Privacy Policy

1. What we collect

If you only browse, we collect nothing beyond ordinary server logs (see below). An account is needed only to report sightings, keep a watchlist and receive alerts.

Account. Your email address, and a name if your sign-in method provides one. Sign-in is handled by Clerk, our authentication provider; we keep a user ID and, on your own profile, the display name we looked up once when your account was created. Nothing public ever shows your name or email.

Sightings you report. The bottle, the store, the price and quantity you saw, the size, a note if you write one, any recipe or pick details, and the time. A sighting also carries the location where the photo was taken — read from the photo’s own metadata on our server, or, if you allow it, from your device or browser location — so we can match the nearest store.

Photos you submit. The shelf photo you attach to a sighting. We strip the camera metadata (GPS, time, camera model) from the image file before it is stored or shown, and we keep only resized copies. Before stripping it, we read that metadata and what we can see in the photo — the GPS coordinate and capture time, any barcode, the label text and shelf price our software recognises, and the nearest store — and we keep those readings as the evidence behind your sighting. The original file is not kept.

Watchlist and alerts. The bottles and stores you watch, your alert setting (daily digest or real-time), and, if you turn on notifications, a push-notification token for your device with its platform and app version. We also keep a record of which alerts we sent you.

Location outside a sighting. If you allow location access, the app uses your current location on your device to sort stores by distance. It is not stored on our servers. When the app or website asks us for stores near you, the coordinate is sent to our server as part of that request and appears in our server logs, as any web request does.

Server logs and diagnostics. Like every web service, our servers log each request — the address requested, the time, your IP address and the response. If the app or site crashes we receive a crash report (the error, the screen, the app version and device model); crash reports never include your photos, location, or anything you typed.

We do not collect advertising identifiers, contacts, payment details, background location, or anything for advertising. There is no third-party analytics or advertising code in the app or site.

2. Why we collect it

• To sign you in and keep your account secure.
• To publish the sightings you report, match them to a store, and validate them against other sightings and state data.
• To send you the alerts you asked for.
• To show you stores near you, when you ask.
• To run, secure and improve the service, investigate abuse, and fix crashes.
• To meet legal obligations and enforce our Terms.

3. Who we share it with

We share personal data only with the providers that run the service for us, each bound to use it only for that purpose:

• Clerk — authentication. Receives your email, name if given, and sign-in details.
• Expo (Expo Application Services) — push-notification delivery. Receives your push token and the text of each alert.
• Railway — hosting for our servers and database, in the United States.
• Cloudflare — encrypted backups of our database and data archive.
• Protomaps — the map tiles. When you view the map, your browser or app requests tiles from Protomaps, which sees your IP address and the map area you are looking at.
• Sentry — error and crash reporting, with the scrubbing described above.

Store addresses are geocoded through the US Census Bureau and Geocodio; that is public store data, never anything about you. We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers. We may disclose data if the law requires it, to protect the service or its users, or as part of a merger or sale of the business (in which case this policy continues to apply).

What is public. A validated sighting — bottle, store, price, quantity, time, note — is public on store and bottle pages, attributed to a numeric contributor ID, never a name. Your photos are not public: they are visible to you and to our moderators, unless a moderator chooses a clear photo as a bottle’s display image (with the metadata already stripped).

4. How long we keep it

• Account details, watchlist, alert settings, device tokens: until you remove them or delete your account.
• Sightings, their photo readings and photos: kept as part of the availability record, including after you delete your account. Once your account is deleted they are no longer connected to a name or an email — only to an anonymous contributor ID. This is the historical record the service exists to build, and it cannot be re-created.
• Alert history: kept as a delivery record, without any identifying details once your account is deleted.
• Server logs: kept for a limited period by our hosting provider and then discarded automatically.
• Crash reports: kept by our error-tracking provider for its standard retention period, then discarded.
• Backups: rotate on a schedule; a deleted account disappears from backups as they age out.

5. Your choices

• Export your data. Your account page at /account gives you a file with everything we hold about you: your account details, sightings, watches, alert settings and alert history.
• Delete your account. From the same page, or in the app under You → Account & data. It takes effect immediately. Section 4 explains what stays in the record.
• Location. The app asks for location only when you tap something that needs it. You can refuse, and change it later in your device settings; you can also type a store name instead.
• Notifications. Turn them on or off in the app or in your device settings; signing out unregisters your device.
• Photos. You choose each photo you submit. To have a photo removed from view, contact us.

6. Children

BourbonDropMap is for adults of legal drinking age — 21 and over in the United States — and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us and we will delete it.

7. Your rights

Wherever you live, you can access, export, correct and delete your personal data using the tools in section 5, or by contacting us. If you are a resident of California or another US state with a consumer-privacy law, you also have the right to know what personal data we collect, use and share (this policy), to delete it, to correct it, and not to be discriminated against for exercising those rights. We do not sell personal data and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, so there is nothing to opt out of. We honour requests made through an authorised agent once we can verify them. If you are outside the United States, note that the service is hosted in the United States and your data is processed there.

8. Security and where data lives

All traffic to the service is encrypted in transit. Data is stored in the United States. Access to production systems is limited to the people who operate the service. No system is perfectly secure; if we learn of a breach affecting your data we will tell you as the law requires.

9. Changes to this policy

When this policy changes we update the effective date at the top. For a material change — a new category of data, or a new way of sharing it — we tell signed-in users in the app or by email before it takes effect.

10. Contact

Privacy questions and requests: [email protected]. Operated by BourbonDropMap, United States.