Privacy Policy

The short version

Give Me The Dish has no accounts, no logins, no advertising, and no ad or social trackers. We don’t sell or rent anything about you. The only things we keep are what’s needed to count a vote once per device, keep deal listings current, stop spam, and know which listings people use — and that last one is a plain tally, with nothing tying it to you.

1. Who we are

The Site is operated by Fuzzy Tech LLC, Bellingham, Washington. This policy covers givemethedish.com and its subdomains.

2. What we store

• A random device ID. The first time you vote or confirm a deal, your browser generates a random identifier and keeps it in local storage. It isn’t derived from your name, email, or hardware — it exists only so a single device counts once per deal. We can’t use it to identify you.
• Votes and “still active” confirmations. Stored with the device ID above and the deal they apply to.
• Deal suggestions, update reports, and venue claims. Whatever you type into those forms — venue, deal details, and any optional name, email, or phone number you choose to add. Contact details are used only to follow up on your submission.
• Feedback and feature requests. Whatever you type into the feedback form in the footer, any optional name or email you add, and the path of the page you were on when you opened it — that last one so a bug report says which screen it happened on. Contact details are used only to reply to you, and we can only reply if you leave one.
• Basic request data. Like any website, our host records requests, including IP address and browser user-agent. We also count recent requests per IP address for a short window to rate-limit voting and submission spam.
• Anonymous usage counts. When you tap Directions, Call or Menu on a venue, change a filter, or spin the wheel, we add 1 to a counter. A counter holds a number and nothing else — no device ID, no session, no IP address, no times, and no order of events. Two people tapping Directions once is stored identically to one person tapping it twice, so there is nothing in these numbers to trace back to you even in principle. We use them to tell venues how often their listing is used, and to find the deals and neighborhoods we’re missing.
• Searches that found nothing. One exception to the paragraph above, and it is worth stating plainly: when a search returns no results, we keep the words you typed, alongside a count of how many times anyone has searched for them. That list is our backlog of venues and deals to go and add. It is still not linked to you — no device ID, no session, no IP address, no times — but the text itself is stored, so please don’t type anything into the search box you wouldn’t want kept. We lower-case it, strip punctuation, cut it at 40 characters, cap how many distinct terms we hold at all, and delete the whole list on the schedule in section 6. Searches that do find something are only ever counted as a number.
• A device category, on one count only. When you tap “Save pick” to save the wheel’s picture, the count records which broad kind of device did it — one of iPhone or iPad, Android, computer, or other. That’s because saving works differently on each one (an iPhone has to go through its own share sheet to reach your photos), and a single number wouldn’t tell us whether it still works on yours. It is a category everyone on that kind of device shares, not an ID and not your browser’s user-agent string: it splits one tally into four tallies, which are no more traceable to you than the one was. No other count records anything about your device.
• Local drafts and preferences. Some pages keep your filter choices or an unsent draft in your browser’s local storage. That data never leaves your device.

3. What we don’t do

• No advertising networks, and no ad or social pixels.
• No profiles, no cross-site tracking, no session recording, no heatmaps, no device fingerprinting, and no following you from page to page. Nothing we store links one action to another or to a person.
• No uploading of the picture the wheel makes. “Save pick” draws that image inside your browser and hands it straight to your device or your share sheet. It never reaches our servers, and we never see which venue yours showed.
• No selling, renting, or sharing of personal information with data brokers or marketers.
• No accounts, passwords, or payment details — we never ask for them.
• No precise location tracking. Two “Near me” buttons ask your browser for your location — the one on the map, which centers the map on you, and the one above the deals list, which shows how far away each venue is and sorts the closest first. Both only ever ask when you tap them. Your position is used inside your browser, kept there (so the page doesn’t have to ask again every time you open it), and never sent to us. Tapping the button again forgets it, as does clearing your browser data for this site.
  One thing to know, and it is a different button: if you use “Use my location” inside the Suggest an update form on a venue page — the one that drops a pin so you can tell us where a venue actually is — those coordinates are sent to OpenStreetMap’s address lookup so the form can fill in the street address. That is a request to OpenStreetMap, not to us, and it only happens on that form, only when you press that button. See section 5.

4. Cookies

The public site sets no tracking cookies. One cookie exists — a signed administrator session cookie — and it is only ever issued to a staff member who logs into the private admin area. Everything else described above lives in your browser’s local storage, not in cookies.

5. Service providers

We use a small number of vendors to run the Site. They process data on our behalf under their own privacy terms:

• Vercel — hosting and edge delivery; sees request data including IP addresses. Vercel Web Analytics also runs on the Site and reports aggregate page views to us. It is cookieless and doesn’t track you across sites.
• Upstash — the Redis database that stores deals, vote counts, confirmations, and submissions.
• OpenStreetMap — map tiles on the map and venue pages are loaded directly from OpenStreetMap’s servers, so those servers see your IP address and the tiles you request. OpenStreetMap’s address lookup (Nominatim) is also used by the location picker in the Suggest an update form: a place name you type there, or the coordinates from that form’s “Use my location” button, are sent to Nominatim to turn into a street address. Their privacy policy governs what they do with it.
• Discord / webhook notifications — if enabled, new submissions and feedback (including any contact details you supplied) are forwarded to our private moderation channel.

6. How long we keep things

Votes and confirmations are kept while the deal is listed. Rate-limit counters expire within hours. Day-by-day usage counts are deleted after 90 days; the running totals they roll up into are kept, since a total is a single number with no date attached. The list of searches that found nothing is deleted after 180 days — it is a to-do list, not a record, and it is the one usage count that holds text you typed. Submissions are kept while we review them and for a reasonable period afterward as a record of where a listing came from. Feedback is kept while the idea or bug it describes is still open to us, and for a reasonable period after we act on it. We delete anything on request where we’re able to identify it.

7. Your choices

• Clearing your browser’s site data for givemethedish.com erases the device ID, your votes, confirmations, and saved preferences.
• You can use the whole Site without submitting a name or contact details — those fields are optional.
• To ask what we hold about a submission or a piece of feedback you sent, or to have it deleted, contact us using the details below.
• If your browser sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track, the Site records no usage counts from it at all. There’s nothing personal in those counts either way, but the signal is respected.

8. Children

The Site isn’t directed to children, and we don’t knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. Listings that describe alcohol are intended for people 21 and over.

9. Security

Traffic is served over HTTPS, administrative pages are gated behind server-side authentication, and admin APIs reject unauthenticated requests. No system is perfectly secure, but we keep the amount of personal data we hold small on purpose.

10. Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, we’ll update the “last updated” date above. Material changes will be noted on the Site.

11. Contact & deletion requests

Privacy questions or a deletion request? Contact Fuzzy Tech LLC:

• Email: privacy@givemethedish.com (or fuzzywonstudios@gmail.com)
• Mail: Fuzzy Tech LLC, Bellingham, WA 98225
• Feedback: You can also use our on-site Feedback form.

We process deletion requests within 30 days and confirm when completed.

See also our Terms & Conditions.