Privacy

Recipe Box keeps your family's recipes. This explains exactly what that means for your information — what is collected, who else ever sees it, and how to get it back or have it removed.

It is written to be read rather than to be defensible. Where something might surprise you, it is said plainly instead of being placed where you would not look.

Who we are

Recipe Box is operated by Life Ascension LLC, a limited liability company registered in the United States. Recipe Box is a trading name of that company.

What we collect

What you give us

Your name and email address, and a password we store only as a hash — we cannot read it and cannot tell you what it is. If you sign in with Google instead, we store the account identifier Google gives us and the URL of your profile picture. We never receive your Google password.

What you put in

Your recipes: titles, ingredients, instructions, notes, timings and any links you paste. And your photographs — which for this service usually means handwriting, and sometimes whatever else happened to be on the table.

What is collected automatically

When you are signed in, we store the IP address and browser identification string of your session, because that is how the sign-in itself works. When anyone looks at our front page we record that a visit happened, where it came from, and nothing else — no cookie, no identifier, nothing that could later be tied to a person. That page carries no analytics or advertising scripts of any kind.

Your photographs are read by another company

This is the part worth knowing, so it is not buried further down.

When you ask us to read a recipe card, the photograph is sent to Anthropic, whose software transcribes the handwriting and returns the text. We keep a copy of what it returned alongside your recipe. Photographs are sent only when you ask for a card to be read — uploading a photo without asking for it to be read never sends it anywhere.

If you would rather no photograph ever left our systems, type the recipe in yourself. Everything else works the same.

Who else processes your information

• Laravel Cloud — runs the service and hosts the database.
• Object storage — holds your photograph files.
• Anthropic — reads recipe cards, as described above.
• Resend — sends email: sign-in confirmations, password resets, and the link to a data export.
• Google — only if you choose to sign in with it.

We do not sell your information, share it with advertisers, or use it to build a profile of you. There is no advertising on this service and no plan to introduce any.

Who can see your recipes

Your recipes are private to you. Three things change that, and each one is your choice:

• Recipes you share with a household are visible to every member of it. Your private notes on a recipe are visible to them too.
• A recipe you share by link can be read by anyone holding that link, without an account. Your notes are never shown on a shared page. You can revoke a link at any time, and the old link stops working.
• If you leave a household, it keeps a copy of the recipes you had shared with it, credited to you by name. You keep yours.

How long we keep things

While your account exists, we keep your recipes — that is the entire point of the service.

A recipe you delete is retained rather than destroyed, so that it can be restored if you ask. It disappears from your box immediately and from every screen, but it is still on our systems. If that is not what you want, tell us and we will remove it permanently.

A data export you request is stored until you request another, which replaces it, and its download link expires after seven days.

Your rights over your information

These apply to everyone who uses the service, wherever you live. We have not tried to work out which of them we are legally obliged to offer you; it was easier to offer all of them to everybody.

• Get a copy. Ask for an export from your profile page. You get a file containing your recipes, your photographs at full resolution, and a page that opens in any browser — no account, no software, no us.
• Correct it. Edit anything, at any time.
• Delete it. Delete individual recipes yourself; ask us to close your account entirely.
• Take it elsewhere. The export includes a machine-readable file of everything, intended to be usable by something that is not us.
• Ask what we hold. Write to us and we will tell you.

Security

Traffic is encrypted in transit. Passwords are hashed. Photograph files are private and served only to people entitled to see them — never by a public URL you could guess. Photographs are stripped of embedded metadata when uploaded, including the GPS coordinates phones record, so a shared photo does not reveal where it was taken.

No service is perfectly secure, and this one is operated by a very small team. If you find a problem, please tell us rather than anyone else first.

Children

This service is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their information.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will say so on this page and update the date at the top. We will not quietly broaden what we do with your information and rely on you not re-reading.

Contact

A contact address has not been configured for this deployment yet.