Privacy Policy

Distant Kitchens ("we," "us," "our") provides a private, invite-only cookbook for families. This policy explains what information we collect when you use our website and the Distant Kitchens app, how we use it, and the choices you have.

What Distant Kitchens is. Distant Kitchens is a subscription web app (at distantkitchens.com and app.distantkitchens.com) where family members who live in different places share recipes, the stories behind them, photos, meal plans, and shopping lists in one private cookbook. Only people invited by the family's admin can see it.

Distant Kitchens is built for families to use privately together. We don't sell your data, and we don't show ads.

Information we collect

Account information. When you or your family's admin creates an account, we collect a name, email address, and password (stored as a salted hash, never in plain text — or, if you sign in with Google, we receive your name and email from Google and no password at all).

Family content. Recipes, photos, stories, comments, ratings, meal plans, and shopping lists that you and your family members add. This content is private to your family's instance — it isn't visible to other Distant Kitchens customers.

Payment information. Subscription payments are processed by Stripe. We receive confirmation that a payment succeeded and basic billing details (like the last four digits of a card), but we never see or store your full card number — Stripe handles that directly.

Usage and device information. Standard technical data your browser sends automatically (IP address, browser type, device type, pages visited) and a session cookie required to keep you signed in to the app.

How we use your information

• To provide, maintain, and secure the service — including keeping your family's recipes private and accessible only to invited members.
• To process payments and manage your subscription through Stripe.
• To send account-related email: invites, password resets, receipts, and service announcements. We won't send marketing email without your consent.
• To troubleshoot problems and improve reliability.

How we share information

We do not sell your personal information or your family's content. We share information only with:

• Service providers who help us run Distant Kitchens — payment processing (Stripe), cloud hosting, and transactional email delivery — bound by their own confidentiality and data-protection obligations.
• Other members of your family instance, to the extent your account's role and sharing settings make content visible to them (this is the whole point of a shared family cookbook).
• Law enforcement or regulators, only if required by valid legal process.

Google sign-in and Google user data

Distant Kitchens offers "Sign in with Google" as an optional way to log in. If you choose it, we ask Google for only three things: your email address, your name, and a basic profile identity (the openid, email, and profile scopes). We do not request access to your Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar, Contacts, or any other Google data.

We use your Google email and name only to recognize you, match you to the family cookbook you were invited to, and show your name to your family members. We do not sell this information, use it for advertising, share it with third parties other than the service providers described above, or use it to train AI models. Our use of information received from Google APIs follows the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements.

You can stop using Google sign-in at any time by signing in with a password instead, and you can revoke Distant Kitchens' access from your Google Account permissions. To have your account and its data deleted, email hello@distantkitchens.com.

Data retention

We keep your family's content for as long as your subscription is active. Deleted recipes go to a trash folder and are permanently removed after 30 days. If you close your account, we delete your family's data within a reasonable period afterward, except where we're required to retain billing records for tax or legal purposes.

Your choices

• Export your data. Family admins can export their full cookbook (recipes, photos, and metadata) at any time from within the app.
• Delete your data. Family admins can delete individual recipes or close the family's account entirely.
• Access and correction. You can update your account details directly in the app, or contact us for help.

Security

We use industry-standard measures to protect your information, including encrypted connections (HTTPS) between your browser and our servers, salted password hashing, and regular backups. No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure, but we work to protect your family's information appropriately for what it is — recipes and family stories, not financial or medical records.

Children's privacy

Distant Kitchens accounts are created and managed by an adult family admin. The service is not directed at children, and we don't knowingly collect personal information directly from children under 13. A family admin may include a child's first name in a recipe's story (e.g., "Grandma's cookies, as made with the kids") — that's family content the admin controls, not information we collect about a child directly.

Cookies

The Distant Kitchens app uses a session cookie required to keep you signed in — this is essential to the service and can't be disabled while staying logged in. This marketing website does not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. If we enable analytics on this site in the future, we intend to use privacy-respecting, cookieless tools rather than third-party ad trackers.

Changes to this policy

If we make material changes to this policy, we'll update the date at the top of this page and, for significant changes, notify family admins by email.

Contact us

Questions about this policy or your family's data? Email us at hello@distantkitchens.com.