Privacy Policy

Ask Aruna is a kitchen companion made by a small independent team in Australia. This page explains, in plain language, what the app knows about you and what happens to it. The short version: your kitchen is yours — we don’t sell data, we don’t show ads, and we collect only what the app needs to work.

What we collect

• Your account: your email address and a password (stored in encrypted form — we never see the password itself).
• Your kitchen: the recipes, pantry items, shopping lists, plans, notes, and taste preferences you put into the app. This is your content; we store it so it can sync between your devices and survive a lost phone.
• Photos you choose to share: when you photograph a pantry shelf, a recipe page, or a notebook, the photo is read so the app can turn it into text. Photos you attach to recipes are stored with your recipes. The app never opens your camera or photo library except when you ask it to.
• A little bookkeeping: how much of the app’s reading allowance you’ve used (so heavy days don’t run up costs), and standard technical records (like error logs) that keep the app healthy.

We do not collect your location, contacts, browsing history, or anything from your device beyond what’s listed here. There is no advertising and no third-party tracking in the app.

How the reading works

When you ask Aruna to read a photo, a pasted recipe, a link, or to suggest dinner, that content is sent securely to Anthropic, the AI provider whose Claude models do the reading, along with the relevant parts of your kitchen (such as your pantry list and taste preferences) so the answer fits your house. Under Anthropic’s API terms, this content is not used to train their models. We send only what the feature needs, and never your email or account details.

Where your kitchen lives

Your data is stored with Supabase, our database provider, in a data centre in Sydney, Australia, protected by row-level security — meaning your kitchen is readable by your account and no one else’s. Data travels between your phone and the server over encrypted connections. The app also keeps a copy of your kitchen on your own phone, so it works offline.

What we never do

• We never sell your data, to anyone, for anything.
• We never show you advertising.
• We never share your kitchen with other users unless you invite them (household sharing, when it arrives, will be by your explicit invitation).
• We never read your data ourselves except when you ask for help with a problem, or when the law requires it.

Leaving, and taking your things

• Export: you can take your recipes with you — export is free and always available.
• Deletion: the app has a delete door (Account → Delete my kitchen). It permanently erases your account and everything in it from our servers. This is immediate and cannot be undone by us or anyone else.
• Lapsed subscriptions (when subscriptions exist): your kitchen is never deleted for non-payment — it stays readable.

Children

Ask Aruna is a general-audience app and is not directed at children under 16. We don’t knowingly collect personal information from children.

The beta period

While Ask Aruna is in testing (TestFlight and Google Play testing), Apple and Google additionally collect the usual beta statistics (like crash reports) under their own privacy policies. Feedback you send us by email or message is used to improve the app and never shared.

Changes and contact

If this policy changes, the date above changes with it, and material changes will be flagged in the app. Questions, concerns, or requests about your data: