BeReal

Is BeReal safe?

It is safer than the big feeds for social pressure, and weaker than its reputation for privacy. BeReal's idea is still simple: once a day, at a random time, everyone gets two minutes to post a photo taken with the front and back cameras at once, shared with friends by default. There are no public like counts and no influencers. But since the games company Voodoo bought the app in 2024, BeReal has become an advertising business, and its privacy policy now says it reads the content of your photos to guess your interests for ads. We score it 52/100, the same as Snapchat and above Instagram (40).

What changed after Voodoo bought BeReal

Voodoo announced the deal in June 2024, valuing BeReal at €500 million and saying the app had more than 40 million active users. The privacy group noyb put daily use at more than 23 million six months later.

From July 2024, European users started seeing a consent banner asking whether their data could be used for personalised advertising. Apple's privacy label now lists user content, identifiers and usage data as data used to track you across other companies' apps and websites. Google Play's label says user IDs and approximate location are shared with other companies for advertising.

Your photos are part of the ad profile

This is the detail most users miss. BeReal's privacy policy, last updated in June 2026, says it analyses your account and posts to infer "your likely interests derived from the visual elements of your photos" and "your likely gender, inferred via AI from your username, first name and biography". Both are used to choose which ads you see in the app.

The policy also draws some limits. BeReal says it does not sell or share your private chats, government ID or precise GPS location with advertisers, and that the interest and gender categories stay internal. Advertisers can upload hashed phone number lists to find their customers in the app, and BeReal says it does not keep those hashes after matching. Where the law requires consent, as in the EU, it asks for it; elsewhere it may rely on "legitimate interest", which means no opt-in.

The consent banner that keeps coming back

In December 2024 noyb filed a GDPRGDPRThe EU's General Data Protection Regulation, which sets rules on how organisations collect and use personal data and allows large fines.More in the glossary complaint with France's data protection authority, the CNIL. Its account: if you accept ad tracking, the banner disappears for good; if you refuse, it comes back every day when you try to post. noyb argues that consent obtained this way is not freely given and asked the CNIL to order changes and consider a fine. The CNIL told noyb in March 2025 that it was investigating. No decision had been published by October 2026. BeReal has no fine from any regulator.

Location and what the two cameras show

The dual camera is the design choice with the most safety impact. Every post shows your face and what is in front of you, often a bedroom, a classroom, a desk or a street sign, at a moment you did not choose.

Location is optional, but the defaults differ by age. For adults who add it, BeReal shares street-level location unless they switch to city level. For minors, approximate location is the default. In 2023 a Berkeley student showed Coda Story that he could map large parts of the friend network through BeReal's friend suggestions, including people with private posts. BeReal's answer then was to add only close friends and family.

Security

Google Play says data is encrypted in transit. Posts and chats are not end-to-end encryptedEnd-to-end encryptionEncryption in which only the sender and the recipient can read a message. The company running the service cannot see its content.More in the glossary, accounts are tied to a phone number, and the privacy policy contains no security section at all. We found no reported breach of BeReal user data, but the friend-graph scraping and the lack of any published security detail keep security at 50.

How to use BeReal more safely

1. Keep posts friends-only and skip the public option, especially for teens.
2. Leave location off, or switch it to city level before you post from home or school.
3. Look at the back camera before posting: addresses, screens, school badges and work documents show up more than people expect.
4. In the EU, refuse ad tracking, and change your choice later under "Modify my consents" in privacy settings if you accepted.
5. Prune the friend list now and then. Friends of friends can find you through suggestions.
6. To leave, delete the account in the app. BeReal says deletion takes about 15 days, and logging back in cancels it.

How we scored it

Regulatory record (80) is the strongest factor: no fines, with 5 points off 85 for the open CNIL investigation. Privacy (38) is the weakest, because BeReal tracks users across apps and builds ad profiles from the content of their photos. Scams and harmful content (62) benefits from friends-only defaults. For a smaller, fully closed alternative, see Locket.