Privacy Policy
Tapas is a cooking app. This policy describes exactly what it stores, why, on what legal basis, and who else sees it. It applies to the Tapas iPhone app, its widgets and share extension, and tapas.cooking. It is written to be read, not to be skimmed past.
The short version. Your cookbook, meal plan, groceries and preferences are private to you and to the household you choose to share them with. Nothing is shown to anyone else unless you add friends or make your profile public. We do not sell your data and we do not use it for advertising. Your data is stored in the United States. You can delete everything from Settings → Delete account.
Who we are
The controller of your personal data is Devan Venkataraman, trading as Tapas, 2700 Cumberland Pkwy SE, Ste 410 #235, Atlanta, GA 30339, United States. Contact for anything in this policy, including every request about your data: [email protected].
We are based in the United States and do not have a representative in the EU or the UK. Write to the email address above and a person will answer.
What we collect, why, and our legal basis
"Contract" means we need it to provide the app you signed up for. "Consent" means we only do it because you said yes, and you can withdraw that at any time in the app. "Legitimate interests" means it is necessary for a purpose we have weighed against your interests, and you can object to it by email.
| Data | Why | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Email address and password, or your Apple or Google sign-in | To create and secure your account. Passwords are stored hashed; we never see them. | Contract |
| Display name, handle, avatar, bio, and the city you choose to add | Your profile, shown to people you allow. The city is the one you type or pick, never your device location. | Contract |
| Recipes, ingredients, tags, notes, nutrition and cover photos | The cookbook itself. | Contract |
| Links, pages, captions and files you import | To turn them into a recipe. A video's audio is transcribed on your iPhone and never leaves it. | Contract |
| Meal plans and grocery lists, and the shops you tag items with | Planning and shopping, synced live with your household. | Contract |
| Cook sessions: photos, notes, ratings, rankings, timestamps | Your cooking history. Only you can see it, except what you choose to share with friends. | Contract |
| Kitchen equipment and spices | To suggest substitutions and leave staples off your grocery list. | Contract |
| Food preferences, including allergies and dietary restrictions | To tailor suggestions. This can be health-related, so it is treated as sensitive: it is optional, visible and editable at Settings → What Tapas knows, and deletable at any time. | Your explicit consent, given when you add it. Delete it to withdraw. |
| Messages you send the assistant | To answer them, and to keep the conversation for you to re-read. | Contract |
| Friendships, friend requests, blocks and reports | Friends and the safety controls around them. | Contract |
| Household membership | To share a cookbook, plan and grocery list with the people you live with. | Contract |
| Device push token | To notify you when a household member changes the plan or the grocery list. Only if you allow notifications. | Consent (the iPhone notification prompt) |
| Product update email preference | To send occasional news about Tapas, only if you opt in. Unsubscribe from any of those emails. | Consent |
| Referral code and who used it | To credit both people. | Contract |
| Moderation records of screened profile text and shared photos | To keep what other people see safe, and to answer appeals. | Legitimate interests (a safe service for everyone in it) |
| Feedback you send us | To answer it and fix what you reported. Includes your app version, device model and which screen you were on, and your email address only if you ask for a reply. | Legitimate interests (answering you and fixing the app) |
| Usage events and diagnostics | Counts of what gets used: imports started and finished, cooks, grocery lists built, meals planned, errors by type. Keyed to a random account id, never your name or email, and never a recipe title, an ingredient, a caption, a message or a photo. You can turn this off at Settings → Privacy → Share usage data, which stops collection on your device rather than merely hiding it. | In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland: your consent, asked once in the app, and nothing is collected until you allow it. Elsewhere: legitimate interests (knowing what works and what breaks), and you can object at any time with the switch. |
| Visits to tapas.cooking | Which pages of the website are visited (the home page, the blog, and shared recipe pages, whose private link is never recorded), the site that sent you there, any campaign tags in the link, and whether you tapped through to the App Store. Sent to PostHog with a random id that is made fresh for every page and kept nowhere, so two visits are never linked to each other or to you, and no cookie or anything else is stored on your device. Nothing is sent if you are signed in to the web app in that browser, or if your browser sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track. | In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland: nothing is collected (judged by the time zone your device is set to). Elsewhere: legitimate interests (knowing which pages help people find Tapas), and you can object by turning on Global Privacy Control in your browser or by email. |
| Whether an Apple Search Ads ad led to your install | If you downloaded Tapas after seeing or tapping one of our ads in the App Store, Apple tells us which of our campaigns, ad groups and search keywords it was, and the App Store country. We keep that with your account id so we can see which ads bring in people who go on to cook with Tapas, and stop paying for the ones that don't. Apple sends nothing that identifies you or your device, and we don't receive the time you saw or tapped the ad. We ask once per install, only while usage data is on, and it is deleted with your account. | Same as usage events |
| Service records on our servers | Whether an import or a notification succeeded, and for each AI request the model used, its token count, cost and timing, so we can find failures and control spend. These are kept with your account id; the text of what you asked is not included. If you have turned usage data off, or have not allowed it where we ask, none of these are sent to PostHog either. | Same as usage events |
Analytics consent in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland
If your App Store account is in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, Tapas asks before it collects any usage data, with two equal choices: Allow or Don't allow. Until you choose Allow, the analytics library is not started at all: no usage events, no identifier stored for analytics, and our servers send nothing to PostHog about you. Your answer is the same setting as Settings → Privacy → Share usage data, where you can change it at any time. Withdrawing consent stops collection from then on.
Tapas has no advertising SDK and does not track you across other apps or websites. The Apple Search Ads information above comes from Apple's own App Store, which doesn't count as tracking under Apple's App Tracking Transparency rules, so Tapas never asks your permission to track. We do not collect your device location. When your device talks to our servers, the servers necessarily see its IP address; we use it only to deliver the request and to protect the service from abuse.
Who your data goes to
These providers process data on our behalf, under contracts that limit them to providing their service to us.
- Supabase hosts the database, sign-in, file storage and server functions, on Amazon Web Services in the United States. Your data lives there. Supabase privacy policy.
- OpenRouter carries AI requests (recipe imports, the assistant, auto-tagging, preference parsing, and screening of profile text and shared photos) to the inference provider that runs the model, for example Groq. The text of the request is sent: the recipe, your message, the preferences relevant to it, or the profile text or photo being screened. OpenRouter privacy policy. Turning AI off in Settings stops all of this except screening, which applies to anything you share with other people.
- PostHog receives the usage events above, from the app, and the service records above, from our servers. PostHog privacy policy.
- Resend sends account emails (sign-in links, password resets), delivers feedback you send us to our inbox and our reply back to you, and, if you opt in, product update email. Resend privacy policy.
- Slack is where our team receives the feedback you send and reports about content, so a person can act on them.
- Cloudflare hosts tapas.cooking and sits in front of our servers, so it handles the network traffic between your device and Tapas.
- Apple handles Sign in with Apple, push notifications, and the App Store. If you installed Tapas from one of our App Store ads, Apple tells us which ad it was (see above); we send Apple only the one-time code its framework gives the app for that, never your account details.
- Google handles Google sign-in, if you use it.
- Open Food Facts is asked about a barcode when you scan one. Only the barcode number is sent.
- Kroger, in the United States only, if you choose a Kroger store or link your Kroger account. The store and the products on your list are sent so it can show aisles and prices.
If you connect Tapas to another AI app, such as ChatGPT or Claude, that app receives what it asks Tapas for on your behalf, under its own privacy policy. You can disconnect it at Settings → Connected apps.
Nobody else. We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We would disclose data to authorities only where the law requires it.
Who else can see it
- Your household. Everyone in a household shares one cookbook, meal plan and grocery list, and can see and edit all of it. Your chats and saved preferences stay yours alone.
- Your friends, once you have both accepted, see your recipes and the cooking activity you share, unless you hide it at Settings → Privacy. Your cook ratings and notes reach them only if you agreed to share them.
- Everyone, if you set your profile to public, your handle, name, avatar, bio and shared recipes become findable.
A new account shares nothing until you add a friend or make your profile public.
International transfers
Tapas is run from the United States, and your data is stored and processed there. If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, this means your data is transferred to the United States. Where a provider is certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (and its UK Extension and Swiss counterpart), the transfer relies on that certification; otherwise it relies on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses (with the UK Addendum for UK data) in the provider's data processing terms. You can ask us for more detail about the safeguard for a particular provider at the email above.
How long we keep it
Your account data is kept until you delete it or your account. Deleting a recipe, chat, preference or post removes it. Deleting your account removes your profile, recipes, chats, preferences, photos, posts, friendships and device tokens permanently. Recipes you shared into a household stay with that household, because they belong to everyone in it.
- Feedback you send: up to 24 months, so we can follow up and track whether we fixed it.
- Usage events and service records: 12 months.
- Moderation records tied to a report: up to 12 months, so we can handle appeals and repeat abuse.
- Backups of the database expire on their normal cycle after deletion.
Your rights
Wherever you live, you can:
- See and correct your data. Most of it is directly visible and editable in the app.
- Export it. Settings → Export my recipes gives you your recipes as a file. For a copy of everything else we hold about you, email us.
- Delete it. Settings → Delete account deletes your account and data immediately.
- Withdraw consent at any time, for anything that relies on it, using the switches in Settings. This does not affect what was done before.
If you are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, you also have the right to access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, data portability, and to object to processing based on legitimate interests. You have the right to complain to your data protection supervisory authority: in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk); in the EU, the authority in your country (list of EU authorities); in Switzerland, the FDPIC. We would appreciate the chance to fix it first.
Email [email protected] for anything the app cannot do itself. We answer within 30 days, and may ask you to confirm the request from the email address on your account.
Tapas does not make decisions about you that have legal or similarly significant effects by automated means. Screening of shared text and photos is automated, and you can ask for a person to review any decision about your content.
California residents
Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, you have the right to know what personal information we collect, use and disclose (described above), to delete it, to correct it, and not to be discriminated against for exercising these rights. We do not sell personal information and do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, so there is nothing to opt out of. We use sensitive personal information (food preferences that may relate to health) only to provide the app. Make a request at [email protected]; you may use an authorised agent.
Children
Tapas is not directed at children. You must be at least 13 to use it, and in the EEA and the UK, if you are under the age at which you can consent to online services where you live (between 13 and 16, depending on the country), you need a parent's permission. We do not knowingly collect data from children under 13. If you believe a child has an account, email us and we will delete it.
Security
Traffic is encrypted in transit. Access to your rows is enforced in the database itself, per user and per household, not only in the app. Private import uploads are stored in a non-public bucket. No system is perfect; if a breach affects you, we will tell you, and the regulator where the law requires it.
Changes
If this policy changes materially we will say so in the app before the change takes effect. The date at the top always reflects the current version.
Contact
Devan Venkataraman, Tapas, 2700 Cumberland Pkwy SE, Ste 410 #235, Atlanta, GA 30339, United States