Privacy Policy

Who we are

Bhansa is made by ANPO PTY LTD (ACN 698 868 147), a company based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia ("Bhansa", "we", "our" or "us"). We are responsible for the personal information described here (in the EU, EEA and UK, we are the "controller"). This policy covers the Bhansa mobile app, this website and the pages we host for shared recipes, collections and shopping lists.

This policy explains what we collect, why, who we share it with, how long we keep it, and the choices you have. If anything is unclear, email privacy@bhansa.app.

1. Information we collect

1.1 Account information

• Google or Apple sign-in: your email address, name and profile picture (as provided by Google or Apple) and the account identifier they give us. With Apple you can choose to hide your email; we then receive an Apple relay address.
• Guest mode: if you continue without signing in, the app creates a random identifier stored securely on your device. We store only a one-way hash of it, which still lets us recognise your guest account.
• Your Bhansa account ID, sign-in and activity timestamps, timezone and country.

1.2 Preferences

• Dietary restrictions, allergies and ingredients you avoid
• Cuisine, flavour and spice preferences, cooking skill and time, budget
• Household size, measurement units, language
• Taste signals the app learns from what you save, rate, cook and skip (only while Personalized Recommendations is on)

1.3 Health and nutrition information

If you use food logging or nutrition goals, we collect:

• Food log entries: what you ate, when, portions, calories, protein, carbohydrates, fat, fibre, sugar and sodium
• Your nutrition profile: birth year or age, sex, height, weight, goal weight, activity level and the targets calculated from them
• Optional focus areas you choose, such as blood pressure, blood sugar, heart and cholesterol, or digestion
• Allergies and dietary restrictions (also listed above)

This is sensitive information, and so are allergies and any dietary restriction that reveals your religious beliefs (for example halal or kosher). It is optional, used only to provide the features you use (tracking, targets, tips, suitable recipes and Mira's answers about your food), sent to an AI provider only when a feature you use needs it, and never sold or used for advertising. Bhansa gives general nutrition information, not medical advice.

1.4 Your content

• Pantry items (quantities, expiry dates, prices), shopping lists and receipts you scan
• Saved, imported and custom recipes, recipe notes and edits, folders and collections, ratings
• Meal plans, cooking history, prep plans and routines
• Shared household content: shopping lists, pantry, plans and expense entries are visible to, and can be changed by, the other members of that household
• Share links: anyone with a recipe, collection or shopping-list link can view it, and recipients can save a copy. We record which account created each link so we can handle abuse or copyright complaints

1.5 AI features and Mira

Mira (chat, cooking help and voice), photo scans, recipe imports, meal and recipe generation and nutrition estimates are powered by third-party AI providers. Before the first AI request the app shows which providers are used and what is sent, and asks for your permission. You can change your answer in Settings > Privacy & Data > AI Features. Planning, saved recipes, your pantry and lists work without AI.

An Allow is saved on your device and with your account. New or guest accounts on the same device inherit that permission, and we record it for those accounts without asking again. Signing out does not clear the device permission. Turning AI Features off clears the device permission and revokes permission for the current account; it does not revoke permission already recorded for other accounts or devices. On a shared device, check this setting before using AI features.

• What is sent: your message, recent messages in the same chat, and the context the feature needs, such as the current recipe and step, pantry items, food log entries, preferences, allergies and nutrition targets.
• What is not sent: we do not send your account name, email or account ID to AI providers. Anything you type, say, or show in a photo can still reach them, so avoid including details you do not want to share.
• Cooking chat history: kept on our servers for up to 24 hours (at most the last 30 messages per recipe) so Mira can follow up, then deleted.
• Mira chat history: kept in server memory and reset after an hour without activity, or when our servers restart. Your device keeps your most recent conversation for up to an hour so you can pick it up again.
• Results: things Mira does for you (a logged meal, an updated list, a saved recipe) are stored like the rest of your content.
• Reports: if you report an AI response or recipe, we store the reported text, the reason and any note you add so we can review it and improve Mira.

1.6 Photos and camera

• The camera and photo library are used when you choose to scan a receipt, barcode, pantry or fridge, dish or nutrition label, import a recipe from a photo, screenshot or cookbook page, set a profile picture, or attach a screenshot to a bug report.
• Scan and import photos are resized, stripped of location and other metadata, sent over an encrypted connection to OpenAI for analysis, and not stored on our servers. The results are: nutrition scan results are kept for 30 days and receipt results for 24 hours, linked to your account, so a repeated scan does not cost you another credit.
• Your device keeps small thumbnails of your 10 most recent scans.
• Bug report screenshots are stored on our servers so only our team can see them (see 1.11).

1.7 Voice and microphone

• The microphone is used only when you choose voice input: adding ingredients, logging meals, talking to Mira and hands-free cooking controls.
• Depending on the feature, speech is turned into text either by your device's speech service (Apple or Google, which may process it in the cloud) or by sending a short recording to OpenAI's transcription service. We do not keep the recordings.
• The transcribed text is then handled like any typed message.

1.8 Location

• Location is optional and used only while the app is open. The app never asks for it when you simply open the Home screen; it asks when you use a feature that uses it, such as weather-aware recipe suggestions.
• If you allow it, your device sends its coordinates directly to Open-Meteo to get local weather, and your device's map service turns them into a city name. On iOS this can be your precise location; on Android Bhansa only requests approximate location.
• The city name is kept on your device and sent to us for local grocery price estimates. We store your country and timezone with your account. We do not store your coordinates.
• You can turn location off at any time in your device settings.

1.9 Imported recipes

• When you import from a website, we fetch the page. For social media posts we may use ScrapeCreators to read the post. When the text needs structuring, it is sent to our AI providers.
• We keep the source link and creator attribution with the recipe, including when it is shared.
• To make repeat imports fast, we keep a shared copy of the recipe as it appears at the source (not your edits). It is deleted after 90 days without use.

1.10 Feature requests

• Requests you post are reviewed by our team before other people can see them. Once published, the title and description are visible to other Bhansa users. Your name is not shown.
• You can report a published request in the app. Do not include personal or health information in a request.

1.11 Support and bug reports

• A bug report includes your description, an optional contact email, device details (model, OS and app version) and any screenshots you attach. The description and device details are sent to a private GitHub repository that only our team can access.
• Your contact email and screenshots stay on our servers with the report and are never sent to GitHub. Only our team can see them. If you were signed in, the report is linked to your account and deleted with it. Reports, contact emails and screenshots are deleted after 90 days at the latest.

1.12 Usage data and diagnostics

• Usage analytics (only while Usage Analytics is on): which features you use, recipe views, searches, cooking outcomes, errors and requests that fail (which screen or request was involved, not its content) and similar events. In the EU, EEA and UK this is off until you turn it on.
• In-app feedback (only while Usage Analytics is on): now and then the app asks one short question, such as how easy it was to plan your week. Answering is optional. If you answer, we store your score and any comment you add, linked to your account. Please do not put health or other sensitive information in a comment.
• Records the service needs, whatever your analytics setting: AI usage and credit balances, subscription status, and request logs used for security, rate limiting and fixing faults.
• Crash reports are sent to Sentry so we can fix them.
• IP addresses are processed by our hosting providers and used briefly for rate limiting and abuse prevention. We do not keep them in our database.

1.13 Device information and notifications

• Device type, operating system and app version, language and region settings.
• If you allow notifications, your device's push token, used for household updates, cooking and expiry reminders and trial reminders. You can turn notifications off in your device settings. In the app, notification presets and individual controls let you choose how often you hear from us. We record reminder deliveries and whether you open them so we can reduce reminders you ignore. Device-scheduled reminder records stay on your device; delivery and open records for server-sent reminders are linked to your account.

1.14 Purchases

• Subscriptions and one-time Mira credit packs are processed by Apple or Google and managed through RevenueCat. We receive your subscription status, product, renewal and expiry dates, trial status, store transaction identifiers and refund status, linked to your Bhansa account. For credit packs we also keep the store, date credits were added, number of credits purchased and remaining, and purchase price when supplied by the store. We use these records to validate purchases, add and spend credits, avoid duplicate grants and handle refunds. Purchased credit records and balances are included in your data export and removed when you delete your account, subject to the legal retention described below. We never receive card numbers or billing addresses.

1.15 This website

• You can browse bhansa.app without an account. Our hosting provider (Vercel) processes your IP address and standard request details to serve the site and protect it from abuse.
• The home page sets one cookie, bh_country, holding only the two-letter country code worked out from your IP address, so it can show Premium prices in your local currency. It expires after 24 hours.
• The website has no analytics, advertising or tracking cookies, and no third-party trackers.
• Opening a shared recipe collection page loads it from our servers using the code in the link.

2. How we use your information

• To provide Bhansa: recipes, meal plans, pantry and lists, food logging, Mira, imports, sharing and households.
• To personalise it: learning your tastes and suggesting suitable, seasonal and local recipes (you can turn this off).
• To keep it running and safe: security, preventing abuse and fraud, enforcing usage limits, fixing bugs, moderating shared content and handling copyright complaints.
• To improve it: understanding how features are used (only with Usage Analytics on) and reviewing reports about AI answers.
• To communicate with you: service notifications and emails, such as trial reminders, and replies to your support requests. We do not send marketing emails.
• To meet legal obligations: for example tax records for purchases and responding to lawful requests.

If you are in the EU, EEA, UK or Switzerland, our legal bases are: performing our contract with you (providing the app), your consent (AI features, usage analytics, location, notifications), your explicit consent for health information, allergies and dietary restrictions that reveal religious beliefs, our legitimate interests (security, fixing faults, moderation, personalising suggestions and improving the service), and legal obligations. You can withdraw consent at any time without affecting processing that already happened, and you can object to processing based on legitimate interests. Personalised suggestions stop when you turn off Personalized Recommendations.

Automated decisions: we do not make decisions about you based solely on automated processing that have legal or similarly significant effects on you. Personalisation and AI suggestions only change which recipes, tips and answers you see.

3. Who we share information with

We share personal information only with the service providers below, who process it for us to run Bhansa, with the people you choose to share content with, and where the law requires it. We require our providers to protect the data and use it only to provide their service.

AI training: we use OpenAI's API and Google's paid Gemini API. Under those services' terms, the content we send is not used to train their models. Providers may keep content for a limited period for abuse monitoring under their own policies.

Recipe images may also be fetched from public image libraries (Pexels, Unsplash and Pixabay) using recipe or ingredient names only. Shared shopping-list pages load fonts from Google Fonts. Nutrition values come from public reference datasets (such as USDA FoodData Central), which receive no personal information.

Legal requests and business changes: we may disclose information where the law requires it, for example in response to a valid court order, or to protect someone's safety. If ANPO PTY LTD or Bhansa is sold or merged, your information may pass to the new owner, who must keep honouring this policy. We will tell you before that happens.

We do not sell or rent your personal information, and we do not share it for advertising.

4. International transfers

Our servers are hosted in the United States, and several of our providers (including OpenAI, Google, RevenueCat and Sentry) process data in the United States and other countries where they or their subprocessors operate. Our website is served from Vercel's global network, so a request may be handled in a data centre near you. Your information is therefore transferred outside Australia and, if you live there, outside the EU, EEA, UK, Switzerland, Canada or your own country. While it is held abroad, courts and authorities there may be able to access it under their laws.

We take reasonable steps to make sure overseas recipients protect it consistently with the Australian Privacy Principles. For EU, EEA, UK and Swiss users we rely on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (and its UK and Swiss extensions) where the provider is certified, or on Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK Addendum. We also minimise what we send, for example by not sending your name, email or account ID to AI providers. You can ask for more information at privacy@bhansa.app.

5. How we protect your information

• All connections between the app and our servers use HTTPS encryption.
• Sign-in uses Google or Apple; your session token is kept in your device's secure storage.
• Access to your data on our servers is checked against your signed-in account on every request.
• Photos are stripped of location metadata before analysis, guest identifiers are stored only as hashes, and sign-in credentials are removed from our logs.
• We review our security regularly. No system is perfectly secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security. If a data breach affects your information, we will notify you and the relevant regulators as the laws that apply require (for example the Australian Notifiable Data Breaches scheme and the GDPR).

6. How long we keep information

7. Your choices

In Settings > Privacy & Data you can turn these on or off at any time:

• AI Features: whether content you share with AI features is sent to our AI providers
• Personalized Recommendations: taste learning. Turning it off deletes the learned behaviour data
• Usage Analytics: feature usage events, performance traces and the occasional in-app feedback question

Camera, photos, microphone, speech recognition, location, calendar and notifications are each controlled by your device's permission settings. Health information is optional: you can use Bhansa without a food log or nutrition profile, and delete entries at any time.

8. Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us to:

• Access your personal information, or export it yourself in Settings > Privacy & Data > Export Your Data
• Correct information that is wrong (most of it you can edit in the app)
• Delete your account and information (section 9)
• Withdraw consent using the settings above

Australia: we handle personal information in line with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles. If you are not satisfied with how we respond to a privacy complaint, you can contact the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au.

EU, EEA, UK and Switzerland: you also have the rights to restrict or object to processing, to data portability, and to complain to your local data protection authority (in the UK, the ICO; in Switzerland, the FDPIC).

Canada: you can withdraw consent, access and correct your information, and complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada or, in Quebec, the Commission d'accès à l'information. Our Data Protection Officer (dpo@bhansa.app) is the person in charge of protecting personal information.

Brazil: under the LGPD you can confirm whether we process your data, access, correct, anonymise, port or delete it, learn who we share it with, and complain to the ANPD. Our Data Protection Officer (dpo@bhansa.app) is our contact person (encarregado).

India: you can access, correct and erase your information, nominate someone to exercise your rights if you die or become unable to, and raise a grievance with our Data Protection Officer (dpo@bhansa.app). If you are not satisfied with our response, you can approach the Data Protection Board of India.

New Zealand and elsewhere: you have the rights your local law gives you, and you can complain to your local privacy regulator (in New Zealand, the Privacy Commissioner). We will honour the rights above wherever you live.

US state privacy rights

If you live in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Texas, Oregon or another US state with a consumer privacy law, you have the right to know what we collect and why, to access, correct, delete and get a portable copy of it, and not to be discriminated against for using these rights. We do not sell personal information, share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, use it for targeted advertising, or profile you in ways that produce legal or similarly significant effects, so there is nothing to opt out of. Because we do not track you across other sites or apps, we do not change what we do in response to Do Not Track signals; we treat a Global Privacy Control signal as an opt-out of sale and sharing, which we already do not do.

Categories we collect (as defined in California law), from you, your device, Apple or Google sign-in, and the app stores: identifiers (name, email, account ID, push token); customer and commercial records (purchases and subscription status); internet and app activity (usage analytics, searches, request logs); approximate location (city, country and timezone); audio (short voice recordings for transcription, not kept); inferences (taste preferences); and sensitive personal information (health and nutrition information, allergies, and dietary restrictions that may reveal religious beliefs). We disclose these only to the service providers in section 3, for the purposes in section 2, and keep them for the periods in section 6. We use sensitive personal information only to provide the features you ask for, so the right to limit its use does not need to be exercised.

Consumer health data: if you live in Washington, Nevada or another state with a consumer health data law, see our Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy.

Authorised agents and appeals: you can use an authorised agent to make a request; we will ask for proof of their authority and may ask you to confirm your identity. If we decline your request, you can appeal by replying to our decision. We will respond to an appeal within 45 days. If you are not satisfied, you can contact your state Attorney General.

How to make a request

Email privacy@bhansa.app from the email address on your account, or use the in-app tools. We will verify the request comes from you and respond within 30 days. If a request is complex, we may take longer where the law allows (for example up to two further months under the GDPR, or 45 further days under US state laws), and we will tell you why. Requests are free unless they are clearly unfounded or excessive.

9. Deleting your account

Delete your account in the app under Settings > Privacy & Data > Delete Account, or without the app by following the instructions at bhansa.app/api/delete-account.

What deletion removes straight away:

• Your account, preferences, saved and imported recipes, notes, collections and share links, meal plans, pantry, lists, food log, nutrition profile, cooking history, credits, consents, feature requests, reports, and bug reports with their contact email and screenshots linked to your account
• Cached data and chat histories tied to your account on our servers
• Households and shared meal plans you own (for all their members) and your membership of others
• Your RevenueCat customer record. If you signed in with Apple, we also ask Apple to revoke Bhansa's access to your Apple ID
• On the device you delete from, the data the app stored locally

What can remain:

• Copies other people saved from your share links, and content you added to a household or shared plan someone else owns
• Data on your other devices until you open the app there or remove it
• Bug report text in our private issue tracker (email us and we will delete it)
• Records held by Apple, Google and our other providers under their own retention, and our backups and logs until they expire
• Records we must keep by law, such as transaction records

Deleting your account does not cancel a subscription. Cancel it in your App Store or Google Play subscription settings. Deletion also removes your unused purchased Mira credits and does not automatically refund a purchase. Contact the store or support@bhansa.app about any refund rights before deleting your account.

10. Children

Bhansa is intended for adults aged 18 and over and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has given us personal information, contact privacy@bhansa.app and we will delete it.

11. Changes to this policy

We will update this policy when our practices change and change the "Last Updated" date above. For significant changes we will also tell you in the app before they take effect and, where the law requires, ask for your consent again.

12. Contact us

• Privacy questions and requests: privacy@bhansa.app
• Data protection officer: dpo@bhansa.app
• General support: support@bhansa.app, or Settings > Contact Support in the app
• Company: ANPO PTY LTD (ACN 698 868 147), Melbourne, Victoria, Australia