Privacy Policy

1. What data we collect

When you register, we collect your name, email address, and password (stored as a secure bcrypt hash — we never store your password as plain text). You may optionally provide a profile photo, location, bio, and links.

In your profile you can also choose dietary preferences (for example, vegetarian, halal, kosher, or diabetic-friendly). They are optional and visible only to you: we use them solely to show matching recipes higher in your own home feed, never show them to other users, and do not share them with third parties. You can change or remove them at any time in your profile.

In your profile you can also choose up to five favorite cuisines from our list of world cuisines. This is optional public profile information: like your bio, it is shown on your profile to other users. We also use them to show recipes of these cuisines higher in your own home feed. You can change or remove them at any time in your profile.

If you register or sign in with Google, we receive your name, email, and profile picture from Google.

Recipes you create or save, comments, and likes are stored to provide the service.

We set a session cookie (cookbook_session) to keep you logged in for up to 7 days. In the Android app, this cookie can last up to 400 days and is automatically renewed while you remain signed in; logout or account invalidation ends the session.

The iPhone and iPad app cannot use this cookie, so it keeps you signed in with access tokens instead. A short-lived token stays only in the app's memory, and a long-lived renewal token is stored securely on the device. We store only a hash of the renewal token, together with the platform, app or browser identifier (user agent), and the dates it was created and last used. We need this data to keep you signed in and let you end sessions. You can end other sessions in Settings; sessions also end automatically when you change your password or delete your account.

When you use the calorie reference, your search query is sent to our server to find matching products. We do not link these queries to your account and do not use them to build a profile of you.

If you enable notifications, we store the delivery identifier required by your platform: a Web Push subscription, an Android Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) token and per-install identifier, or the Apple APNs token described in section 8. The browser push service, Google, or Apple receives the delivery data needed to send the notification.

2. How we use your data

Your data is used solely to provide CookbookSocial: to authenticate you, display your profile, store your recipes, and enable social features such as likes, comments, and follows.

We do not sell, rent, or share your personal data with third parties for marketing purposes.

3. Third-party services

Google OAuth (optional): if you choose to sign in with Google, your authentication is handled by Google. Google's privacy policy applies to that interaction.

AI and transcription providers: depending on the feature you request and the configured provider, recipe text, source URLs, public-source audio or transcripts, and generated output may be processed by Google Gemini, OpenAI, Groq, or OpenRouter. Existing legacy Premium API Key accounts may use a saved personal OpenAI key; it is encrypted at rest and sent to OpenAI only when that account requests an AI import or translation. New Premium API Key purchases are not offered.

Smart (semantic) search: recipe text — titles, descriptions, ingredients, steps, dietary labels, and allergen labels, including private recipes you create — is sent to Google Gemini (or OpenAI as a fallback) to generate search embeddings. When you use smart search, your search query is also sent to Google Gemini to compute an embedding used only to rank results; queries are processed transiently and never used for advertising. These providers process data under their own privacy policies.

YouTube imports: when you submit a YouTube URL, we may send the video ID or URL to YouTube API Services to retrieve public metadata such as title, description, channel, thumbnail, and duration. Google Privacy Policy (https://policies.google.com/privacy) and YouTube Terms of Service (https://www.youtube.com/t/terms) apply to YouTube API Services.

Payment providers: Paddle processes web checkout as merchant of record, Google Play processes Android purchases, and Apple processes iPhone and iPad purchases through StoreKit. We receive the identifiers and status needed to verify, restore, reconcile, or refund a purchase, but we do not receive or store your full payment card details.

4. Data security

Passwords are hashed with bcrypt using a cost factor of 12 and are never stored in plain text.

AI API keys are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM using a server-side secret.

Data is stored in a PostgreSQL database on Railway infrastructure. Recipe photos and other uploaded images are stored in Cloudflare R2 object storage.

5. Your rights

You can edit or delete your profile and all your recipes at any time from your Profile → Settings page.

Deleting your account schedules removal after a 14-day restoration window. During that period the account is inactive and can be restored by signing in again.

After the window expires, your profile, recipes, likes, comments, follows, sign-in credentials, and other account-linked data are removed. Recipe copies already saved by other users remain in their accounts, but the link back to your deleted account is removed.

6. Contextual advertising

CookbookSocial may show internal sponsored placements based only on the current app context, such as the page, recipe category, interface language, and ad placement.

We do not use cross-site tracking, behavioral advertising profiles, third-party ad networks, or advertising-specific cookies or local-storage identifiers for this. We record basic campaign and placement metrics to count impressions, clicks, hidden ads, and reports. These metrics do not include recipe text, searches, payment data, or the content of your private recipes.

7. API usage data

If you use our paid food data API, we record what is needed to enforce plan limits and to bill correctly: the time a key was last used and the number of requests made in the current month and minute. These counters are reset at the end of each billing month.

We do not store the search queries you send to the API, request bodies, or the responses returned to you. Usage counters are tied to the API key and its owning account, not to the end users of your application — we never receive their identity.

8. Apple app, Sign in with Apple, and notifications

In the iPhone and iPad app, Sign in with Apple is optional. If you use it, Apple sends us the information needed to sign you in, such as your Apple account identifier and, when Apple provides it, your name and email address. If you choose Apple's private relay email, we store that relay address as your account email.

App Store purchases are processed by Apple through StoreKit. We receive transaction identifiers, product identifiers, subscription status, renewal, refund, and restore information needed to unlock paid features and keep your account in sync. We do not receive your full payment card details from Apple.

If you enable push notifications, we store the APNs device token and environment needed to deliver notifications to your device. You can disable notifications in iOS settings.

For the first native iOS release, the app does not load client-side Google tags or Google Ads conversion tracking inside the iOS app and does not use IDFA or cross-app tracking. Server-side operational events, billing verification, fraud prevention, and diagnostics may still be processed to provide and secure the service.

9. Cookies and analytics

On the website and in the Android app, we use necessary local storage and the cookbook_session cookie for sign-in, security, language, and your privacy choices. These functions do not require optional-cookie consent.

On the website, we load Google tags for Google Analytics and advertising measurement only with your permission. In the Android app, these measurement purposes are always enabled. Google may then receive usage events and technical browser or device information under its own privacy policy. We do not enable personalized advertising. On the website, you can accept or reject these optional measurement purposes and change your choice at any time through Cookie settings in your profile settings.

The iPhone and iPad app does not load these Google tags; instead it uses Firebase Analytics (Google) for the same usage measurement. It is always enabled in the app, does not use advertising identifiers and does not measure advertising.

When analytics is enabled, we also use Microsoft Clarity to collect masked interaction data, including clicks, scrolling, and session replays, so we can find usability problems. Before recording, we mask private data: email addresses, form fields, API keys, private recipes, shopping lists, event menus and personal profile and account details. Microsoft processes this data under its own privacy statement.

Microsoft Clarity follows different consent rules by platform: on the production website it runs only after you enable analytics; in the production iPhone and iPad app it is always enabled, while the development app does not initialize it. The native app does not send a custom user ID, and Clarity is not used for cross-app tracking. Microsoft may infer an approximate region from the device IP address.

10. Recipe import suggestions

When you browse the feed or search for recipes, we may show suggestion cards from our own index — recipes from public websites and YouTube videos that you can import into your collection.

Your search query is not sent to any external search provider. If you use smart (semantic) search — a Premium feature — the query text is sent to our AI provider only to convert it into a numeric vector used to rank results; the search itself runs on our infrastructure. We do not use these searches to build advertising profiles.

The index itself is built from public sources: the Common Crawl web archive and the official YouTube Data API. We store titles, descriptions, metadata, and links — never cooking steps or ingredient quantities.

An import starts only when you press the import button. It uses your credits and follows the same rules as importing a link yourself.

Discover pages (cookbooksocial.app/discover) show the same suggestion cards publicly, without an account. Viewing them does not create a profile; we keep only the standard server logs and the analytics described in this policy. The recipe image on a suggestion card or a Discover page is loaded directly from the source website, so that website may receive your IP address and browser data in the same way as any image embedded from another site.

11. Contact

For any privacy-related questions, contact us at: [email protected]