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Privacy at What's for Dinner?

Last updated: 2 July 2026

The short version

Who we are

What's for Dinner? is an independent recipe app made in Dorset, UK. If you have any question about this policy or your data, email allanvarnfield@hotmail.co.uk and a real human (Allan) will reply.

What we collect, and where it lives

Your profile stays on your device. Everything you set up — household size, dietary needs, health and life-stage selections, cuisines, kitchen equipment, cupboard staples, your companion's name, accessibility settings, macro targets and free-text notes — is saved in your browser's local storage on your own phone or computer. It is not saved to our servers and we cannot see it.

Your favourites stay on your device too, in the same local storage.

Recipe generation. When you ask for meal ideas, your ingredients and relevant profile details are sent securely to our server, which passes them to Anthropic's Claude AI to write your recipes. This happens transiently — we do not store your requests or your recipes on our servers.

Voice input. When you use the microphone, your audio clip is sent securely to our server and passed to OpenAI's Whisper service, which turns it into text. We do not store your recordings.

A special word on health information

Some of the app's options touch on sensitive things — pregnancy, diabetes, ME/CFS, mental health support and others. We treat these with particular care:

Recipes and nutritional information in the app are AI-generated estimates for general guidance only. They are not medical advice — always consult your GP, midwife or a registered dietitian for personal health decisions.

Analytics

We use Vercel Web Analytics to understand how many people use the app and which pages they visit. It is cookie-free and does not identify you personally — we see anonymous, aggregated numbers, not individuals.

Rate limiting

To protect the app from abuse, our server briefly notes the IP address of incoming requests in temporary memory. This is not written to any database and disappears automatically.

The services we rely on

Deleting your data

Because your data lives on your device, you're in control: clearing your browser's site data for this app removes your profile, favourites and everything else. There is nothing held about you on our servers to delete.

Children

The app includes family cooking features, but it is designed for use by adults. It is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law (UK GDPR) you have rights over your personal data, including access, correction and erasure. Since we don't hold your data server-side there is usually nothing for us to retrieve or delete — but if you have any concern, email us and we will help. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office.

When this policy changes

If the app changes in a way that affects your data — for example when optional accounts arrive — we will update this page and its date, and flag significant changes in the app.