What we store, and who else sees it.

What Big Shop stores

• Your account. The email address and name you signed up with, an identifier from our login provider, and when you last logged in.
• Your recipes. Names, ingredients, methods, notes, tags, and the link a recipe came from. If you import one by photographing it, the photo is sent away to be read and then deleted — it is never stored.
• Your shopping lists. What is on them, how much of each, and what you have ticked off — plus a record of lists you have made before, which is what lets Dave suggest from what you actually cook.
• Invites you send. The email address of anyone you invite to share your account, until the invite is accepted or rejected.
• A few preferences. Whether you have been shown the welcome screen, and how you like the shopping list laid out.

There is no advertising here, no profiling, and nothing is sold or shared with anyone beyond the companies listed below that run the thing.

Recipes are shared with your account, not with the world

An account can have more than one person on it — that is the point of it. Anyone you share an account with can see and change every recipe and list on that account. Ingredient names are the one exception: they are pooled across everybody, so that “tin of chopped tomatoes” means the same thing for everyone. Your recipes are not.

Reading recipes, and Dave

When you import a recipe from a link, a photo, or pasted text, the contents are sent to OpenAI to be turned into ingredients and a method.

Dave sends more than you might assume, so it is worth being exact. To answer a question he can look up your recipes, read a whole recipe back — ingredients and method — and read the history of lists you have made. Whatever he looks up goes to OpenAI along with your messages. That is the feature working rather than a leak, but it means your recipes leave our systems when you chat to him, not just their names.

OpenAI processes it on our behalf and, on the API terms Big Shop uses, does not train on it.

Error reporting

Big Shop reports its own errors and performance to Grafana Cloud, and it is not something you are asked to consent to. We treat it as necessary to keep the service working, since an app that only reports errors for people who opted in is an app that does not know when it is broken. It is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight, and it is a contested one, so it is stated here rather than buried.

What it carries is limited on purpose: an account number, a login identifier, page names, timings, and error messages. It does not carry your recipes, your ingredients, your chats with Dave, or your email address. It is deleted after 14 days.

Analytics

Big Shop is not running any analytics at the moment. Nothing is counting what you do, and the only thing watching the app is the error reporting described above. The cookie banner asks anyway, because that is due to change and we would rather have your answer before anything starts than after. What follows is what your answer will mean.

Analytics is the one thing here you get a say over, and it is off until you say otherwise.

Decline and nothing loads. Not a reduced version, not a cookieless one, nothing at all — no script from Google is fetched and no request reaches them. That is stricter than the usual arrangement, where the tag loads for everyone and merely promises not to store anything.

Accept and Big Shop would useGoogle Analytics to count how the site is used: which pages get visited, and a short fixed list of actions like “a recipe was imported”. It is never told who you are. It gets an account number, so that several visits from one household count as one household rather than several strangers — and it does not get your login identifier, your name, your email address, or the names of your recipes. Loading it does let Google see the usual things any website sees: your IP address, which page you came from, and what browser you are using. Advertising features are switched off permanently; Big Shop runs no ads.

You can change your mind whenever you like, using the Cookie settings link at the bottom of this page. Withdrawing stops the collection there and then — no further page is counted — and deletes the cookies Google has already set.

What is stored on your device

All of it is needed for the site to work or to keep it working, none of it is used to track you anywhere else, and there is nothing here you are asked to consent to. Clearing your browser data for this site removes the lot.

Who else processes it

Your recipes and lists live in Frankfurt. The parts that run in the United States are the website itself, the recipe-reading and chat endpoints, and invite emails; those transfers rely on each provider’s standard contractual clauses.

How long it is kept

Your account, recipes and lists are kept until you ask us to delete them. Error and performance data is deleted after 14 days. Invites disappear when accepted or rejected.

Your rights, and how to use them

Under UK data protection law you can ask for a copy of your data, ask for it to be corrected, ask for it to be deleted, or object to how it is used. There is no button for any of that yet — it is done by hand, by email, and we would rather say so than imply a self-service flow that does not exist.

Email info@ianfeather.co.uk and it will be actioned. If you are not happy with the response you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

One honest complication: an account can be shared. If you are on an account with other people, deleting “your” recipes would delete theirs too, so tell us what you want to happen and we will sort it out with you rather than guess.

Changes to this page

If something material changes — a new company processing your data, a new purpose — the version at the top changes, and we will make sure you are told rather than leaving you to notice. Smaller corrections are made quietly, and only the date changes.