Privacy Policy

True Dish is operated by its founder, an individual based in Kansas City, Missouri. Questions or requests go to truedish@truedishreviews.com.

Your account. Sign-in is handled by Clerk, our authentication provider. They hold your email address, your name and any profile picture from the service you signed in with. We store a display name, a username, an optional profile photo and your role on the site.

What you post. Reviews, ratings, the dishes you name, photographs, the places you save, and any drafts you save to finish later. Reviews and photos are public by design. Saved places and drafts are private to you, and a draft is deleted when you post it.

Reports you make. Kept with your account attached, because an anonymous report cannot be told apart from the same person clicking twenty times.

Basic activity. We record that a restaurant was viewed, saved or reviewed, and when. This is what makes the Trending list mean something. If you are signed in, your account ID is stored on that record so that one person refreshing a page four hundred times cannot look like a trend. It is not there to build a profile of you.

Errors. When something breaks, the error and the page it happened on are emailed to us so it can be fixed.

• Your location never reaches our servers. When you use “Near me”, your browser gives the coordinates to the page you are looking at, and the sorting happens there. Nothing is sent to us and nothing is stored. A ZIP code you type is matched against a list already in the page, for the same reason.
• Photo metadata is removed, usually before it leaves your device. Phone photographs usually carry the GPS coordinates of where they were taken. When you pick a photo, your browser redraws it as a smaller copy that carries none of that, and it is the copy that is uploaded. If your browser can’t, the photo is uploaded as it is. Either way, we re-encode every uploaded image, which discards that data and everything like it, and the uploaded file is deleted. If a photo is uploaded but never posted, it is deleted within two days, unless you saved it with a draft: then it is kept privately, already cleaned, until you post the review or delete the draft. What is published is the picture and nothing else.
• No advertising or analytics trackers. There are no third-party ad networks, pixels or cross-site tracking scripts on this site.
• No payment details. The site is free and takes no payments.

We do not sell, rent or trade personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. Nobody pays us for it, and selling it would undermine what the site is for.

Running a website means using other companies’ infrastructure. Each of these handles data on our instructions and for no purpose of their own:

• Clerk: sign-in and account security.
• Vercel: hosting and delivery.
• Neon: the database.
• Resend: the emails we send, including moderation and error alerts.
• Object storage: where uploaded photographs live.

Restaurant listings start from Foursquare’s open places dataset. We keep our own copy of it, so searching for a restaurant here never sends anything about you to Foursquare.

We may disclose information if the law requires it, or to protect someone’s safety.

The only cookies here are the ones that keep you signed in, set by Clerk. There are no advertising or tracking cookies, which is why the site does not greet you with a consent banner. Clearing them signs you out.

Your browser also stores a little of your own activity locally (the review you’re writing, and preferences), which stays on your device. Drafts you choose to save to your account are kept with it instead, so you can finish them anywhere.

Your account and what you have written are kept while your account is open.

The activity records behind Trending are deleted after 28 days. Nothing else reads them, and a trend older than that is not a trend.

Backups are kept for a short period after deletion, then overwritten in the ordinary course.

You can do this yourself, from your profile. When you do:

• Your sign-in account is deleted.
• Your photographs are deleted from storage.
• Your saved places and drafts are deleted.
• Your reviews stay, under “Former member”, with your name removed.

That last one is explained in clause 7 of the Terms: deleting the reviews would silently move the score of every restaurant you wrote about. If you want a particular review gone entirely, delete it before closing your account, or email us.

Wherever you live, you can ask us to show you what we hold about you, correct it, or delete it. Most of it you can do yourself: your profile is editable, your reviews are editable, and closing your account is a button.

For anything else, email truedish@truedishreviews.com and we will respond within 30 days. We will not treat you differently for asking.

Residents of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia and other states with privacy statutes have these rights by law, including the right to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information. That’s straightforward here, because we do neither.

True Dish is not for people under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their information. If you believe a child has an account here, email us and we will remove it.

The site and its data are hosted in the United States. Using True Dish from elsewhere means your information is processed there.

Passwords are handled by Clerk and never reach us. Traffic is encrypted. Access to the database is limited to what runs the site.

No site can promise perfect security, and one that does is not being straight with you. If a breach affects your information, we will tell you.

If we change how we handle your information, the date at the top of this page changes and we will say so on the site before it takes effect.