What we know about you, and what we don’t.

Part one — this website

This site is a set of static files. It has no accounts, no database, no server-side code, and no session state.

There are no cookies. There is no analytics package, no tag manager, no advertising pixel, no heat-mapping, no session recording, and no embedded social media widgets. Nothing on any page loads a resource from another company’s server — no external fonts, no external scripts, no external images. The site enforces this in the browser with a Content Security Policy that forbids network connections to anywhere at all. You can confirm it: open your browser’s network inspector and reload this page.

The interactive demo does not leave your browser. Ratings you give, dishes you save and plans you build in the demo are held in your tab’s memory. They are not written to storage, not sent anywhere, and not associated with you. Reloading the page discards all of it. The demo does not create an account, send a message or invitation, or reserve a table — the people and venues in it are fictional.

The one thing that is recorded

The site is hosted by Vercel Inc., which keeps ordinary web server logs the way every host does: the requesting IP address, the time, the page requested, and the browser’s user-agent string. These exist so the site can be delivered and so abuse can be blocked. We do not use them to build a profile of you and do not combine them with anything else. Vercel’s handling of that data is governed by its own privacy policy.

If you email us

The early-access form is not a form in the usual sense. Nothing you type into it is transmitted to this website — the page has no way to transmit anything. When you press the button, your own email program opens with a message already written, addressed to us. You read it, you edit it, and you decide whether to press send. If you never press send, we never see it.

If you do send it, we hold your message in our email account: your name, your email address, and whatever else you chose to include. We use it to contact you about early access and to understand who is interested. We do not add you to a marketing list, sell your address, or pass it to anyone else. Ask us to delete it at any time and we will, and confirm when it is done.

Part two — the iPhone app

What it collects

• Your reactions to dishes. Ratings you give on the app’s seven-point scale, from strongly disliked to strongly liked. This is the core of the product; without it there is nothing to learn from.
• Sensory ratings. Numeric intensity values across the app’s taste dimensions — how much crunch, salt, heat, acidity and so on a dish had for you — and the categorical descriptors attached to them.
• Taste Drivers. Optional selections, made after a meal, from a fixed vocabulary describing what actually made the experience good or bad.
• Dietary exclusions you declare. Allergies and lifestyle restrictions you enter yourself, used to filter out dishes you should not be shown.
• Coarse location, only while you are searching. City or neighbourhood level, processed at the time of a venue search so results are near you. There is no continuous or background location tracking.
• Account basics. The email address or sign-in identifier you register with, and the profile details you choose to enter.

What it does not collect

• Government identification numbers of any kind.
• Genetic, biological or biometric data. “Taste DNA” is a name for your learned food preferences. It is not a genetic test, it involves no saliva sample, no DNA sequencing and no genetic data of any kind. We chose the name because it is memorable, and we would rather say plainly what it is not.
• Protected health information or medical records. TasteTwins is not a medical device and does not diagnose, treat or give clinical advice.
• Background GPS logs or travel history.
• Card numbers or financial account details. If payments are ever introduced, they will run through a PCI-compliant processor and the card details will not reach us.
• Your contacts, photo library, microphone or calendar, except for a specific photo you deliberately choose to attach.

How it is protected

• Row-level security is enabled on every application table, so a query can only ever return rows the requesting account is entitled to.
• The access policies do not permit anonymous row operations. An unauthenticated request cannot read or write application data.
• Your taste vectors are stored separately from your profile content, and an authenticated account can only insert and manage its own.
• Data is encrypted at rest with AES-256 and in transit with TLS 1.3.
• Access follows role-based controls, built on the same zero-trust practice used in the high-assurance federal systems the founder works in.

Your control

From the app’s settings you can export your preference data or delete your account. Deletion removes your account and your taste vectors from the live database and from backups on their normal rotation. It is permanent — there is no recovery afterwards, and rebuilding a palate means starting from zero.

Research, and why it is a separate decision

Aggregate patterns in food preference are genuinely useful to public-health and academic researchers, and part of why this company exists is to make that data available to them. That is a completely separate decision from using the app, and it works like this:

• It is opt-in and specific. Nothing about your data goes to a research partner unless you have separately and explicitly agreed to it. Consent to use the app is not consent to be in a dataset.
• Declining costs you nothing. Every feature works identically whether you opt in or not. You will not be nagged, degraded, or shown a worse product for saying no.
• You can withdraw. Turning it off stops your data being included in anything released afterwards.
• Safeguards are being built, and are not finished. Statistical disclosure controls — thresholds ensuring no released record can be traced to a small enough group to identify someone — are a design requirement that must be implemented, tested and documented before any dataset is shared with anyone. They are not in place today. We are saying so rather than describing a planned control as an existing guarantee.
• No brokers, ever. We do not sell, rent or trade individual profiles to data brokers, ad networks or marketers. This is not a business model we intend to leave room for.

Children

TasteTwins is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their information. If you believe a child has given us data, write to hello@tastetwins.app and we will delete it.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to see what we hold about you, correct it, delete it, obtain a portable copy, or object to particular processing. We extend all of these to everyone who asks, regardless of jurisdiction, because maintaining two standards is more trouble than simply having one good one. Email hello@tastetwins.app and we will respond within 30 days.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.

Changes

If this policy changes materially, the date at the top changes and app testers are notified in the app. Superseded versions are kept, so a change can always be pointed to rather than quietly made.

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Questions, or something here that does not match what you have observed? Tell us — we would rather fix a document than defend one.