Dating Apps That Don't Track Your Location in 2026
It means there's no code path in the app that can ask your phone where you are — not a setting you have to find and disable, a capability that was never built. In December 2021, Norway's data protection authority fined Grindr NOK 65 million (about €6.5 million) for sharing users' precise GPS coordinates with advertising partners without valid consent Datatilsynet (2021) — proof that "we use your location to match you" isn't a hypothetical privacy cost. It's one a dating app has already paid for, in public, with a number attached.
Anketta sits at the opposite end of that spectrum, and the claim is checkable rather than promised. There's no navigator.geolocation call anywhere in the web app, no getCurrentPosition, no watchPosition — and no location-permission string in either native shell, so neither iPhone nor Android can even show the prompt. You type your city once, during signup, and that's the only geography the app ever holds — the rest of what people learn about you is whatever you choose to write.
Distance is the organizing logic of a swipe feed. Sort profiles by how close someone is and "browse" quietly becomes "browse nearby" — which is why Tinder, Bumble, Hinge and Grindr all ask for device location before you see a single match. A stack of strangers is more useful sorted by miles than sorted at random, and that sort needs a live coordinate to run.
In practice, a distance-based app asks for your location to do three specific things:
- Show a distance badge on every profile — the "3 km away" line that tells you how close someone is right now.
- Let you set or narrow a search radius — a slider that filters who appears at all, based on where you're currently standing.
- Keep both of those current — which means re-checking your GPS periodically, not just once at signup.
None of that is secret or sinister on its own; it's the mechanism a proximity feed needs to function. The problem shows up in what that same data can do in someone else's hands — its own chapter in the wider dating-app privacy landscape.
Yes, more than once, and not only through misuse — through the ordinary math of distance data itself. In 2014, security researchers at Include Security found that Tinder's API returned the distance to a match as a 64-bit number, far more precise than the "3 km away" the app displayed on screen. "The distance_mi field is a 64-bit double. That's a lot of precision that we're getting, and it's enough to do really accurate triangulation!" Include Security (2014)
Using three fake accounts positioned around a target and comparing the distances each one reported back, the researchers pinpointed a real user's location to within 100 feet — no server breach required, just the numbers the app was already sending to anyone's phone. That's the structural risk, not just a policy failure: the moment an app tells you how far away someone is, the precision of that number becomes a design decision, and getting it wrong is easy. People who work directly with survivors of stalking and coercive control describe the same pattern from the other direction.
"Technology doesn't cause stalking. However, the integration of technology into so many aspects of our lives has made it easier for stalkers to create fear and do harm." — Toby Shulruff, Senior Technology Safety Specialist, NNEDV Safety Net Project NNEDV (2017)
A distance figure on a dating profile is one small piece of that larger picture — but it's a piece an app doesn't have to hand anyone if it never computes one in the first place.
Write your first manuscript — the only thing this app tracks
By not having a distance to hand anyone. There's no radius, no "nearby" tab, no sort-by-proximity anywhere in the product — the closest thing to a location field is the city you typed once during onboarding, alongside your age range and who you're open to meeting. That field is one of the hard filters the matching system checks, the same tier as age range and gender, not a live signal it recomputes.
| Typical distance-based apps (Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Grindr) | Anketta | |
|---|---|---|
| Location permission prompt | Requested at signup | Never — no location API exists in the code |
| Distance shown on a profile | Yes, updated live | Never computed |
| Radius or distance filter | Yes, adjustable | Doesn't exist |
| What determines who you see, geographically | Your live GPS coordinate | The city you typed once |
| Updates as you travel | Yes, automatically | No — the field is frozen after onboarding |
The gap in that last row is deliberate, and worth stating plainly rather than glossing over: your city on Anketta isn't a live reading, and it also isn't something you can quietly change from your profile settings afterward. It's a declaration you make once — and from there, matching runs on what you write, not on where you are.
Yes — and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of overclaim. A city you typed is still geography; saying the app holds "no location data at all" would be false, and it's worth naming that directly rather than letting the tidier version of the claim slide by unchallenged. The real distinction isn't presence versus absence. It's declared versus tracked.
A declared fact is something you chose to state, once, and it sits there until you say otherwise. A tracked fact updates on its own, without you doing anything, every time your phone reports a new coordinate. Those are structurally different even when the underlying information — "this person is roughly in this city" — looks similar on the surface. One requires your continued, active participation to stay current. The other doesn't need you to do anything at all, which is exactly what makes it easy to forget it's happening. The same logic runs through why a manuscript on Anketta stays out of Google's index: it exists because you chose to publish it, not because something was scraped off you in the background.
Technically, yes — and pretending otherwise would be the second overclaim worth naming plainly. Every request your phone makes to any server on the internet, Anketta included, carries an IP address, and an IP address maps to a rough location the same way it does for any website you visit, dating app or not. That's not a special surveillance capability; it's how the internet's addressing works, full stop.
What that IP address doesn't do is get read, stored as a location field, or used to compute a distance, filter a radius, or sort a feed. The gap between "a server receives the same network metadata every server receives" and "an app asks your phone for coordinates and shows other people how many kilometers away you are" is the entire difference this article is about. Anketta genuinely never asks and never tracks. It would be a stretch — and a dishonest one — to also claim it somehow doesn't know which country a request came from, the way any server anywhere does.
Sometimes, and it's a real trade-off rather than a hidden catch. The city field is read-only after onboarding — there's no settings toggle to update it later, which is a deliberate simplicity choice, not an oversight.
For someone dating after a move abroad, that means the city declared on day one is the city the matching filter keeps using indefinitely, even if you relocate three months later. A live-tracking app would notice the move on its own. Anketta won't notice at all — it will keep filtering on whatever you typed the first time, and the correspondence between "how far someone is" and where you're actually reachable stays deliberately loose, in exactly the way an unmatched stranger's contact details do. The trade is the same one running through this whole article: a system that updates itself automatically is also a system that's watching continuously. One that only knows what you told it has to be told again when the facts change — a real limitation, and also the entire mechanism that keeps it from tracking you in between.
Does Anketta ask for location permission when I install the app?
No. There's no location-permission request in either the iOS or Android build, because no code in the app calls a location API in the first place — there's nothing to grant permission to.
Can other users see how far away I am?
No. There's no distance calculation anywhere in the product, so there's no "X km away" figure to show anyone, ever.
What does Anketta actually know about where I am?
Only the city you typed once, at signup, as one of your matching filters — the same way it knows your age range or who you're open to meeting. It doesn't know your precise coordinates, your movements, or anything your phone's GPS would report.
If I move to a new city, does Anketta update automatically?
No. The city field is frozen after onboarding, so relocating doesn't change your matching filter — worth knowing going in, since there's no menu that quietly fixes it for you.
Is a dating app with no distance feature less useful for meeting people nearby?
It's a different kind of useful. Matching runs on your written manuscript plus hard filters like age, gender and city equality — not on sorting strangers by how many meters separate you.
Unsure about writing? Try reading first.Nobody walking down their own street needs an app in their hand to know where they are. The only reason it would need to know is if it were built to ask — and Anketta simply wasn't.