Forsoka Culinary Arts

At Forsoka Culinary Arts LLC ("Forsoka Culinary Arts", "we", "us") we know your privacy matters to you, so please read this policy carefully. It applies to the Forsoka Culinary Arts family of apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Vision Pro, Apple Watch, Android and Windows: Cookbook, Home & Family, Family and Chore Calendar, Plate Ponder, Family Ponder, Family Ponder Kids, Shake it!, Kitchen Unit Converter, Kitchen Timers, Plate Scanner, Recipe Scanner and Forsoka Culinary Arts, together with this website and the services behind them (the "Services").

One exception: the TO DO / SHOPPING LIST app collects far less than the rest of the family and has its own, much shorter privacy policy. If you are here about that app, read that one.

1. Information we collect

Your identity in our apps

There are no user accounts, usernames or passwords. The first Forsoka Culinary Arts app you open on a device creates a random, anonymous identity, and the other Forsoka Culinary Arts apps on that device share it. Everything you back up with us is filed under that identity, which is tied to nothing about you. If you want your data on a second device, you may give us an email address; we verify it with a one-time code and use it for nothing but that recovery. If you contact support, we keep what you send us.

What each app stores with us

• Cookbook, Home & Family, Family and Chore Calendar: your recipes, meal plans and, in the two family apps, the family board: member names and colours, the events you create in the app, chores, rewards and lists. A backup is kept under your identity so it can be recovered. Photos you place in the Home & Family photo frame stay on the device.
• Plate Ponder and Plate Scanner: food diary entries, calorie and nutrient totals, weight entries and goals. This is health data; see section 4.
• Shake it!: the drink recipes and photos you add yourself.
• Kitchen Unit Converter and Kitchen Timers: nothing personal. They store your timers and settings on the device only.
• Pantry Ponder: photos you upload or capture (grocery products, packaging, ingredients, nutrition labels, barcodes, shelf displays and pantry photos), product ratings, written reviews, price entries, product corrections and comments.

Photos you scan

Recipe Scanner, Cookbook and Home & Family read recipe cards, cookbook pages and handwritten notes from photographs; Plate Scanner and Plate Ponder read a plate of food; Forsoka Culinary Arts reads packaging and labels. To do that, the photo is sent to our server and on to an artificial-intelligence service (see section 5), which returns the structured text or food list. On iPhones with a depth sensor, Plate Scanner measures the plate on the device; depth maps and 3D point clouds never leave the phone, and only the resulting dimensions travel with the photo.

Shelf-tag observations (Pantry Ponder)

Some stores print a barcode on the shelf tag that is the store's own number rather than the product's. When you scan one of those and then scan the product itself, we record that pairing - the tag's code, the product's barcode, the store, the time and your identity - so that we can study how to identify products from shelf tags. If you delete your data, your identity is removed from these records; the remaining tag-to-product pairing is not linked to you.

Purchases

Forsoka Culinary Arts Plus, when offered, is one subscription that unlocks every app in the family. Apple, Google, Amazon or, on Windows, our merchant of record processes your payment; we never receive your card number. A receipts service (RevenueCat) validates the purchase and tells our server how long your subscription runs, and we store that date against your identity so every app can honour it.

Location

Home & Family and Family and Chore Calendar show today's weather at the top of the family screen. With your permission, your device sends its coordinates to the weather service (Open-Meteo) to fetch the forecast; we do not store your location. Forsoka Culinary Arts, with your permission, uses your location to detect the store you are in. Precise coordinates are used for the moment of the lookup and are not stored as a record of your movements; only the resolved store or country is kept with your contributions. We also keep your country and language settings to show relevant regional products.

Calendar access

Shared files in Home & Family and Family and Chore Calendar move straight between your family's own devices over your local network; the files themselves never reach us. The family document carries each folder's and file's name, size and a small thumbnail sealed with a key that only the devices a parent has confirmed hold, so our server stores only identifiers, dates and ciphertext. To help two devices find each other, each one tells our server its local network addresses under a hash of the family code and a random device identifier; that record carries no identity and is deleted after two minutes.

If you connect an iCloud calendar in Home & Family or Family and Chore Calendar, the app reads that one calendar and writes back the events you create. This happens on your device and in your own iCloud account. We do not receive your calendar.

Device and usage information

Our apps send an anonymous status ping (which app, which version) that carries no identity, and our servers keep standard request logs including IP address, app version and language. Our apps contain no analytics or crash-reporting SDKs and no advertising identifiers.

2. How we use your information

We use the information we collect to provide, maintain, secure and improve the Services; to operate app features (recipe reading, food recognition, product lookup, backup, sharing, family sync, subscriptions); to respond to support inquiries; to enforce our Terms of Use; and to comply with law.

Photo Retention & AI Model Training. Photos you upload or capture through the Services (including grocery items, packaging, barcodes, nutrition labels, receipts, pantries, recipe cards and pages, and plates of food) may be retained by Forsoka Culinary Arts and used to train, fine-tune, develop, evaluate and improve our artificial-intelligence, computer-vision and machine-learning models. By submitting photos to the Services you grant Forsoka Culinary Arts the right to retain and process those images for model training and dataset development. Retained photos are separated from your identity. We do not sell your photos.

Open & Closed Database Contributions (Pantry Ponder). Product details, barcode mappings, ingredient information and non-personal product photos you submit may be contributed to, published on or shared with open database projects (such as Open Food Facts under open data licenses), open dataset repositories, and closed or proprietary product catalogues, partner networks and machine-learning research datasets to enrich grocery information. Recipes, diaries and family boards are never contributed anywhere.

No advertising. None of our apps shows advertisements, and we use no advertising identifiers and no ad networks.

3. What other people can see

• Pantry Ponder is a collaborative grocery review community. Your screen name (or anonymous handle), product reviews, ratings and uploaded product photos are publicly visible to all users, as are product corrections and barcode photos contributed to the shared catalogue.
• Cookbook and Home & Family: a recipe you share as a link or card travels inside that link, so anyone you give it to can open it. A recipe you share with everyone joins Global search, where anyone can find it; you can see how many people have viewed it and withdraw it at any time. Your whole cookbook is visible to anyone who has your share code, and you can replace the code whenever you like.
• Family and Chore Calendar and Home & Family: the family board is visible to every device that joins your family with your join link.
• Plate Ponder: see section 4. Circles see daily totals only; coaches see what you choose to share.

Your email address and identity keys are never shown to anyone.

4. Health data (Plate Ponder and Plate Scanner)

Your food diary, calorie and nutrient totals, weight and goals are health data, a special category under the GDPR and similar laws. They live on your device and are backed up under your anonymous identity so a new device can recover them. We process them only to run the app for you.

Sharing is off until you switch it on, and switching it on is an explicit consent that the app records with a timestamp. A circle of up to two friends sees your daily totals only, never the meals behind them. A coach you invite sees a summary and, only if you turn that on, the itemised day, and can send suggestions you are free to dismiss. You can withdraw consent, unlink a coach, leave a circle or delete everything you have shared from inside the app at any time; shared data is then removed. Health data is never sold, never used for advertising and never contributed to any database.

5. How your information is shared

We do not sell your personal information. We share information only with:

• AI services: photos of recipes, plates and products, and recipe text from links you paste, are sent to artificial-intelligence providers (currently DeepInfra, Google and OpenAI) to be read. They receive the image or text and nothing about you.
• Data sources: barcodes and food names are looked up against Open Food Facts and the USDA food database; drink and recipe catalogues are our own. Lookups carry no identity.
• Infrastructure: our own server, fronted by Cloudflare, which sees the same request logs we do; a mail provider that delivers recovery codes; the weather service above; Apple Maps and OpenStreetMap for place lookups in Forsoka Culinary Arts.
• Purchases: Apple, Google, Amazon, our Windows merchant of record, and RevenueCat, for the subscription only.
• Other users: as described in sections 3 and 4.
• Legal and safety recipients: when required to comply with law, enforce our terms, investigate abuse, or protect the rights, property or safety of Forsoka Culinary Arts, our users or the public.
• A successor: as part of a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, subject to the protections of this policy.

6. Retention and deletion

We keep what you back up for as long as you use the Services. Every app has a delete option in its settings that removes your data from our server, and you can also write to [email protected]. Deleted data is held in a recoverable state for a short period so an accidental deletion can be undone, then permanently removed. Recipes you delete are also withdrawn from Global search.

What we hold, and what we don't: our apps work without a server. If you never turn on backup, never join a family, a shared list or a circle, and never send anything to another person, your recipes, board, lists, diary and photos exist only on your own devices and we hold no copy of them at all. The way to see, change or delete that data is the app itself, and deleting the app removes it. What we hold is what you have backed up or shared, and that is what an access or portability request returns.

Identities without an email: an identity that has not been used for 180 days may be purged or fully de-identified.

Retention of anonymised photos for AI training: because product, recipe and plate photos contribute to our catalogues and training datasets, photos may be retained in anonymised or de-identified form after your data is deleted. De-identified photos contain no personal data and are not associated with any identity.

7. Your rights and choices

Depending on your jurisdiction (such as the EEA and UK under the GDPR, or California under the CCPA/CPRA), you may have rights to access, correct, delete or export your personal data, to restrict or object to certain processing, and to withdraw consent. For health data you can withdraw consent at any time inside Plate Ponder. To exercise your rights, contact us at [email protected]; we answer within one month. Because there are no accounts, we verify a request by the email linked to the identity, or by a code sent through the app on a device that holds it. Data we hold is returned as a JSON file, the same shape the apps use.

Legal bases (EEA and UK): we process what you back up or share to perform our contract with you (providing the Services); health data in Plate Ponder and Plate Scanner on your explicit consent; request logs, security and abuse prevention on our legitimate interests in running the Services safely; and anything else the law requires of us. Where processing rests on consent you may withdraw it at any time, without affecting what was done before.

Complaints: you may lodge a complaint with your data protection authority (in the EEA, the authority of your country; in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office). We would appreciate the chance to answer your concern first.

United States: we do not sell personal information, do not share it for targeted or cross-context behavioural advertising, do not profile you, and have done none of these in the preceding twelve months, so there is nothing to opt out of. We do not use or disclose sensitive personal information for purposes beyond those described here. Residents of California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, Texas, Oregon, Montana, Delaware, New Jersey, Minnesota, Maryland and any other state with a privacy law may exercise the rights in this section, access, correction, deletion and portability, through the contact below, verified as described above. If we decline a request you may appeal by replying to our answer, and we respond to an appeal within 45 days with the reasons; if you are still unsatisfied you may contact your state attorney general. You will not be treated differently for exercising a privacy right, and an authorised agent may make a request on your behalf with your written permission. Where an app lets you unlock with your face or fingerprint, that happens on your device through its operating system; we never receive biometric data and we collect no biometric identifiers, in Illinois or anywhere else.

8. Information security

Where your data is kept: our servers are in the United States. If you use the Services from the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, what you back up or share is transferred there; we rely on Standard Contractual Clauses (and the UK Addendum) with our providers, and on the safeguards above. The AI and data providers in section 5 receive photos and text stripped of identity.

We implement administrative, technical and physical safeguards to protect your information against unauthorised access, loss, misuse or alteration. All app-to-server communication is encrypted in transit with HTTPS/TLS. Your identity is a cryptographic key pair that never leaves your devices except to prove who you are to our server.

9. Children and age

Home & Family and Family and Chore Calendar are made for households, and children in a household use them on a parent's device under the parent's identity: the parent sets up the board, and the app collects no personal information from a child directly. A child's name and chores on the board are the parent's data, held for the parent. Plate Ponder and Plate Scanner are for people aged 16 and over. Shake it! is for people of legal drinking age where they live. Forsoka Culinary Arts is for people aged 18 and over. The remaining apps have no age requirement beyond the app stores' own. We do not knowingly collect personal information directly from children under 13 (or under 16 where that is the local age); if you believe a child has provided us with personal data, please contact us for deletion.

10. App permissions

Depending on the app, we ask for: Camera (scanning recipe cards, plates, barcodes and products), Photo Library (choosing an existing photo to read), Location (weather in the family apps; store detection in Forsoka Culinary Arts), Calendars (one iCloud calendar in the family apps) and Notifications (timer alarms). Plate Scanner uses the depth sensor on the device only. You can control or revoke any permission at any time in your device settings, and the app keeps working without it.

11. This website

This website is served by us, sets no cookies, runs no analytics and loads nothing from third parties; its fonts are served from our own site. Our server and Cloudflare keep standard request logs.

12. Changes

We may update this privacy policy periodically. Small changes appear as a new date on this page. For a material change - a new purpose, a new kind of data, a new recipient - we tell you in the app before it takes effect, and where the law requires it we ask again for your consent.

13. Contact information

The data controller is Forsoka Culinary Arts LLC, a US company. We have no establishment in the EEA or UK; a representative under Article 27 GDPR will be named here when one is appointed.

If you have questions, concerns or privacy requests, please contact us at [email protected] with the subject line "Attn: Privacy Administrator".