Privacy Policy

1. Information We Collect

Information you give us

• Account information: your email address and a password. Passwords are stored only as a salted cryptographic hash — we cannot read them.
• Preferences you set in the app: preferred grocery store, household size, weekly budget, cuisine and meal preferences, dietary preferences, cooking days, and kitchen equipment. Most preferences are stored on your device; some are stored with your account so your experience syncs.
• Activity in the app: recipes you save, recipes you view, and your weekly meal plan and grocery-list checkmarks (your plan and checkmarks are stored on your device).
• Support communications: if you contact us, we receive your email address and the contents of your message.

Information collected automatically

• Session and security data: when you sign in, we record the session's IP address, device information, and timestamps. We use this to secure accounts and invalidate stolen or expired sessions.
• Usage analytics: we collect app interaction events (for example: screens viewed, recipe viewed, grocery item checked) together with a user identifier, so we can understand how PlatePal is used and improve it.
• Purchase and subscription status: whether your subscription is active, the product purchased, and expiration dates. Payment itself is processed entirely by Apple — we never see or store your payment card details.
• Advertising measurement events: we send a limited set of anonymized app events (such as app install and free-trial start) to our advertising-measurement partners using Apple's privacy-preserving frameworks (SKAdNetwork and Aggregated Event Measurement).

Information we do NOT collect

• We do not collect your location (precise or coarse).
• We do not access your contacts, photos, microphone, camera, or health data.
• We do not collect or use your device's advertising identifier (IDFA), and we do not track you across other companies' apps or websites. Because we do not track, the app does not display an App Tracking Transparency prompt — there is nothing to ask permission for.

2. How We Use Information

• Provide the Service: build your weekly meal plan, generate grocery lists, sync saved recipes, and remember your preferences
• Maintain and secure accounts and sessions, and prevent fraud and abuse
• Process and honor subscriptions and free trials
• Understand feature usage and improve the app
• Measure the effectiveness of our advertising in aggregate (no cross-app tracking, no advertising identifiers)
• Respond to support requests
• Comply with legal obligations

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with data brokers.

3. Who We Share Information With

We share personal information only with service providers who process it on our behalf, under contracts that limit their use of your data to providing services to us. These fall into the following categories:

• Cloud hosting and infrastructure providers — operate our servers and database (account data, saved recipes, viewing history, session records)
• Payment processing — purchases and subscriptions are handled by Apple through the App Store under Apple's own privacy policy; a subscription-management provider processes your app user ID and subscription status
• Analytics providers — process usage events and a user identifier
• Advertising-measurement partners — receive anonymized, aggregated app events only, via Apple's privacy-preserving measurement frameworks; never your advertising identifier or cross-app activity
• Content delivery networks — serve recipe images and receive standard web-request data (such as IP address) when images load

We may also disclose information if required by law, to protect our rights or users' safety, or as part of a business transfer (we would notify you of any change in ownership).

4. Data Retention

• Account data, saved recipes, and viewing history are kept while your account is active.
• Session records expire and are invalidated automatically; expired sessions are retained only for security auditing.
• Preferences, meal plans, and grocery checkmarks stored on your device remain until you delete the app or reset them.
• If you delete your account, we delete your account record, sessions, saved recipes, viewing history, and subscription records from our systems. Service providers retain aggregated data per their own retention schedules.

5. Deleting Your Account & Your Choices

• Delete your account in the app: Settings → Delete my account. This permanently removes your PlatePal account and associated data from our servers.
• Subscriptions: deleting your account does not cancel an active Apple subscription — manage or cancel it in iOS Settings → Apple ID → Subscriptions, or via Settings → Manage subscription in the app.
• Local data: deleting the app from your device removes locally stored preferences, plans, and checkmarks.
• Email us at support@joinvaluehive.com to request access, correction, or deletion of your data at any time.

6. Your Privacy Rights

Depending on where you live, you may have rights including access, correction, deletion, portability, restriction of processing, and objection to processing.

• European Union / United Kingdom (GDPR/UK GDPR): our legal bases are performance of a contract (providing the Service), legitimate interests (security, analytics, service improvement), and consent where required. You may lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority.
• California (CCPA/CPRA): we do not sell or “share” (as defined by the CPRA) personal information. You have the right to know, delete, correct, and to non-discrimination for exercising your rights.

To exercise any right, email support@joinvaluehive.com. We will verify your request via your account email and respond within the legally required timeframe.

7. Security

We use industry-standard safeguards: passwords are cryptographically hashed, transport is encrypted with HTTPS/TLS, session tokens expire and can be revoked, and production data access is restricted. No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure, but we work to protect your information appropriately.

8. Children's Privacy

PlatePal is not directed at children under 13 (or the minimum age in your jurisdiction), and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has provided us personal information, contact us and we will delete it.

9. International Transfers

Our servers are located in the United States. If you use PlatePal from outside the U.S., your information will be transferred to and processed in the U.S. Where required, we rely on appropriate safeguards for such transfers.

10. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy from time to time. We will post the updated version here with a revised “Last updated” date, and for material changes we will provide notice in the app. Continued use of the Service after changes take effect constitutes acceptance.

11. Contact Us