Is NGL really anonymous? What the FTC found out

Short answer: no — and the FTC has a $5M settlement on file to prove it.

NGL is the app that lets people put a link in their Instagram bio so anyone can DM them anonymously. It exploded in 2022, peaked in 2023, and got investigated in 2024 after researchers and journalists noticed something off: the app was selling a $9.99/week "NGL Pro" subscription with a feature that claimed to give you "hints" about who sent each message — even though the senders are supposed to be anonymous.

What the FTC and DOJ found

In July 2024, the FTC and the U.S. Department of Justice announced a settlement against NGL Labs. Their finding, summarized:

• NGL stored sender data (IP address, device fingerprint) even though the app marketed itself as anonymous.
• The "hints" feature was fake. According to the FTC, the hints didn't actually reveal anything useful — they were generic and unrelated to the real sender. Some "hints" were literally generated from random text.
• NGL was knowingly used by minors and failed to enforce its age gate, leading to documented bullying and self-harm incidents.

The settlement: $5 million, a permanent ban on marketing NGL to anyone under 18, and a requirement to delete data improperly collected.

So is NGL "anonymous" right now?

NGL still operates. The app still markets itself as anonymous. The "reveal" feature is gone in its old form. But the underlying technical setup hasn't fundamentally changed: NGL still receives and stores sender metadata. If a court subpoena, a serious abuse investigation, or another regulator asks NGL for sender data, NGL almost certainly has the ability to produce it.

What "actually anonymous" looks like

For an anonymous-message app to be truly anonymous in the way users expect, three things have to be true:

1. No sender identity field in the database. Not IP, not fingerprint, not device ID. If it's stored, it can be revealed.
2. Promise enforced at the schema/rules level, not in marketing copy. Anyone with database access — including the developers — should be technically unable to look up who sent a given message.
3. Open source or third-party-auditable. "Trust us" doesn't cut it.

That's the bar we're building anonymousquestion.com against. The Firestore security rules in our codebase literally forbid writing a sender identity field on a message. The promise isn't a tagline; it's the schema.

Should you still use NGL?

If you want the cultural relevance and the app icon, sure. If you want the privacy promise to actually be true, look at alternatives that enforce it in code rather than in marketing. We compare ourselves to NGL feature-by-feature here.