Privacy Policy

1. Summary (the short version)

• We collect what we need to run a plate-rating service: your account details, the reviews and content you create, and how you use the app.
• Some information is optional, including your birth year, your home location, and your favorite cuisines. You can use PlateRanks fully without providing any of it.
• We use your favorite cuisines to give you better recommendations from day one.
• Only if you opt in, we may include your information in anonymized, aggregate trends we show to restaurants about their customers, for example “diners here tend to be 25–34.” These trends never show your birth year, your location, or who you are, and we never show a trend unless at least 25 different people are represented in it.
• Separately, restaurants see totals, such as views of their PlateRanks page, scans of the QR codes they print, and, for some restaurants, the most common searches made near them. These totals never show who you are, and they do not depend on that opt-in.
• Restaurants can read your reviews of them, with your name. A restaurant you have reviewed may also see how often you come back, send you offers, or send you a private message about a poor experience. You can turn off offers and messages in your settings (Section 4.1).
• We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with third-party data brokers.
• You can view, edit, or delete your optional information, and withdraw your consent, at any time in your profile settings.

2. Information we collect

2.1 Information you provide when you create an account

• Your username, full name, and email address. Everyone can see your username. Sections 4.1 and 4.2 explain who can see your full name.
• A profile picture, if you add one. It shows next to your username.
• Your password (if you register with email and password), stored only as a secure hash, never in plain text.
• Your Google account identifier (if you sign in with Google). We receive your Google-verified email, name, and a user identifier, never your Google password.
• Your Apple account identifier (if you sign in with Apple). We receive an Apple user identifier, the email address Apple shares with us (which may be a private relay address), and your name if you choose to share it. We never receive your Apple password. We also keep a token from Apple so we can disconnect Sign in with Apple when you delete your account.
• If you sign up with Google or Apple, we start your username from the name they share with us or, if Apple shares no name, from the part of your email address before the @. Everyone can see your username, so you can change it at any time in your settings.

2.2 Optional information you may choose to provide

All of the following are optional. The Service works fully whether or not you provide them, and we do not withhold features if you decline.

• Birth year. We collect only the year, not your full date of birth. We use it to estimate an age range; we never display or share your exact birth year.
• Home location. You may give a default location, either by letting us use your device’s location, which saves that location rounded to about 1 kilometer, or by entering a city, state, or ZIP code. We use it to find plates near you and to estimate how far you typically travel to a restaurant. We may also use it to set your default search location, which you can change or remove in your settings.
• Favorite cuisines. You may select up to five cuisines you prefer.

Whether this optional information may be used to produce anonymized trends shown to restaurants is governed by a separate, explicit consent (Sections 3.2 and 5.1). Providing the information is not the same as consenting to that use.

2.3 Content you create

• Reviews and ratings of plates and restaurants: your scores (taste, portion size, presentation, memorability, and your overall experience), whether you would order a plate again, a cost indication, which meal it was (such as lunch or dinner), whether the meal was to-go, and what you write. When you review a restaurant, we also record that you visited it that day.
• Photos you attach to reviews.
• Menus you add to a restaurant’s page in our app, as a photo or a PDF. We read the dishes from it, add them to the restaurant’s menu, and record that you added them. We do not keep the photo or file itself.
• Posts you share with your followers, including any photos and the restaurant or plates you tag, and your comments and likes.
• Your “Want to Try” plates, the reviews you save, the restaurants and users you follow, and any dashboard links you generate to share your activity.
• Reports you make about other people’s content or messages, and the people you block.
• Replies you send to a restaurant’s private message, the offers restaurants send you, and when you use an offer code.

2.4 Information collected automatically when you use the Service

• Usage and interaction data: searches you run and items you view, tap, or open, associated with a randomly generated device/session identifier, a source label (web, Android, or iOS), and your account when you are signed in.
• Location for search. When you search, we use your device’s location if you allow it, the place you type, or the default search location you saved. We save that location with the search, along with what you searched for, the device/session identifier described above, and your account if you are signed in. We keep these search records for up to 90 days (Section 6). Restaurants never see who searched (Section 4.1). Granting location permission is optional, and you can turn it off in your device or browser settings.
• Decide spins (our iOS and Android apps). When you use Decide to pick a place, we save the filters you chose, such as meal, price, and distance, the area you spun from (rounded to about 100 meters), anyone you added, the place we picked, and whether you went with it. If someone else adds you to their spin, we save that you were included, unless you have turned off group picks (Section 4.2). We keep this history until you delete your account.
• Basic technical data needed to deliver and secure the Service, such as your device’s network address when it contacts our servers.
• Cookies and browser storage (our websites). We use cookies to keep you signed in and to protect sign-in from misuse. On plateranks.com, cookies also remember where to send you after you sign in and, when you sign in with Google or Apple, that you were shown our Terms. Your browser there also stores the random identifier described above, a copy of your basic account details, any review you have started but not sent, and, after you scan a restaurant’s QR code, a note of that scan, which stays in that browser tab until you close it. We do not use advertising cookies, and our websites do not load third-party analytics or tracking scripts.
• Error and speed reports (our website). plateranks.com sends us page-speed measurements and, when something fails, an error report. These include the page address, your browser type, and your account if you are signed in.
• App analytics (our iOS and Android apps). Our apps use Google’s Firebase Analytics to understand how they are used. It records steps you take in the app, such as opening it, signing in, finishing onboarding, choosing whether to allow notifications, and starting, leaving, or submitting a review, with the PlateRanks IDs of the restaurant, plate, or review involved and, when something fails, the error message. It also collects device and app information, such as your device model, operating system, app version, and general region, and an identifier Firebase creates for the app on your device. On iOS it also records your PlateRanks account ID while you are signed in. We do not use any of this for advertising.
• Crash reports (our iOS and Android apps). Our apps use Google’s Firebase Crashlytics. When an app crashes, it sends a report with technical details, such as your device model, operating system, app version, and what the app was doing. On iOS, reports also cover some errors that do not crash the app, include your PlateRanks account ID while you are signed in, and, when a request fails, can include which PlateRanks address the app was calling, without the searches, locations, or other details sent with it.
• Notifications (our iOS and Android apps). If you allow notifications, the app registers your device with Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging (on iOS, together with Apple’s push notification service) and sends us the device’s notification token, the app version, and your time zone. We keep these with your account, along with the notification settings you choose, such as quiet hours, so we may send you notifications. Signing out removes the token. Notifications about restaurant offers have their own rule. On iPhone, we send them only if you turn on “Offers from restaurants.” On Android, they come with “Restaurant replies and offers,” which is on unless you turn it off. You can change either in the app’s notification settings, and you can turn notifications off at any time in your device settings.

In our own usage-analytics records (the first item above), we deliberately avoid capturing sensitive fields and filter out things like full web addresses and authentication tokens.

2.5 Restaurant QR codes

Some restaurants print a PlateRanks QR code on their table tents or on flyers they put in to-go orders. A few may also have printed one on their receipts. Each restaurant has one code of each kind. Each code is the same for every guest and is never tied to an order.

• When you scan one. When you open a restaurant’s PlateRanks page from one of these codes, on our website or in our app, we record the scan: the restaurant, which code you used, the time, the device/session identifier and source label described in Section 2.4, and your account if you are signed in. Each day, we count how many different phones or browsers scanned each code.
• When you review after a scan. If the scan leads you to review that restaurant and you submit the review within 24 hours of the scan, we note on that review which code it came from. This note is never shown on the review, not even to you, and it is deleted along with the review.

Section 4.1 explains what restaurants see.

2.6 If you manage a restaurant

If you use our restaurant portal, we also collect: your role at the restaurant and how you proved it, including any documents you upload, which we keep private; the details you send when you ask us to add a restaurant; the email addresses of people you invite to your team; messages and files you send our support team; your replies to reviews; the menus, photos, posts, offers, and messages you add or send; and when you accepted our Merchant Terms. If you import a menu file from your point-of-sale system, your browser reads the file and sends us only its rows. We keep counts, not the file.

2.7 If you joined our early-access list

We keep your email address, the area you typed, and whether you said you run a restaurant. We use them to send you a confirmation and one email when PlateRanks opens near you. Email support@plateranks.com to be removed. If you delete a PlateRanks account with the same email address, we remove you from the list too.

3. How we use information

3.1 To provide and personalize the Service

To run your account, power search and social features, compute community ratings, and personalize recommendations. Your selected favorite cuisines help us personalize recommendations for you from the start, before you have written any reviews. This personalization is core functionality and does not depend on the separate consent below. We build a taste profile from your ratings, the reviews you save, and your “Want to Try” list, and use it to personalize what we show you. When we calculate community ratings, we adjust each review for the reviewer’s rating habits, for example if someone rates everything very high, and we may count some reviews more than others. When other people see your reviews in their feed or open a link to one, their app or browser may also receive the score we use to decide how much your reviews count.

3.2 To produce anonymized, aggregate insights for restaurants, only with your consent

If, and only if, you opt in (Section 5.1), we may include your information in aggregate trends we provide to restaurants about the people who review them, such as typical age ranges, how far reviewers travel, when they tend to visit, or how their stated cuisine preferences relate to how they rated the restaurant. To protect you:

• They are always aggregated across many people. These trends never show a restaurant your name, your birth year, your exact location, or anything else tied to you as an individual. Section 4.1 explains what a restaurant can see about you outside these trends.
• We never show a trend unless at least 25 different people are represented in it. Below that, the restaurant sees “not enough data,” never a smaller number. This exists specifically to prevent a restaurant from inferring anything about any single identifiable customer.

3.3 To keep the Service safe and improve it

To prevent fraud, abuse, and violations of our terms, respond to security incidents, analyze usage to improve features, and comply with legal obligations.

4. How we share information

4.1 With restaurants

As described in Section 3.2, and only with your consent, we may share anonymized, aggregate trends with restaurants about their reviewers. We never give a restaurant your birth year, your home location, your favorite cuisines, or your email address. A restaurant can see these things about you as a person:

• Your reviews. A restaurant can read the reviews you write about it in its dashboard, in the emails we send it, and in its reports, along with your name. If you gave us your full name, the restaurant sees it, even if you don’t share it with friends. Otherwise it sees your username. We never show a restaurant your answer to “would you order this again?” It sees only the share of diners who said yes, and our Merchant Terms forbid it from trying to work out yours.
• Its guest list. A restaurant using our paid guest tools can see a list of diners who have a public review there and have come back, or are new. For each one, it sees the diner’s name, whether they are a regular, a lapsed regular, or a new guest, how many different days they visited in the past year, how many days ago their first and last visits were, and how many reviews they wrote there. We count a visit on each day you review the restaurant. It also sees how many diners are in each group, which can include you even when your name is not on the list.
• Offers. A restaurant may send an offer or an event invitation to its regular, lapsed, or new guests, as a notification in PlateRanks. It picks a whole group, or chooses guests from its list. You get at most one offer from the same restaurant every 15 days. Some offers come with a code. If you use the code at the restaurant, the restaurant sees your name. Offers are on unless you turn them off in your settings.
• Private messages. If you post a review with an overall score of 5 or lower out of 10, the restaurant may start one private conversation with you through PlateRanks within 45 days to try to make things right. It can’t change or remove your review. You can reply, decline, report the message, or turn off restaurant messages in your settings, which also closes any open conversation. Restaurant messages are on unless you turn them off. Our staff can also read these conversations, for example to help the restaurant, to look into a report, or to enforce our terms.

Restaurants also see totals, such as views of and clicks on their PlateRanks page. A restaurant using our paid tools can also see the most common searches made near it, such as “ramen” or “Italian.” We list a search only after at least 10 different people made it, we round each count down to the nearest 5, and we never show who searched or exactly where they were. These totals do not use your optional information, do not depend on the consent in Section 5.1, and never show who you are. For the QR codes described in Section 2.5, a restaurant sees only:

• how many times each code was scanned in the last 30 days, where the same phone or browser scanning the same code more than once in a day counts once; and
• how many reviews came from a scan over the last 4 full weeks. We round this number down to the nearest 5, and we do not show it at all until at least 10 different diners have reviewed from a scan in that time.

A restaurant never sees who scanned a code, or which review came from a scan.

4.2 With other users

Other people can see what you share on PlateRanks:

• Your reviews. Anyone, even without an account, can see your reviews, with their scores and photos, on restaurant pages and review links, along with your username. Making your profile private does not hide these.
• Your profile. People signed in to PlateRanks can see your profile, including your “Want to Try” list, top plates, top restaurants, recent reviews, and badges, and your place on leaderboards. Your profile picture shows next to your username. If you make your profile private, your profile page shows its lists, reviews, and badges only to you and your followers, and new followers need your approval unless you choose to accept everyone. Your username, profile picture, follower, following, and review counts, and your title and place on leaderboards still show.
• Your posts and activity. Your posts, and your new reviews unless you turn that off, show in your followers’ feeds. Comments and likes are visible to the people who can see the post or review.
• Your full name. We show your full name to people who follow you and whom you follow back, only if you choose to share it. Separately, unless you turn it off in your settings, other signed-in users can find you by your full name when they search for people, and see your full name when you appear in their results. Restaurants see it as described in Section 4.1.
• Group spins. If someone you follow who also follows you runs a group “Decide” spin and adds you, we may use your taste profile to pick places for the group, and show them a line like “Sam would go for the tacos.” We never show them your scores or what you dislike. If you don’t want your taste used this way, turn off “Use my taste in friends’ group picks” in your settings. We then leave you out of your friends’ group spins.
• Shared dashboards. Anyone signed in who has your dashboard link can see your dashboard, including your plate reviews and badges, even if your profile is private. Our apps and website receive that link when they show you to other people in comments, feeds, notifications, and friend lists. Without signing in, someone with the link sees only your username and how many reviews you have written.
• Blocking. If you block someone, we hide your profile’s lists, reviews, and badges from them, and theirs from you.

Please keep this in mind when writing reviews or attaching photos.

4.3 With service providers who operate the Service on our behalf

Trusted providers that process information only to provide services to us, under contractual obligations. These include:

• Cloud hosting and infrastructure (Google Cloud), which hosts our servers and database and stores the photos and files you upload.
• Mapping and places data (Geoapify), used to find restaurants and turn places into map locations. It receives what you search for, the location you search from, and, if you use your device’s location as your home location, that location. It does not receive your name or account.
• AI services (Google’s Gemini and Cloud Vision), which we use to pick out what diners praise or criticize about a plate from the text of their reviews (for this, the AI receives review text, not who wrote it), choose the main photo for a plate from the photos diners have added, read the dishes from a menu photo or PDF you add and from menus restaurants publish on their own websites, and suggest a course and meals for menu items a restaurant imports from its point-of-sale system. For that last one, the AI receives item names and menu categories, not information about diners. We also use these services to check whether the profile image a restaurant uploads already shows the restaurant’s name, so its printed table tents, to-go flyers, and award certificates do not repeat the name. For this, the AI receives that image and the restaurant’s name, not information about diners. We may also turn on a feature that uses these services to find the problems, suggestions and unmet expectations that several diners raise in their written reviews of a plate (for example “arrived cold,” or “not spicy” for a plate the menu calls spicy). The restaurant would see these in its dashboard, emails and reports as short labels and a count of how many diners raised each one, and could open the reviews behind each one, which it can already read along with the reviewer’s name. If several diners describe a health or safety problem with a plate, such as getting sick, we may also alert the restaurant’s team and our own staff, with counts only, not who wrote the reviews. For these, the AI receives the review text, whether the meal was to-go, and the plate’s name, menu description, course and cuisine, not who wrote the review. We send all of this through our paid Google account. Under Google’s terms for paid use, Google does not use it to improve its products. We do not use these services to make decisions about you.
• Email delivery (Resend), which sends our emails to you, such as password and email-change codes, notices about your account and your reviews, and, if you manage a restaurant, emails about your restaurant. Resend receives your email address and the content of each email.
• Support email (Google Workspace), which hosts our support@plateranks.com inbox and the messages you send to it.
• App analytics, crash reports, and notification delivery (Google Firebase), for our iOS and Android apps, as described in Section 2.4. On iOS, any push notifications we send go through Apple’s push notification service.

Google Places works differently. Some searches also go to Google’s Places service so we can find restaurants. Google receives what you searched for and the area you searched in, not your name or account. Google is not acting only on our behalf here: it uses this information under its own terms and its privacy policy, at policies.google.com/privacy.

4.4 For legal reasons, safety, and business transfers

We may disclose information if required by law, legal process, or governmental request, or where we believe disclosure is necessary to protect the rights, property, or safety of PlateRanks, our users, or the public. If PlateRanks is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, information may be transferred as part of that transaction, subject to this policy.

4.5 What we do not do

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with third-party data brokers or advertising networks. If this ever changes, we will update this policy, notify you, and, where required, obtain your consent and provide the opt-out choices the law requires first.

5. Your choices and rights

5.1 Consent for aggregate restaurant insights

This use is off by default and happens only if you explicitly opt in. You can turn it on or off anytime in your profile. If you turn it off, your information stops being included in any future insights; insights already generated before then are not retroactively changed. We keep an internal record of when you grant or withdraw consent, under which policy version, and the network address and browser or app it came from, so we can honor your choice.

5.2 Access, correct, and delete your optional information

You can view, edit, or delete your birth year, home location, and cuisine preferences anytime from your profile. Deleting this information removes it from future use; as noted above, it does not alter insights already generated before deletion. Your default search location is a separate setting. You can remove it in your settings.

5.3 Location, account, and your privacy rights

Location access is optional and controlled by your device. You can grant or revoke it in your device or browser settings at any time.

You can edit or delete a review for 30 days after you post it. Deleting your account removes all of your reviews. If someone reports a review, post, or comment of yours, we keep a copy of what it said with the report, so we can still look into it if you edit or delete it. We delete that copy when you delete your account. You can permanently delete your account at any time from Settings in the app or on our website, or by emailing us at support@plateranks.com. We delete the data tied to your account, except the few things listed on our Delete your account page.

Your privacy rights. Wherever you live, you can ask us to: tell you what personal information we have about you and send you a copy; correct information that is wrong; and delete your information. Email support@plateranks.com from the address on your account. If you signed in with Apple and hid your email, tell us your PlateRanks username. We will check that the request comes from you before we act on it, and we will answer within 45 days. If we can’t do what you ask, we will tell you why, and you can reply to ask us to look at it again. We will not treat you differently for using these rights. We do not sell your personal information, and we do not use it for ads from ad networks. Restaurants you have reviewed can send you offers through PlateRanks, and they choose who gets them from how often you visit (Section 4.1). Offers are on unless you turn them off in your settings. If we ever start selling personal information or using it for ads from ad networks, we will update this policy first and, where the law requires, ask for your consent or give you a way to opt out before we do it. Depending on where you live, you may have other rights under local law, and we will honor them as that law requires.

6. Retention, security, and children

We keep your information while your account is active and as needed to provide the Service. We retain certain information longer where necessary to comply with legal obligations, resolve disputes, enforce our agreements, and maintain security. Raw usage and interaction records (the analytics events in Section 2.4) are retained for up to 90 days, after which they are automatically deleted. This includes the QR code scans in Section 2.5. The note on a review saying which QR code it came from stays with the review and is deleted along with it. The search records described in Section 2.4, including the location you searched from, are also deleted after 90 days. Decide spin history is kept until you delete your account. If you joined our early-access list, we keep your email address until you ask us to remove it or you delete your PlateRanks account. Deleted information can stay in our encrypted backups, and in a private copy of our database we use for testing, until those copies are replaced. Anonymized, aggregate information may be kept without those limits.

We encrypt data in transit (with certificate pinning in our mobile apps), store passwords only as hashes, and store authentication tokens in protected device storage (the system keychain on iOS, encrypted storage on Android) and, on our websites, in secure cookies that page scripts can’t read. No system is perfectly secure.

PlateRanks is not meant for anyone under 16, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If you believe someone under 16 has given us information, contact us at support@plateranks.com and we will delete it.

7. Where information is processed and changes to this policy

We operate using cloud infrastructure that may process and store information in the United States. If you use the Service from outside the United States, you understand that your information may be processed in the United States. Some of our service providers may also process information in other countries.

When we make material changes to this policy, for example collecting a new category of information, we will update the version and effective date, and where the change affects how your optional information may be used, tell you before the new use takes effect and, where the law requires, ask for your consent again.

8. Contact us

If you have questions about this policy or how we handle your information, contact us at:

PlateRanks LLC
Attn: Privacy
16350 Bruce B Downs Blvd, PO Box 46694
Tampa, FL 33646
support@plateranks.com

This policy is governed by the laws of the State of Florida, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.