Foodaya Privacy Policy
Foodaya is a grocery and kitchen-management app, and a product of Jar XL Innovations LLC (“we”, “us”). It also has a community side — a recipe feed, profiles, comments, and direct messages between cooks. This policy explains what we collect, how we use it, who else can see it, and the choices you have.
Information we collect
- Account information: your name, email address, and — if you sign in with Google — your Google account identifier. If you create a password account, we store a securely hashed version of your password (never the plain password).
- Profile details you choose to add: profile photo and optional account name. Legacy delivery details from earlier versions may remain stored until account deletion; Foodaya no longer collects or uses them.
- Amazon shopping: when you open an Amazon search, the selected item’s search term is sent to Amazon. Amazon handles shopping, checkout, payment and delivery under its own policies; Foodaya does not access your Amazon account or cart. As an Amazon Associate, Foodaya earns from qualifying purchases.
- Claude connector: if you connect Foodaya to your own Claude account, Claude can read your grocery list, pantry, purchases, recipes, cookbooks, saved restaurants, meals and food preferences, and add items to your grocery list, when you ask it to. What Claude reads is then handled by Anthropic under your Claude account's terms. Nothing is shared unless you connect it yourself, and you can disconnect at any time in Claude's Connectors settings.
- Restaurants: Find a Restaurant uses Apple Maps. If you allow location access, your device shares your location with Apple to show places near you; Foodaya does not receive or store it. We store the restaurants you save (with your stars and price notes), and a restaurant you attach to a post is shown on that post like the rest of it.
- Date of birth: asked once, before you can use the community features, so we can confirm you are at least 13. See Children for how we handle it.
- Payment information: on the web, subscriptions are processed by Stripe — your card details are entered directly with Stripe and are never sent to or stored by Foodaya, and we keep only a Stripe customer identifier and your subscription status. In the iOS app, subscriptions are purchased through the App Store and processed by Apple — Foodaya never sees your payment details, and we keep only your subscription status and an identifier tying your purchase to your account.
- Content you create in the app: your grocery inventory, shopping lists, recipes, meal logs, goals, and similar food-related data.
- Photos and videos you upload: receipt photos, fridge/pantry photos, meal photos, recipe photos, and video clips attached to a post.
- Recipe links you submit: when you import a public Instagram post or recipe webpage, we process the link and the recipe information available from that source, such as its caption, creator credit, audio, or visible on-screen text.
- Community activity: posts you publish, comments and replies, likes, reposts, follows, blocks, and reports you file; the communities you create, join or ask to join, and your up and down votes on posts inside them.
- Messages: the notes you attach when you forward a post to another cook, the replies in that conversation, and any photos you send in it.
- Technical information: when you create an account we record the IP address the request came from. We use it only to limit how many accounts can be created from one network, to prevent automated abuse. We do not use it to track your location or your activity in the app.
- App usage: we record which pages and features you use, linked to your account and kept for 90 days, to improve the app. It is never sold or shared.
How we process your photos and text
Important: to read receipts, identify pantry items, estimate meal nutrition, format recipes, and answer in-app cooking questions, we send the relevant photo or text to Anthropic's Claude API for processing and receive the result back. For a public Instagram recipe link, a media-resolution provider retrieves its public caption and temporary media; if the caption is incomplete, Foodaya sends the temporary audio to OpenAI for transcription and sends selected frames to Anthropic to read visible recipe text. The temporary media is discarded after the import finishes.
How we use your information
To provide and operate the app's features, process your receipts and photos, generate recipe and meal information, manage your subscription and billing, secure your account, and review reported content.
The community features, and what other people can see
Foodaya has a social side — a recipe feed (“Discover”), profiles, follows, comments, and direct messages. It is off until you confirm you are at least 13. Here is exactly who sees what.
- Public to anyone signed in to Foodaya: your display name and profile photo, any recipe or meal post you set to public, and your comments, replies, likes and reposts on public posts. Your follower and following lists are visible from your profile.
- Private to you: recipes you keep private, your grocery inventory, shopping lists, meal logs, goals, any legacy delivery details, email address, and date of birth. We never show another user your email address.
- Inside a community: what you post, comment and vote in a community stays in that community — it never appears in the main feed or on your profile. In a public community anyone signed in to Foodaya can read it; in a private community only its members can. A community's name, handle, description, banner, size and moderator are visible to anyone browsing communities, private ones included. The moderator of a private community sees who has asked to join it. Moderators are other Foodaya users: they can remove posts from their community, but they cannot see your messages or anything outside it.
- Between the two of you: a conversation started by forwarding a post. Messages are visible to you and the person you are talking to. They are not public and they are not shown to anyone else in the app.
Messages are not end-to-end encrypted. They are stored on our servers so the conversation is there when you come back, and they are sent over encrypted (HTTPS) connections. Because they are stored, we are technically able to read them — and we will, but only in the specific circumstances in the next paragraph. Please don't use Foodaya messages for anything sensitive.
We access the contents of a conversation only when someone in it reports it to us for review, when we are investigating a safety issue, or where the law requires it. We do not read messages to build advertising profiles, we do not sell them, and we do not send message contents to any AI service — the app's Claude-powered features work on recipes, photos and cooking questions, never on your private messages.
Everything you post publicly, and any text you send in a message, is checked against an automated filter for slurs, sexual content and threats before it is stored. Content that trips the filter is rejected outright rather than posted. Photos are not checked automatically — no filter reads a picture — so reporting and blocking are what cover them, and a reported conversation is reviewed by a person, photos included.
Reporting, blocking, and moderation
You can report a post, a comment, a conversation, or a user from within the app, and you can block any other user. Blocking hides their content from you and yours from them, ends any follow between you in both directions, stops them sending you recipes or messages, and hides any conversation you had with them from both of you for as long as the block is in place.
When you file a report, we record who filed it, what was reported, and any reason you gave, and we review it — normally within 24 hours. Reviewing a reported conversation means a member of our team reads the messages in it. Only someone who is actually in a conversation can report it. We may remove reported content and suspend or terminate accounts that break our Terms of Use.
We keep reports after the reported content is gone, so that a pattern of behaviour can be seen across separate complaints.
Third parties we share data with
We share data only with service providers that make the app work — Google (sign-in), Stripe (payment processing on the web), Apple (payment processing in the iOS app, and Apple Maps for finding restaurants), Anthropic (AI photo and text processing), OpenAI (audio transcription), SaveAPI (retrieving public social-post captions and temporary media), and Railway (hosting and database). We do not share your data with anyone else, except your own Claude account if you choose to connect it.
What we do NOT do
We do not sell your personal data, we do not use it for advertising, we do not share it with data brokers, and we do not track you across other companies' apps or websites.
Data retention and account deletion
We keep your data while your account is active. You can delete your account and its associated data from within the app, or by emailing us at foodayasupport@gmail.com. When you delete your account, we remove your personal data and content from our active database — including your posts, comments, likes, follows, blocks, reports, and your conversations, your community memberships and votes, and any community you moderate, together with every post in it. One exception: we keep a scrambled, one-way version of your email address for 7 days after deletion, so the same address cannot immediately be used to open a new account. It is not readable as an email address, is not linked to anything else about you, and is discarded after 7 days.
Two consequences worth knowing before you delete: a conversation has two people in it, so deleting your account removes it for the other person as well; and comments other cooks left on your posts go with those posts.
Security
We protect your data with industry-standard measures, including encrypted (HTTPS) connections and hashed passwords. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, but we take reasonable steps to protect your information.
Children
Foodaya is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13.
Before you can use Foodaya's community features (the recipe feed, profiles, comments, follows, and messages) we ask for your date of birth. If it shows you are 13 or older, we store the date so we don't have to ask again. If it shows you are under 13, we do not keep the date — we record only that the account is not eligible, turn the community features off for it, and discard the date of birth itself. Because we don't keep that date, we can't tell when an ineligible account turns 13, so the age check can simply be answered again after 30 days; the rest of the app stays available the whole time. If you believe a child under 13 has provided us with personal information, contact us at foodayasupport@gmail.com and we will delete it.
Changes to this policy
We may update this policy from time to time. Material changes will be reflected by updating the effective date at the top of this page.
Contact
For any privacy questions or requests, contact us at foodayasupport@gmail.com.