Who we are
Matcha is made by Simone Giannatiempo, an independent developer in Barcelona, Spain. There is no company behind it. “We” on this page means him, and he is responsible for the data described here (the data controller, in GDPR terms).
Contact: simonegiannatiempo1@gmail.com, or the form on the support page. Postal address: [postal address], Barcelona, Spain.
This policy covers the Matcha iPhone app, its share extension (which receives Google Maps lists) and this website.
In short
- Your dishes, photos, places, scores, prices and notes are stored on your iPhone. We can’t read them.
- A shared list is stored in iCloud and is visible only to the people in it.
- A Send my places link is a copy of the places you picked, stored in Apple’s CloudKit. Anyone with the link can open it.
- The Google Maps import runs on your iPhone. Your lists never reach us.
- Usage statistics and crash reports go to PostHog, on servers in the EU. They never include the names of your dishes, places or lists, your photos or your notes.
- When the app opens, Matcha tells Meta, so we can measure our Facebook and Instagram ads. Matcha doesn’t use your advertising identifier and shows no ads.
- Profile › Share usage data turns off both PostHog and the Meta signal.
- We don’t sell personal data.
Your journal
Everything you log is stored on your iPhone:
- your dishes and the food categories you create
- photos you take or pick
- places, with their address and spot on the map
- scores, prices and notes
- your lists, your Want to try list and the places you import
- your name and profile photo, if you add them
Matcha has no account and no server that keeps your journal, so we can’t see it. The exceptions are the things you choose to share, described below. Like any app’s data, your journal can also be in your iPhone’s backup (iCloud Backup or a computer backup).
Location, camera and photos
With your permission, Matcha uses your location while you use the app, and the location saved in a photo you pick, to suggest your city and the place you’re eating at. It asks the first time you tap Place. If you say no, you can still search for places by name.
Place search, nearby places, place details such as opening hours, and the city of a place all come from Apple Maps. Those requests go to Apple, not to us. The location of your iPhone or your photos never reaches PostHog, RevenueCat, Meta or us.
The camera is used only when you take a photo of a dish. Photos you pick from your library are copied into the app, and Matcha doesn’t browse your library. With Profile › Save photos on, photos you take in Matcha are also added to your library. Saving a ranking card adds only that image.
The Google Maps button on a restaurant page leaves Matcha and opens Google Maps, which has its own privacy policy.
Shared lists
You can share a list with friends. A shared list is stored in Apple’s iCloud (CloudKit), in the owner’s account, and shared with the people the owner invites. Everyone in the list can see:
- the list’s name and cover
- its dishes, with photo, food, place, city, price and date
- everyone’s scores, and which dishes someone marked as not tried
- each member’s name and profile photo
Your notes are not shared. Only people the owner invites can open a list, and a forwarded invite lets no one else in. You see a friend’s score for a dish only after you score it yourself or mark it as not tried.
We can’t read shared lists: they sit in your and your friends’ iCloud accounts. If you leave a list, your name and scores are removed from it. The dishes you added stay in the list, with their photos, unless the owner removes them or deletes the list. If the owner deletes a list, it’s gone for everyone.
Send my places
Send my places, on a city, food or list page, makes a link a friend can open to save your places. To create the link, Matcha publishes a copy of the places you tick to the public database of Matcha’s iCloud container (Apple CloudKit). Publishing needs an iCloud account. The copy holds:
- your name in Matcha and the link’s title, such as “Simone’s Copenhagen”
- a cover photo: the photo you chose for the page, or the photo of your best dish (none if you chose a colour)
- for each place: its name, address, spot on the map, Apple Maps ID, city and country, and your best dish there with its score and note
Only dishes from your own journal go in. A friend’s dishes in a shared list never do.
Anyone who has the link can open it, without an account. The link carries a long random ID, so it can’t be guessed and isn’t listed anywhere, but anyone you send it to can forward it. We can see these copies too. CloudKit also records which iCloud account published the copy, as a random ID.
When your friend saves the places, their app copies them into their own Want to try list. Nothing they do with them comes back to you.
A link stays up until it is deleted. The app has no button to delete a sent link yet, and Delete all data doesn’t remove links you’ve already sent. Write to us with the link and we’ll delete it. Copies your friends already saved stay on their iPhones.
Google Maps import
You can bring in the places from a Google Maps list, in Profile › Import from Google Maps or by sharing a list from Google Maps to Matcha. The list has to be set to Shared in Google Maps.
The import runs on your iPhone. Matcha sends the list link to Google and reads the list’s title and, for each place, its name, address, spot on the map, Google’s ID for the place, the note on it and the date it was added. Google’s answer also names the list’s owner, which Matcha doesn’t keep. The request carries no cookies and no Google sign-in. Google receives it like any web request, including your IP address, under Google’s privacy policy.
The places you choose are saved on your iPhone with the rest of your journal. Matcha doesn’t keep the link, and neither the link nor the places ever reach us. To add details and the city, Matcha then looks up imported places on Apple Maps by name and location.
Before an import, Matcha reads an on/off setting we keep in Apple’s CloudKit, so we can pause the import if Google changes how lists work. Reading it sends us nothing about you.
Purchases
Matcha needs a subscription after onboarding, and the yearly plan starts with a 7-day free trial. Apple handles the payment. RevenueCat, a subscription service, checks that your subscription is active. It receives:
- a random, anonymous ID for your installation
- your purchase history for this app
- basic device and diagnostic information
RevenueCat doesn’t receive your name, your email address, your dishes or your photos. It also tells the app which plans to show, and new customers may see different plans while we test prices. See RevenueCat’s privacy policy. Apple’s handling of the payment is covered by Apple’s privacy policy.
Usage statistics and crash reports
Matcha sends PostHog (servers in the EU) these events:
- opening the app, and the screens you open
- adding a dish (whether it has a photo, how many lists it’s in, and whether you added the place by hand) and editing one
- creating a list: how many members it has, and whether you invited anyone
- scoring a dish in a shared list, with the score
- removing a place from Want to try
- sharing or saving an image card, and where you shared it
- starting a subscription: the plan and the length of the trial
It also sends crash reports and app logs. Each record carries your device model, iOS version, app version and language. None of it includes the names of your dishes, places or lists, your photos or your notes.
The records are linked to a random ID that Apple gives your iCloud account in Matcha, or to a random ID for your installation if you’re not signed in to iCloud. They are never linked to your name or email address. PostHog sees your IP address and uses it to estimate your city and country.
We use this to fix bugs and to see which features get used. See PostHog’s privacy policy.
Ads measurement
We advertise Matcha on Facebook and Instagram. To know whether an install came from one of those ads, Matcha tells Meta each time the app is opened. With that signal Meta gets your IP address, a random ID for your installation that Meta’s SDK creates, and basic device details such as model, iOS version, language and time zone.
Matcha doesn’t use your advertising identifier and sends Meta nothing you log. It never asks for tracking permission, and it shows no ads. Apple’s SKAdNetwork may also tell Meta, anonymously and days later, that an install came from one of its ads. See Meta’s privacy policy.
Turning it off
Profile › Share usage data is on until you turn it off. When it’s off, Matcha sends nothing to PostHog (no statistics, logs or crash reports) and nothing to Meta. You can turn it back on at any time.
Notifications
Matcha sends notifications only about shared lists, and only if you allow them. When a friend scores or adds a dish in a shared list, Apple’s push service wakes Matcha, which shows the notification. You can turn them off for one list in its members sheet, for all lists in Profile › Notifications, or in iOS Settings.
Contact support and Report
When you use Contact support or Report in the app, or the form on our support page, what you write and the email address you type reach us so we can reply. From the app, the app version, iOS version and the app’s language go with it. From the website, the page’s language does.
A report also includes the list’s name, the dish and place, the dish’s note if it has one, and the name and iCloud user ID of the friend it’s about (who added the dish, the member, or the list’s owner).
Messages pass through a small server function hosted by Vercel, which doesn’t store them, and arrive in our private Slack workspace (Slack’s privacy policy). We keep them only as long as we need them to answer you or look into a report. Email us to have yours deleted sooner.
This website
Vercel hosts this website. Like any web host, Vercel records the requests it serves (such as your IP address, your browser and the page you asked for) to deliver and protect the site. See Vercel’s privacy notice.
We count visits with Vercel Web Analytics. Vercel’s documentation says, as of October 2026, that it works without third-party cookies and identifies a visitor by a hash of the request, which it discards after 24 hours. With each page view it may store the time, the page, the referring site, filtered query parameters, approximate location (country, region and city), browser, operating system and device type. We see totals only.
The website sets no cookies and shows no ads. Its fonts and images load from this site. Links to Apple Maps, Google Maps and the sources in our guides open other sites, which have their own privacy policies.
App Store links on this site carry a campaign tag that names the page. If you arrive from an AI assistant such as ChatGPT or Perplexity, the tag names the assistant instead. Your browser works this out from the referring site and keeps it in session storage until you close the tab. Apple then reports to us, as totals, how many App Store visits and downloads each tag brought. The App Store is covered by Apple’s privacy policy.
Who receives data
| Service | What it receives | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Apple (iCloud, CloudKit, Apple Maps, push notifications, App Store) | Shared lists, Send my places links, place searches, notifications, payments | To run those features |
| RevenueCat | Anonymous installation ID, purchase history, device information | To confirm your subscription |
| PostHog (EU) | Usage records, crash reports, device information, IP address | To fix bugs and see which features get used |
| Meta | App opened, device details, a random installation ID, IP address | To measure our Facebook and Instagram ads |
| The list request, when you import a Google Maps list | To read the list you chose | |
| Vercel | Website requests, website page views, support messages on their way to Slack | To host the site, count visits and pass messages on |
| Slack | Support messages and reports | So we can read and answer them |
Some of these companies are based outside the European Economic Area, mostly in the United States. When personal data leaves the EEA, it is covered by the safeguards those companies provide under the GDPR, such as the EU-US Data Privacy Framework or the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses.
We don’t sell personal data. The only data used for advertising is the app-open signal described under Ads measurement.
Legal bases (EEA and UK)
| What | Legal basis |
|---|---|
| Your journal, shared lists, Send my places, the Google Maps import, answering your messages, your subscription | Providing the app you asked for (Article 6(1)(b) GDPR) |
| Usage statistics, crash reports, ad measurement, website logs and website analytics | Our legitimate interest in fixing bugs, improving Matcha and knowing whether our ads work (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR) |
| Location, camera, photos and notifications | The permission you give in iOS, which you can withdraw in Settings |
You can object to the legitimate-interest uses at any time with Profile › Share usage data, or by writing to us.
How long data is kept
| Data | How long |
|---|---|
| Your journal | On your iPhone until you delete it |
| Shared lists | In iCloud until the owner deletes the list. When you leave, your name and scores go; the dishes you added stay. |
| Send my places links | Until you ask us to delete them |
| Usage statistics and crash reports (PostHog) | [retention period] |
| Purchase records (RevenueCat) | [retention period] |
| Support messages and reports (Slack) | As long as we need them to answer you or look into a report |
| Website request logs (Vercel) | [retention period] |
| Website visitor hash (Vercel Web Analytics) | 24 hours |
Deleting your data
- In the app, delete a dish, list or category, or remove a saved place from its place sheet.
- Profile › Delete all data removes everything on your iPhone and deletes the shared lists you own, for everyone. It also takes you out of the lists you joined, where the dishes you added stay unless the owner removes them.
- Profile › Export data gives you a copy first: your dishes, lists and places as a JSON file, with your photos in a folder.
- Export and Delete all data stay available after your subscription ends, in the … menu on the paywall.
- For a Send my places link, your usage statistics, purchase records or a support message, email us. Usage and purchase records aren’t filed under your name or email, so we may ask for details that help us find yours.
Your rights
Most of your data never reaches us. It’s on your iPhone and in your iCloud, so you control it there.
If you’re in the European Economic Area, the UK or Switzerland, you have the right to access, correct, delete or export personal data we hold about you, to restrict or object to its use, and to complain to a data protection authority, either where you live or in Spain (AEPD). If you’re in California, the CCPA gives you comparable rights, including the right not to be treated differently for using them. We don’t sell personal information as these laws define it.
To use any of these rights, email us. There’s no account to log into.
Children
Matcha is not directed at children under 13 and collects no information about age.
Changes
If this policy changes, the date at the top of this page changes with it.
Contact
Questions about this policy, or requests about your data: simonegiannatiempo1@gmail.com, or the form on the support page.
Simone Giannatiempo, [postal address], Barcelona, Spain.