Who we are
Bickr is an app that helps people and groups decide where to eat or drink, what to watch, what to do, what to cook and what to name the baby. It is built and run from Melbourne, Australia, and Australian law applies to it.
This policy explains what we handle and why. If you have a question about it, email hello@bickr.au. If you are not happy with how we have handled your information, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au.
The short version
You can use Bickr without an account, and most people do.
Most of what the app remembers about you is on your own phone and never reaches us. Your dietary filters are part of that, and they stay there.
If you sign in, we keep your email address, the decisions you chose to keep, and the groups you saved.
We do not sell personal information.
What stays on your device
These live in your browser's own storage on the phone or computer you are using. They are not sent to our servers, signing in does not upload them, and clearing your browser's site data for Bickr removes them:
- your filters, including your dietary ones;
- the record of what you have swiped through and what you have already seen;
- your taste profile, which is the tally of what you tend to say yes to;
- the location you last searched from, and the suburb you typed;
- the display name you use in a group, and the face you picked;
- the app's settings, such as your theme, and the counters behind prompts like the one that offers to install the app.
If you have no account, this is nearly everything the app knows about you, and clearing your site data is the delete button.
Your dietary filters
The four dietary filters are vegetarian, vegan, halal and gluten-free. We treat them as sensitive information, because for most people who tap one they say something about a religious observance or a health need.
They stay on your device. They are used to build the search we send out, and that is all:
- they are never stored against your account, and never on a group or a session we keep;
- they are never sent to our analytics, by any route, including the recordings described below;
- they are never used to rank, price or gate anything.
The one place they do leave your device is the search itself. There is no way to ask Google for halal or gluten-free venues except in words, so when you have a dietary filter on, that word goes to Google Maps Platform as part of the search term, along with the area being searched. There is no way to build the feature without that, and if you would rather not, leave the filter off and read the venue's own listing instead.
Dietary matches come from venue data and can be wrong. Always confirm with the venue.
Recipe decks add allergen filters, from the list Australian food labels have to declare. They are treated exactly as the four above. They act on the facts we have recorded for each recipe, so they go no further than the request that builds your deck; we do not store them and we do not send them to anyone else. A recipe's full method opens on the publisher's own site, which is told only that you came from Bickr. Recipes can be wrong too, so always check the ingredients yourself.
What we collect when you use Bickr without an account
- Where you are. Your precise location when you allow it, or the suburb you type instead. Either is sent to Google so we can search near you. Suburbs you type are kept on our servers for up to 30 days.
- What happens in a group session. The session code, the display name you chose, and the choices you make are shared with the other people in that session, and are kept for as long as that session is kept. See below.
- A device identifier. A cookie holding a random id, used to stop one browser exhausting our search budget. It has nothing in it but the id. When you join a group session we also keep a one-way scramble of that id against your place in the room, so that nobody else holding the link can take your place, and that one goes when the session goes. If you start a group without signing in, we keep the same scramble on the group, so that the browser that started it is the one that can keep it. That one goes when you sign in and keep the group, and after 90 days if nobody does. Neither can be turned back into the id or read as anything about you.
- Usage analytics, described as they are, below.
What we collect when you sign in
- Your email address, used to send your sign-in link and to operate your account.
- The display name and the face you chose, once you save them to the account.
- The groups you save, including the display names of the people who were in the room.
- The decisions you keep: the venue, the title, or both, the tags describing it, the occasion it was for, the name your group gave the night, and whether you said you went.
- Your saved shortlist.
- The decks you write yourself: their titles, their cards, and how many times you have dealt them.
- Whether you have a subscription, and its status.
Notifications
Bickr sends you a notification only if you turn notifications on.
When you do, your browser or your phone issues a delivery subscription for this app: an address to deliver to, and the keys that let us encrypt what we send. We keep that on our servers and use it for one thing, sending you the notifications you chose.
Turning notifications off deletes it, and so does deleting your account. It is never used for anything else, and we never give it to anyone.
Group sessions and what other people see
The session code, your display name, and the fact that you have swiped are visible to everybody in the room. What you individually swiped is never shown to anyone, and the app has no screen that could show it.
When a room is agreeing on a date, the dates you mark as free are shown to the people in the room, beside your name, and so is a reason you choose to give when you count yourself out. Those two are what you told the room, which is why they are the one part of your answer other people see.
Those per-member swipes are the most sensitive thing we hold, and they are deleted as soon as the session's deadline passes. What survives is the decision the room reached, which has no member axis at all: it says the group agreed on ramen, and it can never be made to say who wanted it.
A settled session's result page stays readable for three days, so a link shared on the night still opens over the weekend.
Your decision history, and how long we keep it
This is the part worth being precise about.
- A session that never reaches a decision is deleted a week after its deadline.
- Per-member swipes go at the deadline, in every session, decided or not.
- That you were in for a night is kept with the session rather than with the swipes, because the night is still ahead when the swipes go. It says you were coming and never what you chose.
- The dates you marked as free, and any reason you gave for counting yourself out, are kept with the session rather than with the swipes, for the same reason: the screen that states them is still being read after the swipes go. They go when the session does, so a settled session with an account behind it keeps them, as it keeps everything else on it.
- When a room votes on its own shortlist at the end, the card you voted for is kept with the session rather than with the swipes, for the same reason. Nobody is ever shown who voted for what: the room sees a count on each card, you see your own vote, and there is no screen that could show more. It goes when the session does.
- A settled session with an account behind it is kept, so you can find it again later. That is the point of having one.
- A group's record of the nights it settled is kept for as long as the group exists.
- A night's record carries the first names of the people who were in the room when it settled, and nothing else about them: no swipe, no answer, and nothing that could be traced back to what any one person chose.
- Leaving a group, being removed from one, or deleting your account takes your name off the nights that group settled. The nights themselves stay, because they are several people's record of their own evenings.
- The controls that hide a night, or hide your name from one, change what is shown and not what is kept. They are deliberately not a delete. The one that removes you from a group is, and it says so where you use it.
- How you rated a night is yours. The group is shown one number for the night and nothing else: never anyone's own rating, and never how many people gave one, with one exception. In a group of two the number appears only once both of you have rated, and the card says so, because a number arriving any earlier would be the other person's own.
- Your rating goes with your seat. Leaving a group, being removed from one, or deleting your account takes it, and the group's number for that night moves.
- You can pick one of four emoji for a night. The group sees how many picked each one and never who, and there is no screen that could show more. It goes with your seat the same way your rating does.
- What the group ordered stays with the night and never with you. Nothing anywhere records which person ordered which dish, and nothing ever will: the table that holds them has no place to put one.
- A dish a group wrote down can be suggested to other groups who eat at the same place. It arrives as the words alone, with no group, night or person attached, and only from nights that two or more people were on.
- A group can ask for a fresh deck every week. We keep the day it picked and when we last dealt one. Any member can turn it off, and it goes when the group does.
- Deleting a group deletes its nights.
- You can add a night you had without the app. We keep what you picked from the search, the date you chose, and the first names of the people in the group you said were there.
- A night somebody added says who added it. Whoever added it, anybody it names, or anybody in the group once the person who added it has left, can remove it, and removing it takes the night, its rating and its dishes with it.
Two things survive all of that, and you should know it. Counts of how often a venue appeared and how often groups chose it are not attached to any group, so deleting a group does not remove its contribution to them. And your taste profile lives on your device, so resetting it from your profile page clears it there; it was never on our servers to clear.
Analytics, described as it is
We use PostHog, which is hosted in the United States. We serve it through our own domain so that ad blockers do not break it, which means you will not see a posthog.com request in your browser's network tab even though that is where the data goes. We are telling you because the setup would otherwise hide it.
PostHog receives:
- the events you generate as you use the app, such as which category you picked and how a session ended;
- your device, browser and screen size;
- an approximate location worked out from your IP address, down to the city, and including the coordinates of that city;
- error reports when something breaks;
- for about one visit in ten, a recording of the screen as you used it.
If you sign in, your email address is attached to your record in PostHog, so that one person using two browsers reads as one person.
Recordings cannot currently be turned off from inside the app. The dietary filters are masked out of them, and so is anything you type into a search field, but the rest of what is on your screen is in the recording. If you would rather not be recorded, email us and we will exclude you.
We use all of this to see how the app is used and to find what is broken. We do not use it to advertise to you.
The other companies involved
- Google Maps Platform. Venue search. It receives the search terms, including any dietary word, and the area searched. Google's privacy policy applies to its half of that.
- TMDB. Information about films and shows.
- Supabase. Your account and our database, hosted on Amazon Web Services in Tokyo, Japan (the ap-northeast-1 region). That means the things this policy describes as stored on our servers are stored in Japan.
- Vercel. Hosting. The app's servers run in Sydney.
- Stripe. Payments, if you subscribe. We never see or hold your card details.
- Upstash. The rate limiter, which holds the device id described above and your IP address so that one browser cannot exhaust our search budget.
- PostHog. Analytics, as described above.
- Anthropic. Used to screen photos of venues we have collected. No personal information is involved.
- A meal kit company (currently HelloFresh). The one paid link, on recipe screens, and only when you tap their link. We send them nothing; your browser tells their site you came from Bickr. See "Links that pay us" below.
Of these, PostHog, Stripe, Anthropic, Google and TMDB store and process data outside Australia, including in the United States. Upstash runs in the region closest to Sydney. Our own servers run in Sydney.
Links that pay us
Recipe screens can carry one link to a meal kit company, labelled as an ad, and we are paid if you sign up through it. Tapping it opens their site, which is told you came from Bickr and can set its own cookie in your browser. We send them nothing else: not your account, not your device id, not the session code, and nothing about the recipe. The link is the same on every card, so nothing in a deck is ranked or chosen by who pays us.
What we do not do
- We do not sell personal information.
- We do not use your dietary filters, or any other sensitive information, to target advertising or marketing. We do no advertising targeting at all.
- We do not rank venues by who pays us, and we do not accept payment for a place in a deck.
Sharing counts with venues
We may tell a venue how many times it appeared in Bickr and how many groups chose it, and we may publish counts by suburb or city. We already send some venues a letter of exactly that kind.
These are counts over venues and groups, never over people. They never carry a name, and no count is published unless at least three separate groups are behind it. A record of what one person eats is not something we give to anyone, publish, or build a product on.
Your choices and your rights
- Access, correction and deletion. Email hello@bickr.au and we will sort it out.
- Deleting your account. In the app, open your profile, tap Settings, then Delete my account. You can also delete it from this page, or email us and we will do it. It takes your account, your saves, your history, your taste and your name on your groups' rosters, on this device. Other devices keep their local copy until their site data is cleared. The nights your groups settled stay with the group, without your name.
- Everything on your device. Clear your browser's site data for Bickr.
- Your taste profile. Reset it from your profile page.
- A group. Delete it, which deletes its nights, or leave it, which removes you from it and takes your name off the nights it settled.
- Your name in a group's history. Hide it, from the group's own page.
Children
Bickr is not for anyone under 13. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under that age, and if we find out that we have, we delete the account and what is in it. The drink category deals licensed venues, and nothing in the app is an invitation for a minor to visit one.
Changes to this policy
The version and the date it took effect are at the top of this page, and every earlier version is in our source history. If we change something that matters, we say so in the app to anyone signed in, and ask you to read it again.