Law Enforcement Guidelines

WHO TO SERVE

Hush is operated by Hush. LLC, a United States company. Send legal process, preservation demands and emergency requests to legal@hushdate.app. Include the requesting agency, the name and badge or ID of the requesting officer, a return address at the agency, and the legal basis for the request. We acknowledge receipt and will tell you if a request is defective rather than letting it sit.

WHAT PROCESS IS REQUIRED

Basic subscriber records require a subpoena. Non-content records require a court order or a subpoena, depending on the category. The contents of communications — messages and images — require a search warrant issued on probable cause. We do not provide content in response to a subpoena.

WHAT WE ACTUALLY HOLD

Hush is built to keep as little as possible, so this list is short on purpose. Available records may include: the phone number used to sign in; the chosen display name; the verified date of birth; an approximate location, stored only as the centre of a cell roughly three miles across; profile photos; messages and their metadata (sender, recipient, time, type); and records of consent and account actions.

WHAT DOES NOT EXIST, AND CANNOT BE PRODUCED

No amount of process will produce these, because they are never collected or are destroyed by design:

— Face scans and identity documents. Age verification is performed by an independent provider. Hush receives a date of birth and a confirmation, never the selfie, never the ID image, and never the name or document number on it.
— Precise coordinates. Location is reduced to an approximate cell on the user's device before it is ever transmitted. Exact GPS is never sent to us and is not in our systems.
— Payment card details. Purchases are processed by Apple and Google; we receive only whether an entitlement is active.
— Message content past its retention window. See below.

RETENTION, AND WHY TIMING MATTERS

Content on Hush is deliberately short-lived. Chats expire, and images burn after viewing. Server-side, media enters an encrypted safety hold for 30 days — so that abuse can be reported after the fact and illegal content preserved — and is then permanently destroyed.

If you may need content, send a preservation request immediately. We honour valid preservation demands and will hold the specified records while process is obtained. Once material has passed the retention window and been destroyed, it cannot be recovered by us or by anyone else.

What outlives the content itself: one-way content fingerprints (hashes), the record that a check was run, sender/recipient/time records, consent and acceptance records, and account action logs. These let us confirm that something existed and who exchanged it, even when the material itself is gone.

EMERGENCY DISCLOSURE

Where there is an emergency involving imminent danger of death or serious physical injury, we will review a request without a warrant and may disclose what is necessary to address it. Mark the subject line EMERGENCY, describe the nature of the emergency, and state what information is needed and why delay would cause harm. These are prioritised over all other correspondence.

CHILD SAFETY

We report apparent child sexual abuse material to NCMEC as federal law requires, preserve the associated material and account records, and ban the accounts involved. Once an image has been identified and banned, its fingerprint prevents that image being uploaded again anywhere on Hush. Agencies following up on a NCMEC CyberTipline report should reference the report number.

NOTICE TO USERS

Our default is to notify a user before disclosing their information, so they may seek to challenge it. We will not notify where we are legally prohibited from doing so, or where we believe notice would create a risk of harm to a child or to someone in danger.

These guidelines describe our general practice. They are not a waiver of any objection, nor consent to jurisdiction, and nothing here creates an obligation beyond what the law requires.