This is a small app made by one person, and you were invited to it personally. This page explains, in plain terms, what it does with your information. It is not a legal document and no lawyer has read it.

What this is

Pick-a-Recipe turns cooking videos into recipes you can actually cook from. It is early software and a personal project. It runs on a computer in its owner's home, which means it can be slow, can break, and can be offline entirely when that machine is asleep. Recipes can be lost. There is no guarantee it will keep working, and no promise about how long it will exist. Please don't rely on it as the only copy of something you care about.

What is stored

Most of it lives in a single database file on that computer:

• Your username, and a scrambled version of your password. The password itself is never stored and cannot be read back, not even by the owner.
• If this copy of the app has Google sign-in switched on and you use it, your email address, your Google account id, and the web address of your Google profile picture.
• The recipes you import: the link you pasted, the title, the recipe text, and the photo.
• Your ratings, collections, meal plans, shopping list, and which recipes you have cooked.
• Which household you belong to, if any, the invite you signed up with, and a count of how many recipes you have imported this month.
• A notification subscription, only if you turn notifications on.
• Your IP address, briefly, after a failed login. This is how repeated password guessing is slowed down. It is not used for anything else.

While an import is running, the downloaded video, the audio taken out of it and the frames pulled from it sit on that computer outside the database. They are deleted as soon as the import finishes, whether it worked, failed, or you cancelled it.

What leaves the computer

This is the part worth knowing, because it is the least obvious.

• The words from a video are sent to OpenAI or Google Gemini to be turned into a recipe. That means the video's transcript and its description are handled by one of those companies under their own terms.
• Pictures from the video are sent as well. Importing one pulls still frames out of it and sends them to the same company: eight of them to read the text on screen, twelve more to pick the photo for the recipe. Whoever and whatever is in those frames goes with them.
• On the Gemini setting, the video file itself is uploaded to Google in place of those first eight frames — the whole file, audio included. Which of the two companies this copy of the app uses is the owner's setting, so ask them which one you are on.
• Photos you take of a cookbook page are sent to the same place, for the same reason.
• Importing a video means TikTok, YouTube or Instagram sees a request for it.
• Loading any page in this app fetches fonts from Google, and from a public code host an icon font and the small library that streams import progress to your screen. Those services see your IP address. This page does it too.
• If the owner has pointed this copy at a Tandoor or Mealie server, every recipe and its photo is sent there as well. Nothing is set up that way unless the owner did it on purpose, so ask if you want to know.
• If you turn on notifications, your browser's notification service is involved in delivering them.

What does not leave the computer

• Speech in a video is turned into text on this machine, by software running here, and it is that text the recipe is built from. No recording is sent away to be transcribed. The one catch is the Gemini setting above: the video file it uploads has the audio in it.
• There is no analytics, no tracking, and no advertising. Nothing in here counts what you click or reports it anywhere. The only files a page pulls from anyone else are the fonts and that one progress library, listed above because they do let those services see your IP.
• Nothing about you is sold or rented to anyone, and nothing is handed to a company that is not named on this page.
• The only cookie is the one that keeps you signed in. Your light or dark mode preference is remembered by your browser and never sent anywhere.

Who can see your recipes

Only you. The one exception is a household: if you join one, everyone in it can see and cook each other's recipes, and you share a single shopping list and a single meal plan between you. That is the point of it. Outside a household, no other account can open your recipes, your list, or your plan.

Recipes do get reused in one narrow way. If someone else has already imported the same video, the app hands you their extraction rather than paying to redo it, and yours can be handed to them the same way. What travels is the recipe text and the photo. Your name, your library, and the fact that you imported anything do not go with it.

Deleting your account

Ask, and your account will be deleted along with everything attached to it: your recipes, ingredients, collections, ratings, shopping list, meal plan, cooking history, import counts, notification subscriptions, and household membership.

Two things are worth naming, because that sweep does not reach them. The invite you signed up with keeps a record that your username used it. And a recipe caught mid-import, still waiting on a confirmation that never came, can outlast the account. Ask about those too if you want them gone.

Getting in touch

There is no support address, because this app is invite-only. Whoever invited you runs it, and you already know how to reach them. Ask them.

Back to sign in