Privacy policy

The public catalog

Information about points of interest, organizations, coffees, gear, listings, and other catalog subjects is public. We are building a comprehensive specialty coffee catalog using business websites, open datasets, other published sources, and editorial work. Each detail page has source information at the bottom.

We treat catalog facts as a shared resource in the spirit of open data. Public availability does not remove source licensing obligations or privacy rights. Photos, descriptions, trademarks, and other third-party content can have separate rights. Contact us about inaccurate information, personal information in the catalog, or material that should be removed.

Your private information

Your email address, account details, saved items, private notes, bags, brews, setups, and other personal records are private. We use them to provide your account, remember your preferences, and operate the features you choose. Saving an item or logging a brew does not publish it.

We store sign-in and security information, including passkey public credentials, session records, and abuse-prevention metadata. Your device keeps the private passkey keys; Tasting Cup does not receive your fingerprint or face scan. Access to private information is limited to operating and securing the service, responding to your requests, and meeting legal obligations.

Aggregates and recommendations

We may use aggregated and anonymized versions of user contributions to improve the website. Examples include overall ratings of coffees, coffee shops, and gear; coffee recommendations; and suggested brewing setups or settings for a coffee.

We do not publish your private uploads verbatim. Public aggregates must not identify you or reveal individual contributions, including through very small groups. Previously anonymized aggregates may remain after you delete an item or your account when they can no longer be linked back to you.

Your content and your control

You retain ownership of the content you upload. You grant Tasting Cup a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual license to use it to operate and improve the service, subject to this privacy policy and your deletion choices. The license does not make private content public or permit us to disregard privacy rights.

You may delete individual personal records or your entire account. Account deletion is available in Settings and removes private account records, credentials, sessions, and associated share links from the active service when it succeeds. Contact us if you need help deleting an item. We stop using deleted private originals; the continuing license can cover anonymized contributions already incorporated into aggregates.

Cookies, maps, and location

You can browse the public catalog without an account. We use essential cookies for sign-in and store display preferences such as theme and units in your browser. We do not currently use a separate visitor analytics service. Hosting and security services still process request metadata.

We request your location only when you choose “Near me”. For nearby shop searches, coordinates are rounded to two decimal places and included in the search URL sent to Tasting Cup. Map searches send the visible map bounds. These values can appear in browser history and request logs; they are not saved as a location history in your account.

When you display a map, your browser requests map resources from OpenFreeMap. That provider receives your IP address and request information, which can reveal the area being viewed. External links take you to services with their own privacy practices.

Service providers and international processing

We use Cloudflare for website hosting, database services, sign-in email delivery, and support and privacy-request email routing. Service providers process the information needed to deliver, protect, and troubleshoot these services, such as email addresses and message contents for email and IP addresses and device or request metadata for network requests.

Information may be processed outside British Columbia or Canada and may be subject to the laws of the countries where it is processed. We may disclose information when required by law or when necessary to protect the service and people using it.

Retention and deletion

We keep account and private journal records while your account is active, unless you delete them sooner. Sign-in codes expire after five minutes and sessions after 30 days. Expired authentication records and related operational security records are removed within 90 days unless a legal retention requirement applies.

Operational logs are kept for no more than 90 days. Support and correction correspondence is kept for up to 90 days after the request closes. Restricted recovery backups expire within 90 days of creation, so deleted information may remain in an older backup until it expires. Backups are used for recovery, and deletions must be reapplied before restored data returns to service.

We retain information longer when required by law, including for at least one year when personal information is used to make a decision directly affecting an individual as required by British Columbia’s Personal Information Protection Act. Any retained exception is restricted to its legal purpose. Public catalog facts and their source history may be retained for the life of the catalog, subject to corrections, privacy rights, and source rights.

Access, export, corrections, and concerns

To request access to or an export of your personal information, email data@tastingcup.com.

For corrections to your personal information, deletion assistance, privacy complaints, or support, contact us at contact@tastingcup.com.

We may verify that you control the account or are authorized to make the request before providing private information or changing an account. Do not send passwords, sign-in codes, or private passkey material. We review requests under applicable privacy law. You may also raise unresolved privacy concerns with the regulator: Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for BC.