Privacy

Marcus is a notebook for restaurants and cafés that you talk to. You say what happened; it writes it down, sorts it, and shares it with the people in your kitchen. This page says what we collect, why, where it goes, and how to get rid of it.

Your account

• What we store: your name, your email address and an account identifier, through Firebase Authentication (Google). You can sign up with email and password, with Apple, or with Google. If you use Sign in with Apple and hide your email, we only ever see the relay address Apple gives us.
• Why: so your notes belong to you and your kitchen, and so we can reply if you send feedback.

Your notes

• What we store: the text of your notes (the transcript, the summary, the sorted lines, tags, the time and who took it), your notebooks and your settings. They are stored in Google Cloud Firestore in Sydney (australia-southeast1) and shared only with members of the kitchen you belong to, enforced by security rules that check membership on every read and write.
• The recording stays on your phone. The microphone is on only while you are taking a note. Speech becomes text on the device using Apple's speech framework, and the recording is kept on the phone with the note so it can be read again. It is never uploaded, and deleting the note deletes it.
• Sorting and summarising: after you stop a note, its text is sent to OpenAI's API to be titled, summarised and sorted into prep, short and issues. The home screen and notebook summaries are built the same way, and questions on the Ask screen are sent with the text of your notes so they can be answered. OpenAI processes this under its API terms and does not train on API data. If there is no connection, the note is sorted on the phone instead.

How Marcus is used

We look at how Marcus is used so we can make it better: see what works, find what people give up on, and decide what to build next. This is ordinary product analytics. It goes to a collector we run ourselves (analytics.takr.io), not to anybody else.

What we send with each event is a random identifier made on your phone, the app version, your iOS version, device model, locale and the language Marcus is speaking. So we can tell whether people come back, we also send how many days it is since the app was first opened, how many times it has been opened, and on how many separate days. None of that is your account, your email or your name, and we cannot turn it back into you.

What we count:

• Which screens are opened, and which ones people leave.
• Whether a note was spoken or typed, how long it took, and whether it was kept or thrown away, and at which step.
• Whether cards on the home screen were added, moved or taken off.
• Questions asked, and whether the notes had an answer. Never the question itself.
• Whether you read your notes by day or by notebook.
• How many people are in your kitchen. The number, never the names.
• How often our own checks threw out something the model wrote, which is how we catch it inventing things.

What a saved note tells us

When you save a note we send its shape, never its words: what kind of note it is, how long you talked, how many words and how many sorted lines, how many of those were prep, short or issues, how many tags it has, whether it holds a checklist, a chart, a calculator or a photo, and whether it went into a notebook or stayed with the day.

We also send up to four of your tags, which are the one-word labels Marcus puts on a note, like fryer or sourdough. Tags can be useful to us and they are the only part of this that could carry somebody's name, so a tag only leaves your phone if all three of these are true:

• It is a plain word, letters only, nothing capitalised.
• It is not a word anybody in your kitchen signs their notes with.
• Your kitchen has already used it on three separate notes, so a name said once never goes anywhere.

The text of your notes, the transcript, what you asked on the Ask screen, your name and your kitchen's name are never sent to our analytics, and neither is the recording.

Crash and performance reports

Marcus also sends us reports about itself when something goes wrong or takes too long: that it crashed and where in our own code, how long it took to open, how long the sorting of a note took and how many words it cost, that the microphone was refused, that the connection to the database dropped. These carry the same random device identifier, the app version, iOS version and device model, and go to a collector we run ourselves (otel.takr.io). They are counts, durations and error codes. No note text, no transcript, no question text, no name and no account identifier is ever included, and nothing you said can be reconstructed from them. There is no third-party crash reporting SDK.

Beta sign-up

If you leave your email on this site, it is stored with the venue name you gave and the time, and used only to send you the TestFlight link. Ask and we delete it.

Feedback

What you type into the feedback form is stored with your account email and the screen you sent it from, so we can reply.

Your rights, and the buttons for them

• Export: Settings, Your data, Export every note gives you everything as a JSON file.
• Delete a note: open it and tap Delete.
• Delete your account: Settings, Delete my account removes your account and your personal settings. Notes you filed remain with the kitchen, attributed to the name you used, because they belong to the kitchen's record; ask us at the address below if you want them removed too and you have the kitchen owner's agreement.
• Permissions: microphone and speech recognition can be withdrawn any time in iOS Settings.
• We answer access, correction and deletion requests under the Australian Privacy Act and the GDPR at the address below, within 30 days.

The full picture of what is collected and how to get it out is on Your data.

Who processes data for us

• Google Firebase (authentication and database, Sydney region)
• OpenAI (text of notes, for sorting and answers; not used for training)
• Apple (speech recognition on the device; Sign in with Apple)
• Cloudflare (this website)
• Our own analytics collector (anonymous usage counts, and the shape of a saved note)
• Our own crash and performance collector (anonymous counts, durations and error codes)

Children

Marcus is for people working in hospitality and is not directed at children under 16.

Changes and contact

If this policy changes in a way that matters, the app will tell you before you next take a note. Questions and requests: admin@julie-kitchen.com.