Privacy Policy

Account information. Your email address and password (stored only as a secure hash by our sign-in provider), or, if you sign in with Apple or Google, the basic details they share: your name and email (Apple lets you hide your email).

Your profile. Username, display name, photo, bio, city, and the cuisines and dietary preferences you choose, plus the dishes you rate when you first join.

What you post. Photos and videos (videos include the sound they were recorded with), the restaurant and dish, your score and dish ratings, the price you paid, dietary and vibe tags, and your caption. Also your comments, likes, saves, lists, follows, and the “which was better?” comparisons you make.

Menu photos. If you photograph a restaurant’s menu, we keep the photo with that restaurant and read the dishes from it.

Camera and microphone. Used only when you take a photo or record a video to post. We receive only what you choose to post.

Taste signals. Quiet signals of how you use Mirch: posts you open, watch or skip and for roughly how long, and restaurants and dishes you tap into. Together with your ratings, likes, saves and lists, these build a taste profile (a set of numbers, not a description of you) that we use to personalise Mirch.

Location, only if you allow it. Your device’s location while you use Mirch, to show restaurants, dishes and posts nearby and to suggest where you ate. It’s sent with each request and isn’t stored as a history of where you’ve been. Your last approximate location (to about 100 metres) is kept on your phone only, so nearby places show at once when you open the app; it’s erased if you turn location off. You can turn it off any time in your device settings; Mirch still works without it.

Searches. What you search for, to find matching dishes and restaurants. Search results we’ve already worked out are cached by the search words alone, not linked to you.

Invites. If you join through someone’s invite link, we record who invited you, and you’ll follow them.

Notifications. If you turn on notifications, a push token for your device (from Apple, or your browser’s push service) and basic device details, so we can tell you about likes, comments and follows.

Reports, blocks and safety records. Reports you make, people you block, and a record of posts or comments our automated checks removed or held (what was flagged and a short excerpt of the words).

Technical data. IP address and basic device and browser details, used for security and rate limiting, plus logs our hosting providers keep. If the app crashes it may send us a short error report; it doesn’t include your posts.

• To run Mirch (to provide the service you asked for): your account and profile, posting, comments, follows, lists, invites and notifications.
• To personalise (to provide the service, and our legitimate interest in making it useful): ranking your feed, “for you” dishes and restaurants, taste matches with other diners, group picks, and your taste summary.
• To keep Mirch safe (our legitimate interest, and legal obligations): screening new posts and comments, reviewing reports, enforcing our Terms, and preventing spam and abuse.
• To fix and improve the app, and to contact you about your account (for example confirming your email).
• Location, camera, microphone and notifications are used only with your permission, which you can withdraw at any time.

What other people see. Your profile (name, username, photo, bio, city, favourite cuisines, taste summary) and your posts, scores, ratings, tags, prices and comments are visible to other Mirch users, along with your follows and public lists. Your invite page (mirch.app/i/your-username) shows your name, photo, city, counts, favourite cuisines and a few of your top-rated dishes to anyone on the web, including people who aren’t signed in. When someone plans a meal with a group that includes you, Mirch uses your taste to score places for the group; it shows match percentages, never your raw taste profile or activity. Private lists, your saves, searches, taste signals and location aren’t shown to anyone.

Mirch uses AI models from OpenAI for a few specific jobs:

• Safety checks. Every new post’s photos, a few frames from each video, and its words, and every new comment, are checked automatically for nudity, sexual content, graphic violence, hate and threats. Posts are also checked for whether they’re about food or a place to eat.
• Search and matching. Your searches, and the text of dishes, restaurants, captions and tags, are turned into numbers (“embeddings”) so we can match taste and find what you’re looking for. An AI model helps judge which results really match a search.
• Dishes and restaurants. Reading dishes from menu photos, tidying and merging duplicate dishes, detecting cuisines, picking a restaurant’s colours from its photos, and writing short dish summaries from what diners have posted.
• Your taste, explained. A few plain sentences about your taste, written from your ratings and shown on your profile.

We don’t send OpenAI your email, password, location or contact details. OpenAI processes this data for us under its API terms, which say it isn’t used to train their models. AI output can be wrong; see our Terms. Automated checks can remove a post or comment that breaks our rules; if you think one got it wrong, write to support@mirch.app and a person will look.

We share data only with providers that process it on our behalf, under contract, to run the service:

• Supabase: our database, sign-in, and profile photo storage.
• Cloudflare (R2): stores and delivers the photos and videos you post, menu photos, and our encrypted database backups.
• Vercel: hosts the Mirch website and app server.
• OpenAI: the AI features above.
• Google Maps Platform: restaurant search, details, opening hours and photos. Restaurant searches and, when you use “where did you eat?” nearby suggestions, your location are sent to Google. See Google’s Privacy Policy.
• OpenFreeMap (map tiles) and logo.dev (restaurant logos): your device loads these directly, so they see your IP address and which map area or logo is shown.
• Apple: Sign in with Apple and push notifications on iPhone. Google: Google sign-in, if you choose it.
• GitHub: runs our nightly database backup job.

We may also disclose information if the law requires it, to protect someone’s safety, or as part of a merger or sale of Mirch (in which case this policy would continue to apply).

We don’t sell or rent your personal information, and we don’t share it with advertisers or data brokers.

Mirch doesn’t show third-party ads, doesn’t use advertising identifiers or third-party analytics, and doesn’t track you across other companies’ apps or websites. We use cookies and device storage only to keep you signed in, make the app fast, and remember settings such as your theme.

• Edit your profile, and edit or delete any post or comment, at any time.
• Delete your account from Profile → Settings → Delete account. This permanently deletes your account, profile, posts, photos and videos, comments, likes, saves, lists, follows, taste profile and history, notifications, devices, invites, and the reports and blocks you made.
• Permissions. Location, camera, microphone and notifications are off unless you allow them, and you can change them in your device settings.
• Block anyone, and report anything that breaks our rules.

Depending on where you live (for example the EU, UK, Canada or California), you may have the right to access, correct, delete or get a copy of your data, to restrict or object to how we use it, and to withdraw consent. Write to support@mirch.app and we’ll respond within 30 days; we may need to confirm it’s you. We won’t treat you differently for using these rights. You can also complain to your local data protection authority.

We keep your information while your account is open. When you delete your account, it’s removed from our live systems straight away. Nightly database backups are kept for 30 days, so a copy can remain in a backup until it expires.

Some things outlive an account, without your name attached:

• Menu photos you added and dishes you created stay with the restaurant, so the menu stays useful for others.
• Dish summaries and averages already worked out from many diners’ posts are updated as posts disappear, but may take a little while.
• Safety records of content we removed or held are kept to handle appeals and stop repeat abuse.
• Server logs are kept by our hosting providers for a short period.

Data is encrypted in transit, and database access is limited by row-level security so people can only change their own things. Only a small number of people who run Mirch can access user data, and only when needed. No system is perfectly secure, but we work to protect yours and will tell you if a breach affects you where the law requires it.

Mirch is run from Canada, and our providers may store and process data in the United States, Canada and other countries. Where the law requires it, we rely on appropriate safeguards (such as standard contractual clauses) for these transfers.

Mirch isn’t for children under 13 (or the minimum age where you live), and we don’t knowingly collect their information. If you think a child has an account, tell us at support@mirch.app and we’ll delete it.

We’ll update this policy as Mirch changes, change the date at the top, and tell you in the app about significant changes before they take effect. Questions or requests about your privacy: support@mirch.app.