Is Gleeden Safe in India? The NHRC Notice, Legality and Privacy

We run a competing platform, so weigh this accordingly. We have kept it to what can be checked: what the National Human Rights Commission actually did in April 2026, what Indian law says about apps like Gleeden, and the questions worth asking of any discreet app, including ours. If you want the side-by-side with Ashley Madison, that is in Gleeden vs Ashley Madison in India; this piece is about safety.

The short answer

• Is Gleeden legal in India? Using it is not a crime. Adultery stopped being a criminal offence in 2018, and no court or ministry has banned the app as of this writing.
• Did the NHRC ban it? No. It issued a notice to a ministry asking for a report. That is a request for review, not an order against users.
• Is it safe? That depends less on the brand than on what data you hand over and how you behave once a conversation starts. The checklist below applies to every platform in this category.

What the NHRC notice actually is

On 9 April 2026 the National Human Rights Commission issued a notice to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) about Gleeden, following a complaint from the Delhi-based non-profit Sewa Nyaya Utthan Foundation (Global Dating Insights). The complaint had been filed on 2 April, and the notice was issued under Section 12 of the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993, with NHRC member Priyank Kanoongo quoted on the matter (The News Mill).

The concerns listed were fake identities, the risk of exploitation of women, and possible access by under-18 users. The Commission asked MeitY to examine the platform's legal status in India, assess whether adequate safeguards exist for women and minors, and recommend fixes, with an action-taken report due by 23 April 2026 (Storyboard18).

What it is not

• It is not a ban. The NHRC is a recommendatory body. It asked a ministry for a report; it did not order the app blocked.
• It is not a finding against users. Nothing in the notice makes it an offence to hold an account.
• It has no public outcome yet. We searched for a published MeitY response or follow-up order and did not find one as of late September 2026. If that changes, we will update this page.

It is fair to say the notice was framed partly in moral terms: The News Mill reports the complaint alleged a conflict with India's "social-familial structure", and quotes Kanoongo on the risk of relationship breakdown when such relationships are exposed. The practical safety concerns it raised — fake profiles, exploitation, minors — are real ones, and they apply to the whole category, not one app.

Is Gleeden legal in India?

On 27 September 2018 a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court, in Joseph Shine v. Union of India, struck down Section 497 IPC (adultery) and Section 198(2) CrPC, holding them unconstitutional under Articles 14 and 21 (Indian Kanoon). Adultery remains a civil ground for divorce, but it is not a crime. The 2023 Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita did not bring it back.

So an adult using an extramarital dating platform is not committing an offence. What can be an offence is what other people do with you: extortion (BNS s.308), publishing private images without consent (IT Act s.66E, 67, 67A), and cheating by impersonation. Platforms themselves also have obligations under the IT Act and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 — which is the area the NHRC asked MeitY to look at. Full background: is an extramarital affair legal in India?

What Gleeden does reasonably well

Being fair to a competitor:

• It is established. Gleeden was founded in France in 2009 and is owned by Blackdivine Group (Global Dating Insights). It is not a fly-by-night app that will vanish with your data next month.
• It is built around women's comfort. Women use it free while men use credits, and it offers anonymity options (Oneindia Hindi). It markets itself as designed by women (Zee News Hindi).
• No major breach in the record we found. In our search of news coverage we did not find a publicly reported Gleeden data breach comparable to Ashley Madison's in 2015. That is an absence of evidence, not a guarantee.

The honest caveats: its India user figure (4 million, per the company, Business Today) is self-reported and says nothing about how many accounts are active in your city. The same reports put women at about 35% of users, which is typical for the category. We break the numbers down in our 2026 statistics fact-check.

Why the category, not the brand, is the real risk

The clearest lesson here is not about Gleeden. In 2016 the operators of Ashley Madison settled US FTC and state charges after a July 2015 breach exposed 36 million users' profile information. The FTC said the company had misrepresented that messages came from real women when they came from fake "engager profiles", and had kept data on users who paid $19 for a "Full Delete" service (FTC). Fake profiles and data that outlives your account are the two risks to check on any platform. More in our Ashley Madison review.

A privacy checklist for any discreet app

Apply this to Gleeden, to us, and to anything else you try:

1. What identity data is stored? Legal name, phone, ID document? For how long? The data that cannot leak is the data never kept.
2. What does deletion actually remove? Ask in writing. A vague answer usually means "not much".
3. How are profiles verified — and what does verification not cover? An email click, an algorithmic selfie match and a person checking a government ID are three very different standards.
4. Are AI or operator-run profiles labelled? And are they excluded from the member numbers the company publishes?
5. Where are photos masked? A blur applied in the browser can be undone by anyone who opens developer tools; a separately generated file on the server cannot.
6. Can people swap phone numbers in the first message? Most scams start with a fast move to WhatsApp or Telegram, where there is no reporting and no record.
7. Does anyone ever ask you for money? Another member asking for money, a "verification fee" or a gift is the single most reliable scam signal. See what to do if you are blackmailed.

Where Parda fits

Since we compete, here are our own answers to the checklist: Parda is free, with no card on file. Profiles are ID-checked by a person using a government photo ID and a live camera selfie — which confirms a real adult, not marital status, criminal record or behaviour. Phone numbers and handles are stripped from messages, photos are masked on the server until both people match, and AI companions are labelled and never counted as members. If you are comparing options, see our Gleeden alternative page.