Privacy Policy

When you use BetterBite, we may collect the following types of information:

• Account Data: If you register, we collect your name and email address to identify your account.
• Health Profile (optional, sensitive): If you choose to fill in your health profile, we store your declared allergens, health conditions (such as diabetes or pregnancy), age group, sex, diet type, and goal — solely to personalize warnings and insights for you. Every field is optional, editable, and deleted with your account. Because this is sensitive personal data under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, we process it only with your consent (you typing it in). We never sell it. We share it in exactly two situations, both described in Section 4: with a nutritionist you choose to connect with, and — only if you turn on AI personalization — with our AI provider to write your report summary. Nowhere else, and never with advertisers, insurers, or data brokers.
• Behavioral Data: We track your Consumption Intent (e.g., whether you plan to consume or have consumed a product) to build your nutritional log and personalize insights.
• Product Submissions: If you submit a product, we store the image, barcode, and product details you provide.
• Activity Data: When you are logged in and activity tracking is on, we record your in-app actions — products and ingredients you view, terms you search, and barcodes you scan — to improve our guidance and understand how the app is used. This stays in our own database; we do not use third-party analytics or tracking services, and we do not sell it. You can turn it off anytime under Dashboard → Health Profile → Activity tracking.
• Streak Day-History: If you use the scan-streak feature, we keep a record of the calendar days on which you scanned a product. This powers your streak count, streak calendar, and streak-reward reports. Because the feature cannot work without it, this day-history is kept even if you turn activity tracking off (the opt-out stops the detailed event log above — what you viewed or searched — not the fact that a day counted toward your streak). It is included in your data export and deleted with your account.
• Usage Data: Aggregate product view counts (not linked to your identity) and technical error reports (error message, page URL) when something goes wrong, so we can fix it.

We use your data strictly to run and improve BetterBite. Specifically:

• Your Consumption Intent and meal logs power your personal nutritional log, Health Score, and weekly/monthly health reports.
• Personalization: we store your health profile, meal logs, and streak history so BetterBite can act as your personalized nutrition companion — tailoring absorption estimates, condition-aware highlights, allergen notices, and your health reports to you. These are informational insights, not medical advice.
• Your activity data (searches, views, scans) helps us improve our guidance and the platform. It is never sold or shared, and you control it with the activity-tracking toggle.
• Your account data allows session persistence and syncs your preferences across devices.

We do not sell your personal health or dietary data to advertisers, insurance companies, or any third party.

We use an HttpOnly, Secure session cookie (tl_auth) to manage your login session. This cookie cannot be accessed by JavaScript, which protects you against cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.

We also use browser Local Storage to temporarily save UI preferences (e.g., dismissing popups before login). You can clear this at any time via your browser settings.

We do not use advertising or tracking cookies of any kind.

Your data is stored and processed in India. Our database runs in Mumbai (ap-south-1) and our application servers are pinned to the Mumbai region too — so your personal data does not leave the country for ordinary use of BetterBite.

We never sell your data and we use no advertising or analytics networks. A small number of service providers (“Data Processors” under the DPDP Act) do handle data on our behalf, strictly to run the product:

• Hosting & database (India): our application and database, both in the Mumbai region.
• Image hosting (outside India): product and profile images. Deleted with your account.
• Email delivery (outside India): verification, password-reset, and report emails. Receives your email address only.
• Error monitoring (outside India): crash diagnostics, configured to strip personal data before anything is sent.
• Push notifications (outside India): device tokens only. Notification text never contains your health data.
• Google Sign-In (outside India): only if you choose to sign in with Google.
• AI provider (outside India): used to word your health-report summary. Your health conditions are not sent unless you explicitly turn on AI personalization; without it, only non-identifying figures (grades, nutrient totals, trends) are shared.

Nutritionists: if you accept an invitation from a nutritionist, they get read-only access to your logs and reports. Nothing is shared until you accept, and you can revoke access at any time.

We implement industry-standard security measures to protect your account and dietary data:

• Passwords are hashed using bcrypt — we never store your plaintext password.
• All traffic is encrypted over HTTPS with HSTS enforced.
• Session tokens are stored only in HttpOnly cookies, never in localStorage.
• API endpoints are rate-limited to prevent brute-force and abuse.
• Strict Content Security Policy headers are enforced in production.

No internet transmission is 100% secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. We will notify you promptly in the event of a data breach affecting your account.

You have the following rights regarding your personal data — and the first four are self-serve, no email required:

• Access & Portability: Download everything we hold about you as a JSON file — Dashboard → Health Profile → Your data → Download my data.
• Correction: Edit your profile and health data anytime from the same page.
• Deletion: Delete your account and all personal data instantly — Dashboard → Health Profile → Your data → Delete my account (web) or Profile → Delete account (app). See Section 7.
• Objection: Turn off activity tracking anytime — Dashboard → Health Profile → Activity tracking (web) or Profile → Activity tracking (app).
• Grievance: Raise any data-protection concern with our Grievance Officer (Section 6).

In accordance with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 and the Information Technology Act, 2000, privacy questions, requests, and grievances may be addressed to:

Abhinav Mishra
Grievance Officer, BetterBite AI
Email: betterbite.ai@gmail.com

We acknowledge grievances within 48 hours and aim to resolve them within 15 days.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you have the right to complain to the Data Protection Board of India under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.

BetterBite is not for anyone under 18. We ask for your date of birth when you sign up and refuse registration below 18. We do not knowingly collect personal data from, profile, track, or send notifications to anyone under 18, and we do not offer a guardian-consent route for minor account holders.

If we discover that an account holder is under 18, we suspend the account and delete the associated personal data. If you believe a minor has an account with us, contact our Grievance Officer (Section 7) and we will act on it.

This is stricter than it may sound: under India's DPDP Act a “child” is anyone under 18, and the Act forbids behavioural tracking and targeted advertising for children entirely. Rather than build a verifiable parental-consent system, we have chosen to serve adults only.

BetterBite is largely automated. The following are produced by software, without a person reviewing each result:

• Product grades and scores, computed from the declared label by a documented, uniformly applied method.
• Condition and allergen warnings, matched against the health profile you entered.
• Smart Picks, alternatives and swap ideas, ranked against your goals and stated preferences.
• Health scores and report summaries, calculated from what you logged.

None of this is a decision with a legal or similarly significant effect on you — it is nutritional information. It is not medical advice and never a diagnosis. Product grades are computed from the label, not from anything about you.

Reports are point-in-time. A health report records what your profile and logs said when it was generated. If you later correct your profile, every future report and everything you see live in the app uses the corrected data — but past reports are left as they were, because rewriting them would misrepresent what we actually told you at the time. If you need a past report corrected or removed, ask our Grievance Officer (Section 7).

Your controls. You can turn off health-profile personalisation and AI report writing at any time under Privacy choices; your reports are still produced, just without those inputs. If you think an automated result about you is wrong, contact our Grievance Officer (Section 7) — a person will review it and respond.

We retain your account data for as long as your account is active.

Deleting your account (Section 6) takes effect immediately in our live systems: your profile, health data, nutritional history, saved products, health reports, and activity history are permanently erased in a single transaction, and your profile photo is deleted from our image host. Product submissions you contributed to the public catalog are kept but permanently disconnected from your identity. Deletion is irreversible. If you cannot access your account, email us (Section 7) and we will complete deletion within 30 days after verifying your identity.

Encrypted backups. We keep encrypted database backups so we can recover from a failure. A deleted account may persist in those backups for up to 30 days, after which they are rotated out. Backups are never used to restore an individual deleted account, and nobody queries them for user data — they exist only for disaster recovery.

Consent records. When you delete your account we keep a record that consent was given or withdrawn, with the identifying details removed, so we can show our processing was lawful. These records cannot be linked back to you.

Anonymized, aggregate data derived from your usage (not linked to your identity) may be retained indefinitely to improve BetterBite.