Focara Kitchen

Focara Kitchen (“Focara,” “we,” “us,” or “our”) operates the Focara Kitchen apps (iOS and Android) and the shared-recipe web preview at focarakitchen.com. This policy explains what information we collect, how it is used, and the choices you have. Questions? Please use our contact form.

1. What Stays on Your Device

This is the most important thing to understand about Focara. Your recipe box is stored locally on your phone and is not synced to us. Unless you explicitly share a recipe, the following never leave your device and we cannot see them:

• Your recipes — every recipe, every saved version, and every recipe photo.
• Your cooking journal — cook logs, ratings, your notes, and finished-dish photos.
• Your shopping list, meal plans, and timers.
• Your profile photo and app settings.
• Photos you scan and the text read from them.

Because your recipes live only on your device, they are not backed up by us. If you lose your phone, you lose the box. Use Settings → Export My Recipes to keep your own copy, and keep your device backups on.

2. Information We Collect

2.1 Account information (only if you create an account)

• Email address. If you sign up with email and password, your password is handled by our authentication provider (Supabase) and is never visible to us.
• Sign in with Apple. We receive the email address in the Apple identity token — this is the private relay address if you chose to hide your email. If Apple offers to share your name, the app discards it and never sends it anywhere.
• Display / “kitchen” name, if you set one, so recipes you share can be attributed (“From Maria's Kitchen”).

2.2 Recipes you choose to share

When — and only when — you share a recipe, we store a text-only copy of it: title, summary, ingredients, steps, prep time, cook time, servings, and category. No photos are ever uploaded, and none of your other recipes are. Personal tags such as a custom meal type or season stay on your device by design.

2.3 Connections and invitations

To share with someone, you invite them by email address. That means we store the email address of the person you invite — including before they have an account, and whether or not they ever create one — so that the invitation can be matched to them when they sign up. Only invite people who would expect to hear from you. Your own email address is visible to connections you have accepted.

2.4 Reactions

If you react to a recipe someone shared with you, we store the emoji you chose. There is no chat or messaging feature in Focara.

2.5 Advertising information (free version only)

In the free version, ads are served by Google AdMob as native cards and occasional full-screen ads. Google may process device and advertising identifiers (such as the IDFA on iOS) and limited usage and device signals to serve, cap, and measure ads, and to detect fraud. We also register SKAdNetwork ad networks on iOS, Apple's privacy-preserving system for measuring ad installs without identifying you. See section 9 for your choices.

2.6 What we don't collect

We do not use third-party analytics, attribution, or crash-reporting SDKs. We do not collect your location, contacts, microphone, or health data — the app never asks for those permissions. We receive no payment-card details, and we do not operate push notifications, so we hold no device push tokens. Apple and Google may show us aggregate crash and performance diagnostics in their app-store dashboards, but only if you have turned on diagnostic sharing at the operating-system level.

3. Processing That Happens on Your Device

• Scanning a recipe (OCR). Text recognition runs on your device using Apple Vision (iOS) or Google ML Kit (Android). The photo and the recognized text are not sent to us or to anyone else for recognition.
• Camera and photo-library access is used only to scan or import recipes and to add dish photos, with your permission.
• Timers and reminders are local notifications scheduled on your device. There is no push service, and the contents of a reminder (like a recipe name) never leave your phone.

4. Sharing a Recipe — What to Know First

Sharing is the one feature that sends a recipe off your device. Two ways to share, with different privacy consequences:

Sharing with a connection (in the app). The recipe copy goes to that person's Focara account. It is attributed to your kitchen name — and if you haven't set a kitchen name, your email address is used as the sender name and will be visible to them. You can set a name any time in the Me tab.

Sharing a web link (focarakitchen.com/r/…). This creates a page on our website with a secret address. Anyone who has that link can open the recipe — no account, no password. Links do not currently expire, and because the page is a normal public web page, it can in principle be found by search engines or read by the link-preview bots in messaging apps. Only create a web link for a recipe you are comfortable making public. When someone opens it, our hosting provider (Cloudflare) sees their IP address, as with any website.

Once someone saves a recipe you shared, they have their own copy on their own device. Like a recipe card you hand to a friend, you can't take it back.

5. Importing From a Website

When you import a recipe from a URL, your device requests that page directly from that website. The site sees your IP address and that the request came from Focara Kitchen. We only read the recipe text from the page (we do not fetch its images), and we don't send that URL to our servers. The website's own privacy policy governs what it does with the request.

6. How We Use Information

We use the information above to:

• Provide the features you ask for — creating your account, signing you in, delivering a recipe to a connection, and rendering a share link (performing our contract with you).
• Show ads in the free version, and offer and manage the Pro subscription (your consent, where required, and our legitimate interest in funding a free app).
• Keep the Service secure, prevent abuse, respond to you, and comply with the law (our legitimate interests and legal obligations).

We do not use your content to train models, to advertise to other people, or to build a profile of you.

7. Who We Share Information With

We do not sell your personal information for money. We share it only as needed to run the Service:

• People you share with — recipes, your attribution name, and reactions, as described in section 4.
• Supabase — hosts our database and authentication (your account, profile, connections, and shared recipes), and sends account emails such as confirmation links. Those emails are sent today from Supabase's default sender; we are moving them to our own Focara Kitchen address. Our confirmation email loads our logo from focarakitchen.com, so opening it contacts our host in the normal way of any HTML email.
• Google AdMob and Google's User Messaging Platform — ads and ad-consent in the free version.
• Apple — Sign in with Apple, App Store distribution, payments, and TestFlight.
• Google Play — Android distribution and payments.
• Cloudflare — hosts focarakitchen.com and the shared-recipe pages.
• Legal reasons — if required by law, or to protect rights, safety, and security.

A note for U.S. state privacy laws: we don't sell your data, but personalized advertising through Google AdMob may count as “sharing” or a “sale” for cross-context behavioral advertising under laws such as California's CCPA/CPRA. You can turn it off — see section 9 — or remove ads entirely with Pro.

8. Purchases

If you subscribe to Focara Kitchen Pro, the purchase is processed by Apple or Google. Your app tells us nothing about it: the subscription status stays on your device, we receive no payment-card details, and no purchase or receipt data is sent to our servers. Manage or cancel a subscription in your App Store or Google Play account settings. The full subscription terms (price, length, and auto-renewal) are shown on the upgrade screen before you buy.

9. Ads and Your Choices

• Consent (EEA, UK, and Switzerland). Before ads load, we ask for your choice through Google's User Messaging Platform. You can change or withdraw it any time at Settings → Privacy options — a row that appears where consent rules require it.
• App Tracking Transparency (iOS). iOS asks whether Focara Kitchen may track you across other companies' apps and websites to show more relevant ads. You can decline, and change your mind later in iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking. Declining means ads are less relevant — it does not remove them.
• Go ad-free. Focara Kitchen Pro removes all ads. It is the only way to remove them, and no recipe feature is ever locked behind it.

10. Your Rights and Choices

• Access and update — edit your profile and your content directly in the app.
• Export your recipes — Settings → Export My Recipes writes a complete JSON file of every recipe (including versions and notes) and hands it to you to save or send wherever you like. Nothing is uploaded in the process.
• Delete your account — Settings → Delete Account. See section 11 for exactly what that removes.
• Ad consent — see section 9.
• Depending on where you live (for example, the EEA/UK under the GDPR, or U.S. states such as California), you may have additional rights to access, correct, delete, or port your data, to object to certain processing, and to withdraw consent. To exercise them, use our contact form. We won't treat you differently for exercising a right, and you may complain to your local data-protection authority.

11. Data Retention and Deletion

We keep account and shared-recipe data for as long as your account is active. Deleting your account (Settings → Delete Account) is immediate and permanent, and removes:

• your login and your profile (name and email);
• your connections and invitations;
• the recipes you shared and the ones shared with you, on our servers; and
• the web share links you created — those pages stop working.

Two honest limits:

• Copies other people already saved stay theirs. If someone saved a recipe you shared, it is now on their device, and deleting your account cannot reach it.
• An invitation someone else sent to your email address belongs to their account, not yours, so it is not removed when you delete yours. Ask them to remove it, or contact us.

Deleting your account does not touch the recipe box on your own device — that is yours, and it stays. To remove it, delete the app. Residual copies may persist briefly in our provider's routine backups before being overwritten.

12. Security

Data in transit is encrypted (HTTPS/TLS). Access to anything stored on our servers is restricted by row-level security, so people can only read what has been shared with them, and a shared recipe is reachable anonymously only through its secret link. No method of storage or transmission is 100% secure, but we work to protect your information.

13. Children's Privacy

Focara Kitchen is a family-friendly app, but it is not directed to children under 13 (under 16 in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom, unless your country sets a lower age), and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has given us personal information, please contact us and we will delete it.

14. International Users

Our service providers (Supabase, Google, Apple, Cloudflare) store and process data in the United States and other countries. By using Focara you understand that your information may be transferred to and processed in countries whose data-protection laws differ from your own; where required, we rely on appropriate safeguards for those transfers.

15. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy from time to time. We'll change the “Last updated” date at the top and, for material changes, give you a more prominent notice.

© 2026 Olivia Renee Studio LLC. All rights reserved.