Smidgen Privacy Policy

1. Information We Collect and How We Use It

1.1 Account Information

When you create an account in Smidgen, we collect:

• Email address and display name (or authentication tokens if using Google Sign-In or Apple Sign-In).
• A unique User Identifier (UID) generated by our authentication provider (Google Firebase Authentication).

Purpose and Lawful Basis: We use this information to create your account, manage session security, and associate your synced data with your identity (UK GDPR Art. 6(1)(b) — contractual necessity).

If you use Smidgen in Guest Mode, no email address or name is collected. A transient anonymous identifier is held locally and destroyed when you sign out or clear app storage.

1.2 Recipes, Collections, Meal Plans, and Shopping Lists

When signed into an account, Smidgen synchronises your culinary data across your devices using Google Cloud Firestore:

• Recipes you import, adapt, or create (titles, ingredients, preparation steps, source URLs, servings, and notes).
• Collections and tags you organise recipes into.
• Meal plans and scheduled entries.
• Shopping lists and checklist items.
• General application settings (such as measurement system preferences and appearance themes).

Purpose and Lawful Basis: To ensure your recipe collection and planning tools are available across your devices (UK GDPR Art. 6(1)(b) — contractual necessity).

1.3 Recipe Photographs and Imported Images

If you attach a photo to a recipe or capture an image of a physical recipe card:

• The image is compressed and stored locally on your device.
• For signed-in users, the image is synchronised to your private folder in Google Cloud Storage (users/{uid}/recipePhotos/).
• If you use the Photo Import feature, the image is transmitted to our processing service to extract text, ingredients, and method. The image is processed ephemerally and is not retained or used by the reading service to train machine-learning models.
• Notice regarding personal data in photos: Physical recipe cards or cookbook clippings may occasionally contain handwritten names, notes, or incidental personal information. These remain stored solely in your private account storage.

Purpose and Lawful Basis: To display your recipe imagery and extract recipe text from photos you choose to provide (UK GDPR Art. 6(1)(b) — contractual necessity).

1.4 On-Device Health and Dietary Goals (The Health Boundary)

• When you ask Smidgen to adapt a recipe, the application translates your local profile on your device into practical dietary goals (for example, "lower carbohydrate", "reduce free sugars", or "avoid gluten-containing ingredients"). Only these practical culinary goals are sent to the adaptation service — never your medical diagnoses.
• Allergens (such as nut or shellfish allergies) are transmitted verbatim to ensure that recipe adaptations and ingredient substitutions reliably exclude harmful ingredients.

Purpose and Lawful Basis: Tailoring culinary calculations and substitutions to your stated preferences (UK GDPR Art. 6(1)(b) — contractual necessity; Art. 9(2)(a) — explicit consent given on setup).

1.5 Diagnostic Information and Crash Reporting (Opt-In)

Smidgen provides an explicit consent choice during initial setup regarding technical crash diagnostics and telemetry (powered by Google Firebase Crashlytics):

• Disabled by default: No telemetry or crash diagnostics are transmitted unless you explicitly opt in.
• If enabled, reports contain technical stack traces, device model, and OS version. They never contain recipe contents, recipe URLs, or health profile data.
• You may toggle this consent at any time in Settings.

Purpose and Lawful Basis: Improving application stability and diagnosing fatal errors (UK GDPR Art. 6(1)(a) — consent).

1.6 Feedback You Send Us

You can send us feedback from the app. Nothing is sent unless you write a message and tap Send. A report contains:

• Your message, your account ID, the time you sent it, and which part of the app you opened the form from (for example the Library or a failed import).
• Only if you add one: a screenshot you choose from your phone, resized before it is sent.
• Only if you tick the box: the app version, the Android version and your phone model.

A report contains nothing else about what you were doing in the app. Once sent, you cannot read it back from the app; only we can read it.

Purpose and Lawful Basis: Fixing problems and improving Smidgen from what you tell us (UK GDPR Art. 6(1)(f) — legitimate interests).

1.7 Imports That Fail

If an import fails, we keep a record of it for 30 days so we can find and fix the fault. The record contains:

• The link you shared, or the text you pasted.
• The text our service read from it, such as a post's caption or the page text.
• The site it came from, and which step failed and why.
• For a photo, only how many pictures there were. The pictures themselves are never kept.

The record is linked to a coded identifier for your account, not your name or email. It is never shown in the app, and is deleted after 30 days or when you delete your account. Nothing is kept when an import succeeds.

Purpose and Lawful Basis: Finding and fixing faults in importing (UK GDPR Art. 6(1)(f) — legitimate interests).