Privacy Policy

Last updated: April 4, 2026

Welcome to Cookbook Buddy. We built this app to protect and organize your personal culinary world, and we believe your kitchen secrets should remain exactly that—secrets. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect and safeguard your data.

1. Information We Collect

We only collect the information absolutely necessary to provide the Cookbook Buddy service. This includes:

• Account Data: Your email address and basic profile information provided during Apple or Google SSO authentication.
• Library Data: The recipes, ingredients, photos, and cookbooks you actively scan or manually input into the app.
• Usage Analytics: Anonymous, aggregated metadata to help us understand app performance and squash bugs.

2. Recipe Privacy & Sharing Boundaries

By default, every physical recipe you digitize, scan, or upload is 100% private to you. We do not expose, share, or publish your personal recipe vault broadly to the internet or other users.

If you choose to use built-in social features to explicitly share a recipe link with friends or family, only those you actively share the link with will have access. At all times, you remain in control of who sees your digitized library.

3. The AI Chef & Data Processing

Cookbook Buddy utilizes advanced artificial intelligence to parse your recipe scans, generate ingredient lists, and offer the interactive "AI Chef" experience. Our stance on AI and privacy is strict:

• We process your recipe data through AI APIs solely to perform actions on your behalf (e.g., formatting a photo into a recipe card or suggesting substitutions).
• We do not use your private recipe data to train foundational AI models. Your personal family recipes will never be harvested to teach an AI how to cook for someone else.

4. Cloud Sync and Backups

To ensure your digital library is available across all your authenticated devices, we synchronize your data using secure, industry-standard cloud databases. If you cancel your Cookbook Club subscription, your cloud-synced data will be retained for a 90-day grace period before being safely purged from our active synchronization servers. Your local on-device data remains yours forever.

5. Account Deletion and Data Retention

You have the fundamental right to be forgotten. You may request to permanently delete your account and all associated cloud data at any time from within the app settings. Once an account is deleted, your synced data is irrecoverable. If you signed in with Apple, you may also revoke our application's access directly through your iOS device settings.

6. Changes to This Policy

We may update our Privacy Policy as Cookbook Buddy evolves. We will notify you of any major changes by noting the revision date at the top of this document or via in-app notifications.