Back to TasteBuds

TasteBuds Privacy Policy

Last updated: April 9, 2026

1. Who We Are

This Privacy Policy explains how Big Theory Ltd, trading as TasteBuds, collects, uses, stores, shares, and otherwise processes personal data in connection with the TasteBuds consumer product.

Big Theory Ltd is a company incorporated in the United Kingdom with company number 12767506 and registered office at 124 City Road, London, England, EC1V 2NX. Big Theory Ltd is the controller of the personal data covered by this Privacy Policy.

You can contact us at:

  • Support: support@tastebuds.dev
  • Privacy: privacy@tastebuds.dev
  • Legal / IP: legal@tastebuds.dev

2. Who This Policy Covers

This Privacy Policy applies to the TasteBuds consumer product, including our website, mobile-style web experience, user accounts, profiles, social features, map discovery tools, saved lists, media uploads, venue pages, and related APIs and account-linked product features.

TasteBuds is a social dining product built around recommendations from people you know rather than anonymous public reviews.

3. Personal Data We Collect

We may collect the following categories of personal data:

Account and profile data

This may include your name, email address, authentication identifiers, sign-in provider details, and profile information such as your profile picture. TasteBuds currently supports sign-in through Firebase Authentication using Google, Apple, and email-password sign-in.

Social and activity data

This may include your visits, recommendations, favourites, lists, list membership, friend connections, feed activity, profile updates, and other activity you create through the Service.

Media and content data

This may include photos, avatars, captions, and other content you upload or create through the Service.

Location and map data

TasteBuds may process precise location data on user action while you are actively using relevant features in the app. TasteBuds does not use background location tracking and does not store location history as part of the service backend based on the current product design.

Technical and usage data

This may include device and browser information, IP-related request metadata, authentication state, log data, cookie and similar-technology identifiers, analytics events, and service diagnostics.

Business and venue insight inputs

Where users interact with venues, we may process venue-linked activity and review-style content to generate internal analytics, venue-level trend information, rankings, model outputs, and business insight products, subject to the safeguards described below.

4. How We Use Personal Data

We use personal data to:

  • create and manage your account;
  • authenticate you and keep your account secure;
  • provide core TasteBuds features;
  • show your content and activity within the service according to the product design;
  • operate social features, friend connections, lists, recommendations, and feeds;
  • operate map, search, discovery, and venue-detail functionality;
  • moderate content and enforce our Terms;
  • detect, investigate, and prevent fraud, abuse, and security incidents;
  • monitor performance, troubleshoot issues, and improve reliability;
  • analyse product usage and improve existing and future features;
  • generate internal analytics and business insight outputs as described in this Privacy Policy;
  • send service messages, product updates, push notifications, and, where permitted, marketing communications; and
  • comply with legal obligations and protect our rights, users, and the public.

5. Our Lawful Bases

Depending on the context, we rely on the following lawful bases under applicable data protection law:

Contract

We process personal data where necessary to provide the TasteBuds service you ask us to provide, such as account creation, authentication, profile management, social features, lists, recommendations, and core product functionality.

Legitimate interests

We process personal data where necessary for our legitimate interests, provided those interests are not overridden by your rights and interests. This may include:

  • securing and administering the service;
  • preventing abuse and fraud;
  • maintaining logs and audit records;
  • moderating content;
  • improving product performance and design;
  • internal analytics;
  • ranking, recommendation, and discovery systems;
  • business insight generation using non-user-identifiable outputs; and
  • direct product improvement and planning.

Consent

Where required, we rely on your consent, including for non-essential cookies and similar technologies, certain analytics uses where consent is required, push notification permissions at device level, and certain marketing communications where consent is required by law.

You can withdraw consent at any time, but this will not affect processing already carried out before withdrawal.

Legal obligation

We may process personal data where necessary to comply with legal obligations, lawful requests, regulatory requirements, or valid legal process.

6. How Social Features Work

TasteBuds is intentionally social.

Recommendations, visit logs, and lists are visible to friends by default within the app experience.

Your name and profile picture may be visible more broadly within the Service. Content or profile information that is made available outside an authenticated part of the Service may also be accessible to search engines and other third parties.

You are responsible for what you choose to share through the Service. You should not upload sensitive personal information, payment card information, or other material you do not want associated with your account.

7. Venue Pages and Business Insight Features

TasteBuds may use consumer activity and content linked to venues to support venue-level aggregated counts and activity metrics, popularity and benchmarking outputs, rankings and recommendation systems, model training and product improvement, and business-facing venue insight products.

Business customers do not receive your account credentials or raw personal account data through the business insight product.

Where venue-level outputs are shown to businesses, we aim to present them in aggregated, anonymised, or otherwise non-user-identifiable form.

To reduce the risk of identifying individual users, we may apply minimum thresholds, aggregation rules, suppression rules, rolling reporting windows, and time delays before venue-level outputs are made available to businesses.

As part of our current approach:

  • simple venue-level aggregate counts or visit metrics may only be made available where at least 5 unique users contributed to the relevant reporting window;
  • more granular segmented metrics may require at least 10 relevant contributors in the relevant segment or time window;
  • excerpt-style insight, richer theme analysis, or similar output derived from user quotes, media, or natural language processing may require at least 20 distinct contributors in the relevant lookback window;
  • simple venue-level outputs may be delayed by around 7 days before becoming available to businesses;
  • more detailed or excerpt-style outputs may be delayed by around 30 days and may only be shown over broader rolling windows, such as 30-day or 90-day windows; and
  • where there is insufficient underlying activity or where we determine that an output may create a meaningful risk of identifying a user, we may suppress, combine, delay, or withhold that output.

We may also generate excerpt-style insight from user quotes using AI or natural language processing technologies, but only where there is sufficient underlying data for the venue and the resulting output is not intended to identify a user.

8. Analytics, Cookies, and Similar Technologies

TasteBuds uses cookies, local storage, SDK identifiers, and similar technologies on web and related product surfaces.

We use these technologies for purposes such as:

  • keeping users signed in;
  • remembering preferences and settings;
  • security and fraud prevention;
  • measuring product performance;
  • analytics and product improvement; and
  • communications and marketing where permitted.

TasteBuds uses Google Analytics through Firebase and may also use internal analytics systems.

Where required by law, we will ask for your consent before using non-essential cookies or similar technologies. More detail is available in our Cookie Notice.

9. Notifications and Communications

We may send service and administrative messages, product updates, push notifications, and marketing communications.

You can manage certain communications through your account, device, or email preferences, depending on the type of message.

10. Who We Share Personal Data With

We may share personal data with:

Service providers and processors

This includes providers that help us operate the service, such as Firebase for authentication and related services, Mapbox for mapping and location-related functionality, and infrastructure, hosting, storage, monitoring, email, security, and analytics providers, including systems operated directly by Big Theory Ltd on its own infrastructure.

Other users

We share personal data with other users where this is part of the product design, such as friend-visible recommendations, visits, and lists, and broader display of profile name and profile picture.

Businesses and venue partners

Businesses may receive business insight outputs as described above, but not raw personal account data through that product.

Legal and safety disclosures

We may disclose personal data where required by law, to respond to valid legal process, or where reasonably necessary to protect users, the platform, Big Theory Ltd, or the public.

Corporate transactions

We may share information in connection with a merger, financing, acquisition, reorganisation, or sale of assets, subject to appropriate confidentiality and transition protections.

11. International Transfers

TasteBuds may operate and support the service from multiple jurisdictions. As a result, personal data may be processed in countries other than where you live.

Where we make a restricted transfer of personal data, we aim to use an appropriate transfer mechanism under applicable law, such as a country benefiting from an adequacy decision, contractual safeguards such as the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or other recognised safeguards, or another lawful transfer mechanism or exception where applicable.

12. Data Retention

We retain personal data for as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy, including to operate the service, maintain records, enforce agreements, resolve disputes, meet legal obligations, and protect security and platform integrity.

Our current intended retention periods are:

  • Active account data: retained while your account remains active.
  • Deleted account data: up to 3 months after deletion request, unless longer retention is needed for legal, fraud-prevention, security, or dispute reasons.
  • Backups: up to 3 months.
  • Abuse and security logs: up to 3 months, unless longer retention is needed for investigation or legal reasons.

Venue analytics inputs and model-supporting data may be retained for as long as reasonably necessary to support analytics integrity, benchmarking, product improvement, abuse prevention, and auditability, after which they may be deleted, aggregated, anonymised, or de-linked from live account data.

13. Your Rights

Subject to applicable law, you may have the right to:

  • access personal data we hold about you;
  • correct inaccurate or incomplete personal data;
  • request deletion of personal data;
  • restrict or object to certain processing;
  • withdraw consent where we rely on consent;
  • receive a copy of certain personal data in a portable format; and
  • complain to a relevant data protection regulator.

To exercise your rights, contact privacy@tastebuds.dev.

If you are unhappy with how we handle your personal data and you are in the UK, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

14. Your Choices

You may be able to:

  • edit profile information in the app;
  • manage some account content directly in the product;
  • delete your account through the product flow;
  • export or download certain account data; and
  • manage some notifications, permissions, and communication preferences.

Account deletion may take effect immediately in the user interface, but removal from all systems, backups, logs, analytics layers, search indexes, and derived systems may take additional time.

15. Security

We use reasonable technical and organisational measures designed to protect personal data and service integrity.

No internet, cloud, app, or storage system is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your login credentials and for activity occurring through your account.

16. Children

TasteBuds is not intended for children under 13.

Because TasteBuds may be used by teenagers, we aim to design relevant parts of the service with age-appropriate privacy in mind, including limiting broader visibility of profile information and using location data only on active user action within relevant features.

17. Automated Decision-Making

TasteBuds may use automated systems for ranking, recommendations, moderation support, analytics, or product improvement.

TasteBuds does not currently make decisions based solely on automated processing that produce legal effects or similarly significant effects on users.

18. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time.

When we do, we will post the revised version here and update the "Last updated" date. We may also provide additional notice through the service where appropriate.

19. Contact

For privacy questions, requests, or complaints, contact:

privacy@tastebuds.dev

For support questions:

support@tastebuds.dev

For legal or IP matters:

legal@tastebuds.dev