Safety First Principles: How We Protect Every Match

Dating apps have a safety problem that's easy to describe and hard to solve. The product puts strangers in contact with each other, and every platform incentive — match volume, session time, engagement — pulls against caution. Most apps treat safety as a bolt-on feature. We treat it as the foundation.

Here's how we think about it.

Why is photo verification non-optional?

Every profile on Chem IRL has to pass photo verification before a single swipe. You take a short selfie with a prompted pose; our system confirms it matches your profile photos. The check is fast (usually under a minute), one-time, and required.

We don't make it optional because optionality is a signal. A "verified" badge only means something if unverified profiles are rare. The full reasoning is in the verified-daters post.

Meeting suggestions default to public

When a match is confirmed and proposals begin, the default suggestions we surface — coffee, walks, weekend farmers' markets — are always public places. This is a small nudge but a deliberate one. We want the first meeting to be easy to leave and visible to others. First dates are inherently vulnerable; the environment should reduce that.

Reports get acted on

Reports come through a short form: who, what happened, when. We err on the side of the person reporting. If a profile gets multiple reports in a short window, the account is paused pending review — not after, before.

Reporting someone doesn't require you to explain yourself. The friction is on the person receiving the report, not the person filing it. The same principle drives the block-means-block tooling — once you long-press to block, the system carries the rest of the load.

What we don't do

A few things we've explicitly chosen against:

• We don't offer background checks. They give false confidence and miss the kinds of behavior that actually matter.
• We don't sell safety features as premium upgrades. Everything described here is free, for everyone, every time.
• We don't share your location with matches. The closest anyone gets is a neighborhood-scale indicator, and never in real time.

This isn't the full list of things we do. It's the floor, not the ceiling. We'll write more as we learn what's working and what isn't.

Common questions

Why is photo verification non-optional on Chem IRL?

Because optionality is a signal. A verified badge only means something if unverified profiles are rare. Every Chem IRL profile passes a live photo check before a single swipe — a short selfie with a prompted pose, confirmed against profile photos, fast and one-time. (See [the verified-daters post](/blog/dating-app-with-verified-daters) for why the entire user base is verified rather than just a paid tier.)

Why do meeting suggestions default to public places?

Because first dates are inherently vulnerable, and the environment should reduce that. When proposals begin, the default suggestions we surface — coffee, walks, weekend farmers' markets — are public places. We want the first meeting to be easy to leave and visible to others. It's a small nudge but a deliberate one.

How does Chem IRL handle reports?

Reports come through a short form: who, what happened, when. We err on the side of the person reporting. If a profile gets multiple reports in a short window, the account is paused pending review — not after, before. Reporting someone doesn't require you to explain yourself. The friction is on the person receiving the report, not the person filing it. (See [the block-means-block post](/blog/dating-app-where-block-means-block) for the related block-tooling philosophy.)

What does Chem IRL explicitly not do for safety?

Three deliberate choices against. No background checks — they give false confidence and miss the kinds of behavior that actually matter. No premium safety tier — everything described is free, for everyone, every time. No real-time location sharing with matches — the closest anyone gets is a neighborhood-scale indicator, never in real time.