I don’t want to call you out. Really I don’t. Please don’t take this (too) personally. But do take it to heart. This is directed more at a group of society than any one person.
I do like parties, really I do. But in the world we live in today, there’s just no excuse for using a service like Partiful and I’m begging you: Stop Sending Me Partiful Invites. And for similar reasons, don’t send me Evites or Eventbrites either. These and similar services operate on relatively similar models: Share personal information with us without the user’s consent. (I’m focusing on Partiful here, but most of these services will have similar problems)
I’ll start with the most heinous of reasons why: You’re giving a shady dataminer company my private information (Name, phone number, email, etc.) without my permission. I know you think it’s innocent and yes, I know it’s “soooo easy!” to manage your party guest list. That’s the point – they are providing you a valuable service for “free”, but if you are still misinformed that there’s such thing as free, then you are being willfully ignorant here. The last TWENTY years have educated us that we are the profit when the service is “free”.
When someone hosts an event on Partiful, they can sync their phone contacts with the app and invite people directly. According to Partiful’s own help center, once a host does this and invites you, you get a text saying you were invited to their party, with a link to the event page. That means your phone number gets transmitted to and processed by Partiful’s servers the moment a host syncs their contacts. You never consented to that; only the host did, and they may not even be inviting YOU to the party! They’ve just shared a whole profile of identity information with a service without your consent. This is by design. Partiful is hoovering up all our personal information and building profiles on us and our personal networks of friends, without us even knowing it’s happening.
THIS ALONE IS DISRESPECTFUL ENOUGH FOR ME TO STOP TALKING TO YOU. BUT IT GETS WORSE.
First, as if that wasn’t enough, when you enter my phone number into the app from your contacts, and then ask it to send me a party invite, it’s either sending me a text message or an email with a unique tracking link. My clicking that link, even just to look at the invite, is confirming to Partiful, that the information is active and confirmed personal contact information. This is incredibly valuable status information on the data sales market – a data broker can get top dollar for a collection of information that it has confirmed accurate and active.
Partiful states that it doesn’t sell invitee’s personal information, but investigations into their privacy policy and other behavior have found that untrue. Also, there’s a big difference between selling and sharing information – and Partiful’s own Privacy Policy (at the time of this post) contradicts itself there. More on that later, but first:
TechCrunch reported in October 2025 that the app has evolved into a powerful Facebook-like social graph, mapping who your friends are, who your friends’ friends are, your activities, your locations, and all of your phone numbers. That same investigation found Partiful was not stripping location metadata from user-uploaded photos, including public profile photos, so anyone using basic browser developer tools could pull raw images from Partiful’s backend and extract GPS coordinates precise to a few feet, exposing some users’ home or work addresses.
PARTIFUL’S FOUNDERS AND SOME STAFF ARE FORMER PALANTIR EMPLOYEES, THE DATAMING FIRM ASSOCIATED WITH ICE’S DEPORTATION DATABASE.
“But Partiful’s Privacy Policy assures me it doesn’t sell my party guest’s information for money.” Sure – that specifically states that they do not take a spreadsheet and hand it over to any other party in exchange for cash. But that’s misleading: They disclose that they DO “share” your guest’s private information with “Advertising Partners” as well as AI machine models, including outside vendors. As of this writing, the Partiful privacy policy contains language like:
For marketing and advertising. We do not sell your personal information. We do work with advertising partners who may collect and use certain personal information…
and:
…privacy laws characterize the sharing of personal information with advertising partners as a ‘sale’…
So, it’s not an honest statement to say they don’t sell personal information to others.
If you’re still reading and feeling that I haven’t provided ample reason to argue against using Partiful or sharing my information with it, here’s some more:
THERE ARE HOT SINGLES IN YOUR AREA WAITING TO MEET YOU NOW
Ben Lapidus objects that Partiful uses some real shady dark patterns to get you to download the app: “You have a crush! Download the app to find out who it is!” He and I agree: That crush probably doesn’t actually exist, and what does that even have to do with inviting people to events? Is this the next phase of “Hot singles in your area!”?
In his post, Ben goes on to outline how Partiful raised $20 million in venture funding and that Partiful says it plans on using it’s data to implement a feature where party guests can pitch in on party snacks through Instacart.
We all know Ben is correct when he said that the REAL asset is the network data Partiful provide’s it’s partners. “The map of who knows who, who shows up to what [party], and whose social circles overlap.”
Although I have already proven that Partiful is dishonest in it’s claim that it doesn’t sell your data – Ben also highlights a great point: That’s Partiful’s claim now. As we all know because we receive 40,000 “We’ve updated our policy” emails a week from every company we even look at, policies can change at any time in the future – and that data Partiful has been collecting on all your party guests without their permission? You’d then be personally responsible for spreading it all over the internet.
EPILOGUE
“Okay, so no Partiful, no Evite, no Evenbrite. So what CAN I use for event planning, Troy?”
At the risk of showing my age (I swear I’m not a boomer!) EMAIL ME. Or even TEXT me. If you want to be a good party planner and respect your guests, do the work. Don’t rely on a privacy violating vacuum complex to make things slightly easier on yourself. You can use Canva to make a little graphic in 15 minutes and text it to others. (I am speaking from experience – I put my money where my mouth is – every party or event I organize is done this way. You will never get an invite from a platform I down 100% own.) Better yet, if your guest list is just so unmanageable that many texting is too much for you, EMAILING can get that invitation in inboxes in ONE swing for you. I know I know, Email is for old people, but be a part of the better generation and stop encouraging enshitification of our lives.
I also use NextCloud which has a Google Forms style feature in it – and guess what, I have 100% control over the tool and data and it is hosted myself on my own server – nobody else has access to anything about it. When someone might follow a link to a invite via this tool – it is 100% private and my own tool. This route is certainly more involved and technical so I don’t expect everyone to be interested in it, but if you’d like to know more, I’m happy to talk NextCloud to anyone interested.