Privacy Policy

What we collect

You can browse the whole guide, including every restaurant listing and every dish, cuisine and city guide, without an account. We collect the following only when it applies to you.

Account data

When you register we store your email address, the display name you choose, and a hashed form of your password. Passwords are hashed with bcrypt and never stored or logged in readable form, which means we cannot tell you what your password is and can only help you reset it. Where two-factor authentication is enabled on an account, we also store the shared secret your authenticator app needs.

Content you create

Reviews you publish, including the rating, title and body, are stored against your account and shown publicly on the restaurant's page. They are published without your name attached. Collections and favourites are stored against your account and are private to you unless a collection is featured with your agreement.

Location

Nearby search asks your browser for your location. Your browser will prompt you, and refusing costs you nothing but that one feature. A precise location is used in the moment to sort results and is not written to our database. If you save a home city in your preferences, that city and country are stored so the app can open where you expect.

Technical data

Our servers keep standard request logs, including IP address, user agent and the pages requested. These exist to keep the service running and to detect abuse. When error monitoring is enabled, an error report may include the page you were on and a stack trace.

Advertising and cookies

This site is funded by advertising. We use Google AdSense. Google and its advertising partners use cookies and similar identifiers to select and measure ads, including ads based on your previous visits to this and other websites.

• Google's use of advertising cookies is described in How Google uses information from sites that use its services.
• Google and third-party vendors may use the DoubleClick DART cookie and comparable identifiers to serve ads based on your visits to this site and others.
• You can turn off personalised advertising from Google at Google Ads Settings.
• You can opt out of personalised advertising from many other vendors at aboutads.info and the Network Advertising Initiative.

Until you make a choice, advertising and analytics storage are switched off and ads are requested in non-personalised form. You can change or withdraw that choice at any time on the Cookie Policy page, which lists every category we use and lets you change your decision immediately.

Who else processes your data

• Google AdSense serves and measures the advertising on this site.
• Google Analytics 4 measures aggregate traffic. Until you consent to analytics storage it sets no cookies and cannot recognise you between visits, but a cookieless measurement request is still sent to Google.
• Sentry receives crash and error reports so we can fix faults.
• OpenStreetMap serves the map tiles on the Explore page. Loading a map discloses your IP address to that service.

Each of these is a processor acting on our instructions, except Google's advertising business, which acts as an independent controller for the advertising it serves.

How long we keep it

• Account data is kept until you close your account. Closing it deletes your account, reviews, collections, favourites, saved location and sign-in tokens immediately and permanently, in a single operation. There is no grace period and it cannot be undone.
• Sign-in sessions expire after one hour; the refresh token that keeps you signed in expires thirty days after it was last used.
• Reviews stay published until your account is closed, which removes them. To take down a single review before then, write to us and we will remove it.
• Request logs are kept for a short operational period and then discarded.

Your rights

If you are in the United Kingdom, the European Economic Area or another region with comparable law, you have the right to see the personal data we hold about you, to correct it, to have it deleted, to restrict or object to how we use it, and to receive it in a portable form. Where we rely on consent, you may withdraw it at any time without affecting what was done before you did.

If you are a California resident, you have the right to know what we collect, to request deletion, and to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information. We do not sell personal information. Exercising any of these rights will never cost you a worse service.

You can download your data and delete your account from your account settings while signed in. You can also write to support@spicesbite.app and we will respond within thirty days. If you believe we have handled your data badly, you may complain to your local data protection authority.

Children

SpicesBite is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their personal data. If you believe a child has given us personal data, write to support@spicesbite.app and we will delete it.

Changes and contact

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top of this page, and we will tell you in the app when the change is significant. Questions about anything here go to support@spicesbite.app, or to support@spicesbite.app for general support.