Privacy Policy

When you use Plates, we collect:

• Account info: Your name, email, and (for cooks) legal name and kitchen name. Provided by you at signup.
• Profile info: Bio, photo, dietary flags, kitchen environment, cooking hours, pickup instructions. Provided by you.
• Location: Your home address (if you provide it) and your device's GPS when you use the location-based feed or map. Coordinates are stored to compute distance; approximate location is displayed to other users.
• Order history: What you ordered, from whom, when, and pickup details.
• Messages: Chat messages you send in order threads.
• Reviews and posts: Ratings, comments, and community feed content.
• Payment info: Handled entirely by Stripe. Plates never sees your full card number.
• Technical data: IP address, browser type, device type, and app usage patterns (for debugging and improvement).

We use your info to:

• Operate the Plates marketplace (match buyers and cooks, process orders)
• Show your dishes, posts, and reviews to other users
• Compute proximity for the feed and dish listings
• Send you order updates and account notifications
• Improve the app based on usage patterns
• Enforce our terms of service and prevent fraud

We do not sell your personal data to third parties.

Other users: Other users see your name, avatar, cook profile (if you're a cook), posts, reviews, and approximate location. They do NOT see your email, phone, home address, or payment info.

Third-party services we use:

• Clerk: handles user authentication
• Neon (PostgreSQL): stores our database
• Vercel: hosts the app
• Google Maps: displays maps and pickup addresses; sees your location when you use the map
• Stripe: processes payments (future)

Each of these has their own privacy policy. Plates only shares the minimum data needed for the service to function.

You can:

• Edit your profile info at any time in the app
• Delete your posts and reviews from within the app
• Request account deletion by contacting support. We will delete your personal info within 30 days, subject to legal retention requirements (e.g. transaction records for tax purposes).
• Request a copy of your data by contacting support.

If you are in the EU or UK, you have additional rights under GDPR. If you are in California, you have rights under CCPA. Contact support to exercise them.

Plates uses cookies for:

• Keeping you signed in (Clerk sets authentication cookies)
• Remembering session state within the app
• Loading maps (Google Maps sets cookies)

We do not currently use marketing or analytics cookies. If we add them in the future, we will update this policy and provide a cookie consent choice.

We keep your data as long as your account is active. If you delete your account, we delete your personal data within 30 days, except:

• Transaction records (kept 7 years for tax purposes)
• Data that we're legally required to preserve

Community posts expire and are hard-deleted from our database 24 hours after they were posted.

We take reasonable measures to protect your data: encrypted connections (HTTPS), secure authentication (Clerk), and access controls. No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects you, we will notify you as required by law.

Plates is not intended for anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect data from children. If you believe a child has an account, contact support and we will delete it.

We may update this policy. Material changes will be flagged in the app and we'll ask you to re-accept the terms if the change affects your rights.

Questions about this policy can be sent to support (email in the app footer).