Privacy policy

Last updated November 11, 2026

Forkfolk is an app for saving your family’s recipes and sharing them only with the people you choose. This page explains what we keep, why, who can see it, and how to delete it.

The short version: we keep what you put into Forkfolk so the app can work. We don’t show ads, we don’t sell your information, and we don’t track you across other apps or websites. New recipes are private until you share them.

What we keep

The name you choose, and your photo if you add one. Only people you’re connected with can see them.
Your email, only if you add it to save your account. Nobody else can see it. We use it to send you the special link that gets your recipes back, and to answer you if you write to us.
What you add: recipes, photos, stories, notes, versions you make, favorites and collections.
Who you’re connected with, and who you’ve blocked.
Notifications, like “Farah shared a recipe with you.”
Your phone’s alert address, only if you turn on phone alerts, and which kinds of alerts you want. Nobody else can see them.
Reports you send us, with a copy of the recipe you reported.
When you last opened the app, so we know the account is still in use.
Basic technical details our servers need to work, such as your device’s internet address in short-lived logs.

Forkfolk only uses your camera or photo library when you choose to add a photo or scan a recipe. When you scan a recipe, the pages are sent to a reading service to be read (see “Where it’s stored”). Forkfolk doesn’t keep the pages. Scanning needs the internet. Forkfolk doesn’t read your contacts or your location.

Who can see your things

A new recipe starts as Only me. Nobody else can open it until you share it.
You can share a recipe with My people (everyone you’re connected with) or with Selected people.
Forkfolk is invite only. Nobody can search for you or find you by your email. People connect only by opening an invite link someone sent them.
When someone makes their own version of your recipe, it starts private too. If they share it, people who can’t open your original only see your name, not your recipe.
The Forkfolk team can see reports people send, and can look at the information we store when we need to keep the app running or safe.

Where it’s stored

Your information is stored by Supabase, the service that runs Forkfolk’s database and photo storage, on servers in the United States. When you ask for a special link, it’s sent by email through our email provider.

If you open someone’s invite link before you have Forkfolk, we use Detour, a service from Software Mansion, to carry the invite through installing the app. When you tap the link, and once when you first open Forkfolk, Detour receives your phone’s model, system version, screen size, language, time zone and internet address. It uses them only to match the two and hand the invite to the app. On Android it uses Google Play’s install record instead. Forkfolk doesn’t let Detour read your clipboard or collect how you use the app.

If you turn on phone alerts, each alert (a name and a recipe title, like “Farah shared a recipe with you: Banana pudding”) goes through Expo’s alert service and then Apple or Google to reach your phone. If the recipe has a photo, the alert also carries a private link to that photo, which stops working after a day.

When you scan a recipe, the pages go to Qwen, the reading service in Alibaba Cloud’s Model Studio, on servers in the United States. It reads the words and sends them back to fill in your recipe. Alibaba says it never uses them to train its models. It keeps them for no more than 30 days, or up to 2 years if its safety checks flag something. We only keep a count of how many pages each account scans, for a week, so nobody can run up the bill.

How long we keep it

Until you delete it. Deleting a recipe removes it for everyone.
If an account never saved an email and isn’t opened for a year, we delete it with everything in it, because it can’t be recovered.
When you delete your account, your account, recipes, photos, collections and connections are deleted. Copies may stay in our service’s backups for a short time before they’re gone.

Your choices

Change or delete any of your recipes at any time.
Choose who sees each recipe, remove people, or block them.
Turn phone alerts on or off, or pick which kinds you get, in Profile → Phone alerts or your phone’s Settings.
Delete your account in the app: Profile → Delete my account.
Write to us to ask what we keep about you, or to ask us to delete it.

Children

Forkfolk isn’t meant for children under 13, and we don’t knowingly keep information from them. If you think a child is using Forkfolk, please write to us.

Changes

If we change this policy, we’ll update this page and the date at the top.

Contact

Questions or requests: forkfolk@protonmail.com