our members, but we are not obliged to, and a foreign order alone does not compel us.

Vague or overbroad requests slow everything down and may be objected to or refused. Please include all of the following.

• The issuing agency, the name and title of the requesting officer, a direct telephone number and an official email address.
• The specific account or accounts, identified by the email address, mobile number or profile URL used on Orthodate. A first name or a display name alone is not enough to identify an account.
• The precise categories of records sought, and a date range as narrow as the investigation allows.
• The statutory or legal authority relied on, and the case or reference number.
• The date by which a response is required, and any non-disclosure order, with its expiry date.

We will acknowledge a properly served request, and we will tell you if we hold no responsive records. Records are produced electronically. We do not provide real-time interception, and we cannot provide records we do not hold.

Where we believe in good faith that an emergency involving a danger of death or serious physical injury to a person requires disclosure without delay, we may disclose the information reasonably necessary to prevent that harm, consistent with 18 U.S.C. § 2702(b)(8) and (c)(4).

Mark the subject line EMERGENCY DISCLOSURE REQUEST and describe, in the body, the nature of the emergency, the person in danger, why the danger is imminent, and exactly which records would help prevent it. Send it from an official government address with the requesting officer’s name, agency and direct number. We assess every such request on its facts, and an emergency request is not a substitute for legal process once the emergency has passed.

We will preserve records pending service of valid legal process on receipt of a formal preservation request under 18 U.S.C. § 2703(f) or its equivalent. Preservation is for 90 days and may be extended once for a further 90 days on a written renewal request.

A preservation request takes a snapshot of the records that exist when we receive it. It does not disclose anything, and it does not stop the account holder from deleting their own account or content — it only preserves what we still hold. Send preservation requests to the address in section 2, identifying the account precisely.

Our policy is to notify a member before disclosing their information, so that they may seek to protect their rights, unless we are legally prohibited from doing so, or unless we believe on reasonable grounds that notice would create a risk of death or serious physical injury, of child exploitation, of human trafficking or the exploitation of a victim, or of the destruction of evidence.

If your request should not be disclosed to the member, include a non-disclosure order or cite the legal authority for that restriction, together with its duration. Where a non-disclosure order expires, we may then notify the member.

We hold far less than agencies often assume. What we collect, and why, is described in full in our Privacy Policy. Two points come up often.

• We do not conduct criminal background checks on members, and we do not hold government-issued identity documents. Photo verification produces two still images of a member’s face and a review outcome; it does not establish a legal identity.
• We do not receive or store card numbers. Payments are processed by Stripe, so financial records of a transaction must be sought from Stripe, not from us.

When a member deletes their account, the account and its content are deleted from our live systems, and encrypted backups are overwritten in the ordinary course within 30 days. After that, the data cannot be produced by us at all, whatever process is served. If you anticipate needing records, send a preservation request under section 6 promptly. This does not apply to material held under section 10, which we preserve on our own initiative and which account deletion does not release.

We respond to valid requests as quickly as we reasonably can. We are a small team, so please allow a reasonable period for a response and do not assume that a deadline shorter than two weeks can be met unless the request is an emergency under section 5.

We may seek reimbursement of the costs of responding where the law permits it, particularly for requests that are unusually broad or burdensome, and we may object to, narrow or move to quash a request that is overbroad, unduly burdensome, legally deficient or improperly served.

Orthodate has a zero-tolerance policy on human trafficking, sex trafficking, commercial sexual services, child sexual exploitation and child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and the sexual exploitation or sexual abuse of adults. These are absolutely prohibited on the service. They are not matters of degree, there is no context in which they are permitted, and a single instance ends an account permanently, without warning and without refund. The prohibition is set out in full in section 5 of our Terms & Conditions and in our Acceptable Use Policy, and it covers conduct arranged through Orthodate and carried out elsewhere, online or in person.

• Human trafficking and sex trafficking — engaging in, attempting, advertising, arranging, recruiting for, soliciting, financing or in any way furthering the trafficking of any person, including forced labour, servitude, debt bondage, and the recruitment, harbouring, transport or transfer of a person for exploitation by force, fraud, coercion or the abuse of a position of vulnerability.
• Commercial sexual services — offering, soliciting, advertising, arranging or paying for prostitution, escorting, webcam or pornographic performance, or any other sexual act or sexual content in exchange for money, goods, accommodation, employment, immigration assistance or anything else of value.
• Adult sexual exploitation and abuse — sexual coercion, sextortion, non-consensual intimate imagery and sexual deepfakes, covertly recorded sexual content, and content depicting rape, sexual assault or any sexual act to which a participant did not or could not consent.
• Child sexual exploitation and abuse — CSAM or any sexual or sexualised content involving a person under 18, whether real, drawn, animated or synthetically generated, and the sexualisation, grooming, solicitation, extortion of, or attempt to meet, a minor for a sexual purpose. Orthodate is for adults aged 18 and over.

Immediate preservation and reporting. Where we identify, or are credibly notified of, CSAM, child sexual exploitation, or human trafficking, we act on our own initiative and immediately — no legal process, preservation request or prior contact from an agency is required, and we do not wait for one. In every such case we remove the content, permanently close the accounts involved, immediately preserve the evidence, and report the matter to law enforcement and to the relevant safeguarding authority.

• Preservation. The content, account records, registration and connection logs, message metadata, device and IP data, verification images and payment references are placed in a secure, access-restricted hold the moment the matter is identified. That hold is not released by the member deleting their account or their content, and it overrides the ordinary deletion timescales in section 8. Material reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children is retained in line with 18 U.S.C. § 2258A(h) and for as long as an investigating authority asks us to hold it.
• Reporting child sexual exploitation and CSAM. We report without delay to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) through the CyberTipline, as required by 18 U.S.C. § 2258A, and to law enforcement. Reports to NCMEC include the content and the associated account, connection and identifying information permitted by that section.
• Reporting human trafficking. We report without delay to law enforcement and, in the United States, to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, and we notify the equivalent competent authority or safeguarding body in the country concerned where the matter arises outside the United States.
• Cooperation. We treat follow-up from an agency on a matter we have reported as a priority, we respond to properly served process on it as quickly as we are able, and we will not give notice to the member where doing so would risk the safety of a victim, alert a suspect, or lead to the destruction of evidence.

We do not review this content ourselves beyond what is strictly necessary to confirm it, preserve it and report it, and we do not forward, copy or redistribute it other than to NCMEC and the authorities handling the matter.

If you are not an investigator and need to report something: if a child is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services first. In the United States, suspected child sexual exploitation can be reported to NCMEC’s CyberTipline at report.cybertip.org or on 1-800-843-5678, and suspected human trafficking to the National Human Trafficking Hotline on 1-888-373-7888. Please also report the account to us, using the report control on the profile or in the conversation, or through the contact form, so that we can preserve the evidence and act.