Dined turns your camera roll into a restaurant diary. It is built so that your photos never leave your phone. This page explains exactly what does leave, why, and how to delete it.
| Data | Why | Who receives it |
|---|---|---|
| The approximate location (coordinates) where a group of photos was taken | To look up which restaurants are nearby so Dined can name the place | Our server, which forwards the lookup to Google Places. Google's own privacy policy applies to that lookup. |
| A restaurant's name, type, and address (as returned by Google) | To sort the place into a cuisine category | Our server, which asks an AI model (Anthropic's Claude) for the category. No information about you is attached to the request. |
| Anonymous usage events (which screens you open, whether a scan completed, and similar) plus a random device identifier | To understand how the app is used and find bugs | PostHog (analytics), hosted in the United States. Dined does not use this data for advertising and does not track you across other apps or websites. |
| A push-notification token and a random install identifier | To let our server ask the app to check for new photos in the background | Our server (Cloudflare) and Apple Push Notification service |
Dined includes a limited number of free restaurant lookups. To count them fairly and stop the limit being reset by reinstalling the app, our server keeps a small record per device: a random identifier stored in your phone's keychain, a count of lookups, and the Google place identifiers of the restaurants you've matched. Dined also uses Apple's DeviceCheck service and a short-lived (48-hour) per-network-address counter to deter automated abuse. None of this includes your name, your photos, or your notes.
Signing in is optional. It unlocks a larger free tier and cloud backup of your journal so you can restore it on a new phone. When you sign in, Dined receives from Apple only a stable anonymous user identifier (and, if you choose to share it, your email, which Dined does not store). Your analytics identity is then linked to that identifier.
The backup contains your restaurant list (names, addresses, coordinates), your ratings, notes, categories and Top 5 lists, the device name and model, and metadata about the photos attached to each restaurant: photo identifiers, capture times, and the coordinates they were taken at. It never contains the photos themselves. Backups are stored on Cloudflare's network and are only readable with a signed-in session from your Apple ID.
Dined relies on: Apple (Photos, Sign in with Apple, DeviceCheck, push notifications), Google Places (restaurant lookup), Anthropic (cuisine classification), PostHog (analytics), and Cloudflare (our server and storage). Each processes only the data described above. Dined does not sell your data, does not show ads, and does not share your data with anyone else.
Dined is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect information from them.
If this policy changes in a way that matters, the effective date above will change and the app will point you here. Questions or requests: dinedapp@gmail.com.