Privacy policy

Your account

When you sign in with Apple, Google or an email code, our sign-in provider, Clerk, handles your email address, name, profile photo and account ID. We never receive your password or sign-in code.

Your household

Who’s in the household and the email addresses of people you invite. Settings such as diets, foods to avoid, kitchen equipment, oven type, units, shopping days, dinner time, cooking-time limits, portions and time zone.

People you add

A name or label, whether they’re a child, an age range, allergies, likes, dislikes, spice level and any notes you write. Allergy information is health information, so we use it only to keep those foods out of your recipes.

Your food

What’s in your kitchen, your recipes and their versions, meal plans, shopping lists (including who ticked what), how dinners went, and the notes Brine has learned from that.

Nutrition and Apple Health

Whether you show nutrition estimates and whether you add dinners to Apple Health. These settings are saved with your account, separately for each person. Brine works out the estimates from each recipe’s ingredients, so they say nothing about you.

If you turn on Add to Apple Health, your iPhone adds each dinner you finish cooking to the Health app: the dish name, the time, and the estimated calories, protein, carbohydrate and fat in the portion you choose. This happens on your iPhone. Brine never reads anything from Apple Health, and what it adds isn’t sent to our servers or to anyone else. We never use Health data for advertising. You can see or delete what Brine added in the Health app.

What you ask for

The text of your requests and searches, and whether you typed or said them. Links, text and screenshots you share to save a recipe. Screenshots are deleted once a recipe has been saved from them.

Your subscription

Whether your household subscribes, the plan, and when it renews or ends. Apple handles payment, so we never see your card details.

How Brine is used

The app sends anonymous usage events, such as finishing setup, planning a week, starting cooking mode or starting a trial. Each event includes your device model, iOS and app versions, your approximate location worked out from your connection, and a random ID the app creates, so we can count people without knowing who they are. We don’t keep your IP address. Events never include your name, email address, household details, recipes or what you ask for, and we don’t record your screen.

Apple Ads

If you installed Brine after tapping one of our Apple Ads, Apple tells us which campaign and ad group it was, without saying who you are. We keep that with your household’s account so we can see which ads lead to people trying Brine, and we never share it.

Website visits

This website counts visits with PostHog and sets no cookies. It records the page, the website or campaign link that sent you, your browser and device type, and whether you tapped the App Store button. We don’t keep your IP address. When you tap the App Store button, the link tells Apple which website or campaign sent you, so Apple can tell us how many downloads each one led to. Apple reports these as totals, never by person. Our hosting provider may keep ordinary request and security logs, which can include an IP address, browser type, the page requested and the time.

We use this information to:

• Create, secure and support your account and household.
• Plan dinners, write recipes and keep your shopping list and kitchen up to date.
• Estimate the calories, protein, carbohydrate and fat in your dinners, and add them to Apple Health if you ask.
• Remember what your household loved and what to change next time.
• Give your household access when it subscribes.
• Prevent abuse, fix faults and keep Brine working.
• Count how Brine and this website are used, so we can improve them.

We do not sell personal information, and we don’t use it for advertising. We use allergy and other health details only because you add them, and you can change or remove them in the app at any time.

Brine listens only while you record, after you tap to speak. Your iPhone turns speech into text on the device using Apple’s speech recognition. The audio never leaves your phone and is never saved. The text is then used exactly as if you had typed it.

Before Brine sends anything to an AI provider, the app asks your permission and shows what is sent and who receives it. Until you agree, nothing is sent, and you can change your answer in your profile at any time.

To write a recipe for your household, we send an AI model what it needs: your request and the relevant household details, such as people’s names, ages, allergies, likes and dislikes, what’s in your kitchen, and how recent dinners went. Screenshots you share are sent so the recipe can be read from them. Dish photos are made from the dish’s name and description only. To estimate nutrition, the AI model receives only the names of ingredients, never anything about you or your household.

The AI providers we use don’t train their models on data sent through their business APIs by default. Their own retention rules apply to requests they receive. We don’t use your data to train an AI model.

Recipes written by AI can contain mistakes. They are cooking ideas, not medical or nutrition advice. Nutrition figures are rough estimates. Always check labels for allergens.

We use specialist providers for work we can’t sensibly do alone. They may use your data only to provide their service to us, and their own policies also apply.

• Clerk handles sign-in and household invitations. See the Clerk privacy policy.
• Convex hosts our database, files and servers. See the Convex privacy policy.
• OpenAI writes recipes and plans, reads shared recipes and screenshots, estimates the nutrition in ingredients and makes dish photos. See the OpenAI privacy policy.
• Anthropic receives the same requests only if OpenAI is unavailable. See the Anthropic privacy policy.
• Typesafe checks that a request to plan the week is about food. It receives the request text, the dates being planned and the names of recent and planned dinners.
• Cloudflare stores and serves dish photos, which contain no personal information. See the Cloudflare privacy policy.
• PostHog counts anonymous app and website usage, stored in the EU. See the PostHog privacy policy.
• Apple and RevenueCat handle App Store purchases and your household’s subscription status. See Apple’s privacy policy and the RevenueCat privacy policy.

When you share a link to a recipe, your iPhone reads the page. If it can’t find the recipe there, our server fetches the page from the website too.

“Share recipes we cook” is on unless you turn it off in Cooking preferences. When it’s on, recipes Brine wrote for you, that you cooked and didn’t mark “not again”, can be suggested to other Brine households. We share the recipe itself (its title, description, ingredients and steps) and how many households cooked or loved it. We never share your account details.

Recipes you saved from elsewhere are never shared. Turning the setting off makes your shared recipes private again.

We share personal data with the providers above only when their work is needed to run Brine. We may also disclose information when reasonably necessary to comply with law, respond to a valid legal request, protect someone from harm, investigate abuse, or protect Brine and its users.

If Brine is reorganised, financed, acquired or transferred, data may move as part of that. Any successor would remain bound by this policy unless it tells you about a change.

We keep your data while you have an account and as long as it’s needed to provide Brine. You can download a copy of it from the app, in Profile, then Account.

Deleting your account, in the same place, removes your name, email and profile and takes you out of your household. If nobody else is left in the household, we also delete its recipes, plans, shopping lists, kitchen, people and everything Brine learned. Deleting the app doesn’t delete your account.

Some things stay after deletion:

• Data you share with people still in your household stays with them.
• The text of past searches, and anonymous counts of how often recipes were cooked.
• Recipes already shared with other households, and recipes saved from public websites.
• Subscription records held by Apple and RevenueCat. Cancel your subscription in the App Store before deleting your account.
• Records we must keep for security, financial or legal reasons, and protected backups until they expire.

• Speak or type. Everything you can say, you can type, so you don’t have to allow the microphone.
• See what Brine learned. Profile shows everything Brine remembers, and you can remove any of it.
• Turn off recipe sharing in Cooking preferences.
• Hide nutrition estimates, or stop adding dinners to Apple Health, in Cooking preferences. You can also take away Brine’s access in the Health app.
• Ask about your data. Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, export, restrict or delete your data, to object to how we use it, and to complain to a data protection authority, such as the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK.

To make a request, email me@andylower.com. We will check that the request comes from the account holder before sharing or deleting anything.

We use signed-in requests, encrypted connections, signed webhooks and restricted service credentials to protect Brine data. No online service can promise perfect security.

Brine and its providers may process data in countries other than yours, including the United States, which can have different data laws. Where required, we rely on recognised safeguards for these transfers.

Brine accounts are for adults. Parents and carers can add children to their household so recipes suit them. Add only what helps, such as an age range, allergies and what they won’t eat. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us and we will remove it.

We may update this policy when Brine, its providers or the law changes. We will change the date at the top, and tell you in the app if a change materially affects how your data is handled.

Questions and requests can be sent to me@andylower.com. Please don’t email a password or sign-in code.