At Oui Chef, we respect your privacy and are committed to protecting your personal data. This privacy policy explains how we handle your information when you use our services.
1. Information We Collect
We only collect the minimum amount of information necessary to provide our services:
- Account Information: If you register an account, we store your email address and authentication details.
- Support Requests: If you submit the support form, we store your reply email address, subject, message, and submission time in Firebase to handle your issue and contact you about it. We also keep a hashed IP address and submission count to limit repeated submissions. Support requests are private and are not publicly accessible.
- Recipe Data: We store the recipes you import, generate, or save in your personal library.
- Cooking Requests and Preferences: We collect the messages, recipe links, ingredients, dietary preferences, and other information you enter or dictate and submit. We process your conversation history and selected Dish Ideas to respond to your requests. We store Custom instructions you save and include them in subsequent AI cooking requests to Google’s Gemini API. Cooking requests and Custom instructions may contain personal information, such as allergies. Saved Custom instructions are not added to search requests sent to OpenRouter. Private recipe ratings and notes are stored for your own use and are excluded from AI recipe search and public recipes.
- Dinner Conversation Media: Voice recordings are sent securely for transcription and discarded immediately after the text transcript is produced; recordings are not saved. Ingredient photos are stored privately for up to 24 hours so your current dinner conversation can survive a reload, then deleted automatically. Starting over or deleting your account deletes those photos sooner.
- Usage Costs: We track provider costs associated with your access pass to enforce token and trial limits.
- Private Product Analytics: We record pseudonymous visits to the marketing home and app, referring website domains, cooking sessions started and completed, recipes shared and opened, Access Pass purchases, raw AI provider cost, coarse platform/install/device categories, and whether hands-free camera activation succeeds or fails. Hands-free diagnostics use fixed categories such as permission denied and CPU/GPU runtime; we do not retain camera images, raw user-agent strings, exception text, recipe text, cooking requests, prompts, email addresses, full referring URLs, or advertising identifiers in the analytics ledger.
2. How We Use Your Information
We use your information to operate, maintain, and improve the features of Oui Chef, including transcribing voice replies, interpreting ingredient photos and dinner preferences with third-party AI service providers, ranking your own saved recipes when requested, processing recipe URLs, rendering step-by-step cooking guides, understanding whether cooks can complete those guides, and processing transactions securely via Stripe.
Oui Chef uses a first-party pseudonymous browser identifier to understand which referring website brought a visitor to the marketing home or app and whether a marketing visit leads to an app visit. This identifier expires after 30 days. Oui Chef does not use third-party advertising analytics, or cross-site advertising cookies for this reporting.
3. Sharing of Information
We do not sell or share your personal data with third parties, except as necessary to provide our service (such as Stripe for payments and Firebase for hosting/database services).
AI cooking — Google Gemini API: Oui Chef sends cooking messages and conversation history, ingredients, dietary preferences, Custom instructions, selected Dish Ideas, and imported recipe links and recipe content to Google through its Gemini API to suggest meals, create guided recipes, and generate Dish Idea images. On the web, Google also processes submitted voice recordings for transcription and ingredient photos for interpretation. Information you submit may contain personal data. Include only information you want to share with the identified providers.
Google's paid-service data protections: Oui Chef uses the paid Gemini API. Under Google's paid-service terms, prompts and responses are not used to train Google's models or improve its products. Google may keep them temporarily to prevent abuse and meet legal disclosure obligations. Its Data Processing Addendum governs processing on our behalf and requires security measures, confidentiality, restricted access, and controls on subprocessors. Google may process data in countries where it or its agents operate. This assurance applies to Google's paid Gemini API; the other AI providers have their own terms, described on our AI providers page.
OpenRouter data protections: OpenRouter receives search text and recipe content for search and indexing, and routes it to the Inception and Qwen model providers described on our AI providers page. Its Data Processing Agreement provides for confidentiality and security measures and requires written agreements with subprocessors containing data-protection obligations no less protective than its agreement, as applicable to their services. OpenRouter's Privacy Policy states that it does not train models on inputs or outputs; downstream providers have their own data-use and retention terms. Saved Custom instructions are not added to OpenRouter search requests.
iPhone/iPad AI permission: Before its first AI request, the app identifies the recipients and information shared and asks for explicit permission. You may decline, or later withdraw permission in Settings → Privacy → Withdraw AI permission, to stop future AI requests from that device. Requests already sent cannot be recalled. Opening, cooking, saving, and sharing existing recipes remain available without AI permission. AI-assisted search and other AI requests from the app require AI permission. Saved-recipe indexing is automatic server maintenance and is independent of device AI permission.
iPhone/iPad camera and dictation: Hands Free camera frames are analyzed on your device using Apple Vision and are not uploaded or stored. Native dictation uses Apple speech recognition, preferring on-device processing when supported; otherwise Apple may process the audio. Microphone and speech permissions are requested separately by iOS. Dictated text is sent to the identified AI providers when you submit it in an AI request after allowing AI processing; dictated Custom instructions you save may be included in later cooking requests to Google’s Gemini API. AI-assisted recipe search sends search text, preferences expressed in that search, and shortlisted recipe content to the providers listed on our AI providers page.
Native account and usage data: Firebase stores your account, saved recipes and private recipe images. Native product analytics includes pseudonymous app opens, sign-in completions, AI cooking starts, recipe readiness, saved-recipe opens, cooking sessions and Hands Free activation outcomes, with coarse phone/tablet and iOS/iPadOS categories. If you request an email when in-app purchases become available, we store that email and preference; you can withdraw it in Settings. AI permission is stored locally for each signed-in account on the device and is removed when you withdraw it or delete the account from that device.
Recipe search and public discovery: Saved recipes are indexed automatically on the server, including when the app is closed or native AI permission has been withdrawn. This platform maintenance does not consume your Cost Allowance or Free Trials. Saved recipe content is processed through Google’s paid Gemini API for legacy search attributes and by OpenRouter and its Qwen embedding providers for indexing. Search requests are sent through OpenRouter to Inception Mercury 3 for interpretation, with one Qwen3.8 Flash fallback if needed. Interpreted requirements and preferences and compact indexed recipe facts are sent through OpenRouter to Inception Mercury Decide for relevance judgments; preparation steps are excluded from those judgments. Private ratings, notes, and conversations are excluded from recipe indexes and publications. Recipes generated by Oui Chef are public by default and may be indexed and offered to other cooks without a separate publishing action. Imported third-party recipes are excluded from the public catalogue. Public snapshots contain recipe content only; private notes, ratings, conversations, and Custom instructions are not published. Deleting a saved source recipe removes its availability through public search. Account deletion removes owned public search records and private search metadata.
4. Data Retention
In the iPhone/iPad app, Delete my account in Settings verifies your identity before deleting your Firebase account, saved recipes, owned share links, private recipe images, notification preference and actor-level analytics. Non-identifying aggregate metrics remain. Apple sign-in authorization is revoked as part of Apple account deletion.
We keep your personal information for as long as your account is active. Dinner voice recordings are discarded after transcription and dinner photos expire after 24 hours. Detailed pseudonymous analytics events are retained for up to 90 days, while non-identifying daily totals may be retained to understand longer-term product performance. You may request account deletion at any time, which will remove your saved recipes, temporary dinner photos, and account details from our database.
These storage periods describe Oui Chef's own storage. AI providers may retain submitted data under their applicable service terms, including Google's limited abuse-prevention and legal retention described above. Deleting information from Oui Chef does not recall requests already processed by a provider.
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