Privacy.

Forkelo is made by Vorby Studios. This page says what forkelo.com collects, why, who else can see it, and how to get rid of it. It is written to be read rather than to be survived.

The short version: Forkelo is a database of dishes at restaurants. Almost everything on the site is about food, not about you. What it keeps about you is an email address if you join the waitlist, an account if you sign in with Google, the searches people type, and feedback you send. There are no analytics, no advertising, no trackers and no third-party scripts on this site. Nothing here is sold.

What Forkelo stores

The waitlist

If you enter your email address to get early access, Forkelo stores that address and when you gave it. It is used to tell you when Forkelo launches, and for nothing else.

Your account

Accounts are created only by signing in with Google. Forkelo stores the email address, name and profile picture Google returns, and asks Google for nothing else. It also stores your language and time zone so dates and copy come out right, and when the account was created. Forkelo never sees or stores a password; sign-in is handled by Google and Supabase Auth.

Searches

Every search typed into Forkelo is stored: the words, the place you searched near, which dish the words were matched to, and how many results there were. Searches are not tied to your account or to your IP address. They are kept because searches with no good answer are what tell Forkelo which dishes to research next.

Your location, if you ask for distances

Ranking pages can show how far each dish is from you, but only after you press "Show distances from me" and your browser asks your permission. Your coordinates are then put in that page's address so the server can work out the distances. They are not stored in the database. Like any web request, that address appears briefly in the server's request logs, which Google Cloud keeps for thirty days.

Feedback you send

The feedback form stores what you wrote, the kind of feedback it was, your account ID if you were signed in, and an email address if you chose to give one. It is stored in Forkelo's own database and read by Vorby Studios; it is not sent anywhere else.

Restaurant and dish data

The rankings are built from information about restaurants and their menus, gathered from menus, public reviews and community discussions. This is information about businesses, not about the people who reviewed them. Forkelo stores summaries and scores, not copies of other people's reviews, and never publishes a reviewer's name.

What is not collected

No analytics and no tracking pixels. There is no Google Analytics, no Meta pixel, no session recording. Pages on forkelo.com load no third-party JavaScript at all.
No advertising identifiers, and no advertising.
No background location. Your position is only read when you press the button that asks for it.
No purchases. Forkelo does not take orders or payments.

Cookies

Forkelo sets at most five cookies, none of them for advertising or analytics, which is why there is no consent banner to click through:

access_token and refresh_token keep you signed in. Both are httpOnly and Secure, so page scripts cannot read them. They last seven days.
session holds your language preference across requests.
user_language remembers the language you picked.
user_timezone is set by your browser on the sign-in page so timestamps render in your local time.

If you never sign in, only the language cookies can be set, and only if you change the language.

Who else can see your data

Forkelo runs on other companies' infrastructure. These are the only ones that touch your data, and each is used for one job:

Supabase — the database, file storage and the authentication system, in a region in the United States (AWS us-west-2).
Google Cloud Run — runs the Forkelo server itself, in us-west1. It processes requests and keeps request logs for thirty days.
Google Sign-In — only if you choose it. Google will know you signed in to Forkelo.
Google Maps — the "Directions" buttons are ordinary links to Google Maps. Following one tells Google which restaurant you asked directions to, under Google's own privacy policy. Nothing is sent to Google until you click.
Cloudflare — DNS for forkelo.com.
No email provider. Forkelo currently sends no email at all, not even to the waitlist yet. If that changes, this list changes with it.

Your data is not sold, rented, or shared with anyone else, and it is not used to train any model.

How long it is kept

Your account is kept until you delete it. Waitlist addresses are kept until Forkelo has launched and you have been told, or until you ask for removal. Searches are kept indefinitely because they are not tied to anyone. Feedback is kept but detached from a deleted account.

Deleting your account

There is not yet a delete button on the site. Until there is, email support@vorby.com from the address on the account and it will be deleted, along with its data. The same address removes you from the waitlist. Saying so plainly is better than implying a button that does not exist.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, in particular in the UK, the EU/EEA and California, you have the right to ask for a copy of your data, to correct it, to have it deleted, and to object to how it is handled. Forkelo honours these requests regardless of where you live. Write to support@vorby.com and expect an answer within 30 days.

Where the law requires a legal basis: Forkelo processes your data to provide the service you asked for, and on the basis of legitimate interest in keeping the service working and secure. There is no processing for advertising, so there is nothing here to opt out of.

Restaurants

If you own or run a restaurant that appears on Forkelo and something about it is wrong, closed, or out of date, write to support@vorby.com and it will be corrected. Rankings themselves are editorial and are not changed on request; see the Terms.

Children

Forkelo is not intended for anyone under 13, and accounts are not knowingly created for them. If you believe a child has an account, tell us and it will be removed.

Security, honestly

Traffic uses HTTPS. Session cookies are httpOnly and Secure. There are no passwords for Forkelo to lose, because sign-in goes through Google. The bot that researches dishes writes through an API protected by a secret key that is never sent to a browser.

Changes

If this policy changes materially, the date at the top changes. The current version is always at forkelo.com/privacy.

Contact

Vorby Studios — support@vorby.com.