Your restaurant memories stay private

PlateHunter Privacy Policy · Last updated: November 3, 2026

PlateHunter saves what you enter, and what your partner enters, to display the restaurant journal, the podiums and the duo’s statistics. This information is never sold and never used for advertising. The free version shows Google AdMob ads, which receive device data (advertising ID, IP address), never your restaurants or your ratings.

Who is responsible

PlateHunter is published by Maxence Bonnet, sole proprietor (MaxFabrics, SIREN 104406707). For any question about your data: contact@maxfabrics.com.

What you save

The restaurants (name, address, location on the map if you place it), visits, dishes, ratings, comments, expenses, photos of dishes and memories, and your display preferences. None of this goes to the ad network, and the app does no audience measurement.

Where your data lives

Your data is saved in your duo’s secure online space, at Google Firebase (servers in Paris), so it shows up on all the duo’s phones. Only the people in the duo can access it. Photos of dishes and memories go through the PlateHunter relay (Cloudflare), which checks that you’re part of the duo, and are stored with storage providers in Europe: Cloudflare R2, Tigris (Frankfurt), Oracle Cloud (Paris) or Backblaze B2 (Amsterdam). To block fraudulent access, Google (App Check and Play Integrity) checks that requests really come from the PlateHunter app.

Menu reading by an assistant

Only if you accept it (question asked at the first scan, setting in Settings › Privacy): when you scan a restaurant’s menu, the menu photos, without their location, are sent through the PlateHunter relay to an artificial intelligence assistant that reads the dishes and prices: open models hosted by Cloudflare (Workers AI), or, as a fallback, those of OpenRouter. Cloudflare doesn’t keep these photos after the response and doesn’t use them to train its models; OpenRouter is set to exclude providers that would. The relay limits the number of readings per duo and per day. Otherwise, with no connection, or if the assistant doesn’t respond, the menu is read on your phone.

Where to eat?

To suggest restaurants around you, a rounded location (to within about 500 m) is sent to the PlateHunter relay, which passes it on, rounded to the kilometer, to Geoapify (OpenStreetMap data); as a fallback, your phone queries OpenStreetMap’s Overpass service directly. The restaurants found, their distances and a summary of your tastes (cuisines, ratings, budget, favorites) are then sent to the assistant, by the same path as menu reading, to rank them, if the online assistant is turned on; otherwise, the sorting happens on your phone.

Map and addresses

Map backgrounds come from OpenFreeMap (OpenStreetMap data): your phone downloads the tiles for the displayed area from their servers, or as a fallback from OpenStreetMap’s, which therefore see your IP address and that area. Searching for an address, and looking up the address of a point on the map, go through your phone’s built-in location service (provided by Google on most Android phones).

Your location

If you allow it, your location is read when you tap “My location”, when you open the map or “Where to eat?”, to center the map or sort restaurants by distance. It is never tracked in the background. The location of a restaurant you place is saved in the duo’s journal.

Advertising

PlateHunter is free thanks to advertising: a discreet banner on the home screen and the statistics, and now and then a full-screen ad after you finish an entry, never while you’re entering something. The ads come from Google AdMob. Before any ad, the app asks for your choice through Google’s consent form; with your consent, Google receives technical information about your phone (advertising ID, IP address, model, language, interactions with the ads) to show the ads, limit how often they repeat, measure them and, if you accept it, personalize them. If you refuse, ads still appear, but non-personalized, or “limited” if you also refuse storage on your phone (without an advertising ID or tracker); Google processes this information under its own rules (policies.google.com/technologies/ads). Your restaurants, ratings, photos and comments are never sent to it. In the European Union, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, you can change your mind at any time: Settings › Privacy › Ad choices. You can reset or delete the advertising ID in Android settings. When your duo has the ad-free option, no ad appears on either of your phones.

Purchases

Purchases, such as “Remove ads” and the “plus” subscription (monthly or yearly), go through Google Play, which handles the payment: PlateHunter never sees your card or payment method. To give the purchase to your whole duo, the app sends PlateHunter’s server the purchase token provided by Google Play; the server checks it with Google, then keeps a fingerprint (SHA-256) of that token; for a subscription, it also keeps the token itself, needed to check each renewal with Google. It also keeps the product bought and your duo’s identifier, without your name or email address, for as long as the purchase is valid. A refunded purchase or an expired subscription stops being granted; the subscription can be cancelled at any time in Google Play, and the free limits come back when it ends, without deleting anything. To apply these limits, the server counts, per duo, the day’s assistant scans and the month’s uploaded photos, without their content. You can get your purchases back with “Restore purchases” in Settings.

Your account

An anonymous account is created automatically to link your phone to your duo. If you protect your access with Google, your email address is used only to find your duo again if you switch phones.

Sharing and backups

What you choose to send (invite, reminder, recap or backup file) goes out through the app you choose. A backup contains the restaurants, visits, dishes and ratings, without the photos; keep it somewhere safe. The app’s data isn’t copied into Android’s automatic backup.

How long

Your data stays as long as your duo exists. An item put in the trash stays there for 30 days, then is erased for good, photos included, the next time the app opens. When you delete your account, everything about you is erased from our servers right away.

Correct or erase your data

You can edit or delete each item from the app; a deletion goes through the trash first. To erase everything at once when you’re alone in the duo: Settings › Danger zone › Erase all our data; as a pair, “Erase my ratings” erases your ratings and comments, without touching the journal or the other person’s ratings. To delete your account: Settings › Danger zone › Delete my account. In a duo of two, your ratings, your comments and your first name are erased and you leave the duo; the restaurants and photos stay with your partner. If you’re alone in the duo, the whole duo is erased. Without the app: maxfabrics.com/ombelle/platehunter/en/supprimer-mon-compte, or an email to contact@maxfabrics.com. For your other rights (access, rectification, objection), write to contact@maxfabrics.com. You can also refer the matter to the CNIL (cnil.fr).