What's for Dinner? — Privacy Policy

Effective August 10, 2026

The short version: you can play without an account, and anonymous play sends us only anonymous gameplay statistics. The taste test asks for an email only if you want to save your result — and only for that. Accounts exist so creators and restaurants can design and share dinners; what you publish (username, dinners, photos, scores) is public by design. We show no ads, use no ad trackers, and never sell your data.

Playing without an account

Most players never sign in. When you play on whats4dinnergame.com, we record anonymous gameplay telemetry so we can tell what's fun and what's broken:

gameplay events (which cuisine you picked, days played, scores, steps placed);
a random session id that resets when you close the tab;
a one-way hashed fragment of your IP address (we can't recover the IP from it), the coarse location Cloudflare derives from it (country/region/city), and your browser type.

If you join a leaderboard without an account, the name you type and a random device id (stored in your browser's localStorage) identify your row on that board. The name you choose is public.

The Palate Persona taste test & perks

The taste test is played from a restaurant's table QR and needs no account and no email: your picks and the resulting "Flavor ID" are anonymous gameplay telemetry like any other play. If you choose to type your email to save your result (or to claim a restaurant perk), we store exactly what the form says: your email, your persona and Flavor ID, the language you played in, and which restaurant you played at. We use it only for your persona rewards, never for anything else, and you can unsubscribe or ask us to delete it at any time.

When a restaurant offers a perk, saving your result may also mint a coupon code. We store the code, which offer it belongs to, when it was issued and when it expires, and — when you use it — when it was redeemed. The restaurant you redeem it at sees the code, your persona, and the offer; it never sees your email through the coupon screen. Telemetry about quiz play references, at most, an internal row number — never the email address itself.

Playing on Reddit

The Reddit version runs entirely on Reddit's Developer Platform. No gameplay data leaves Reddit — we keep only anonymous daily totals (sessions, plays, wins) inside the app. Your Reddit username appears on post leaderboards and as your public credit on dinners you design there, just as it appears on the post itself.

Creator accounts (website)

Signing in lets you design and publish your own dinner. Authentication is handled by Clerk; you sign in with Google, Apple, or email, and Clerk shares with us your account id and the username you choose. We store, and display publicly:

your username and your creator page (whats4dinnergame.com/your-name);
the dinner you publish and the date you published it;
photos you upload for dishes or eaters;
your leaderboard scores.

Everything a published dinner contains is creator content we store to run the game: eater names and their table lines, dish names, ingredient and topping names, and the photos behind dish and eater icons — plus a one-time record that you accepted the creator content terms. Your recipe library is private to your account. Only upload photos you have the right to share — and get a person's permission before using their face.

You can erase your own footprint any time from your creator dashboard: reset your dinner's play statistics, or permanently delete every recipe and photo you've uploaded. Both act immediately on the game's servers.

Restaurant owners

Publishing a restaurant game goes through a manual review — we verify that a real venue is behind the page before it (and any coupons) go public. For that we ask for the restaurant's phone number and website or business listing. These are used only for verification, are never shown to players, and are kept as the record of that review. The coupon rules you configure (offers, who gets them, daily caps) and the resulting issue and redemption counts are stored to run the perk program and are visible to you in your console.

Recipe & menu importing

When you paste a recipe into the importer, that text is sent to OpenAI to be parsed into game data, subject to OpenAI's privacy policy. When you import a restaurant menu (pasted text, a menu page, or menu photos), that content is sent to Google's Gemini API to be read into dishes and prices, subject to Google's privacy policy. The dish names on a published restaurant menu are also sent to Gemini once to estimate each dish's flavor profile for the taste test's recommendations — dish names only, never personal information. Please import recipes and menus, not personal information. The importers are optional — they're not the only way to add a recipe or a menu: you can write each cooking step, or each menu dish, yourself in the designer, and then your text is never sent to anyone.

Cookies & storage

We use browser storage for gameplay only: a session id (sessionStorage), your device id and board name (localStorage), and Clerk's sign-in cookies if you have an account. There are no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

Where data lives & who we share with

Game data and telemetry are stored with Cloudflare (United States). Account credentials live with Clerk.

The game is operated by Whats4Dinner LLC, and its operation may move to an affiliated or successor company; your data and this policy travel with the game unchanged. Anonymous usage statistics — the gameplay telemetry described above (plays, scores, timings, session counts) — may be shared within the game's corporate family (its parent and affiliated companies) for analytics and product improvement. Usage statistics are the game's own data — the game and its corporate family own them and may analyze them — but that analysis is read-only: it never changes what players or creators see. Creators also keep real control over their own dinner's statistics: the dashboard reset on a creator page's dashboard permanently deletes that dinner's scores and visit records from our servers (anonymous, aggregate insights already derived from them may persist). Creator content and account details are different: the dinners, recipes, and photos you upload, your account information, and your consent record are used only to run the game and are not shared this way — they stay on the game's servers. Beyond the processors named here and, for anonymous usage statistics, the game's corporate family, we share data with no one — and we never sell it.

Children

The game is family-friendly, but it isn't directed at children under 13, and you must be at least 13 to create an account. We don't knowingly collect personal information from children under 13; if you believe we have, email us and we'll delete it.

Deleting your data

You can do most of it yourself, right in the game, no email needed: remove your own leaderboard scores, delete recipes from your recipe box, and — from your creator dashboard's danger zone — reset your dinner's play statistics or permanently delete every recipe and photo you've uploaded. For anything beyond that — questions, or a complete account-level purge (the account itself and its consent record) — email info@whats4dinnergame.com and we'll take care of it.

Third-party content

The game's 3D avatars include the "Warrior Sneaker" model by kunyong_Chen, licensed under CC BY 4.0 (source), used with scaling and placement adjustments. Avatar hairstyles include the "Hair" model by hairmaker, licensed under CC BY 4.0 (source), used with scaling, placement, and colour adjustments, and the "F_ Hair_640" model by Zepeto_Uploads, licensed under CC BY 4.0 (source), and the "Curly Hair 1 (Beatrice) — Character Hair" model by CT Reed, licensed under CC BY 4.0 (source), and the "Ported hair" model by bbb59149, licensed under CC BY 4.0 (source), used with scaling, placement, pruning, and colour adjustments, the "Marilyn Monroe Hair" model by 3FERRETS, licensed under CC BY 4.0 (source), and the "Hunter Hairr (OBJ)" model by zHairezt, licensed under CC BY 4.0 (source), each used with scaling, placement, pruning, and colour adjustments, and the "high heel boots" model by Toxic, licensed under CC BY 4.0 (source), used with scaling and placement adjustments, and the "Leather shoes" model by tranhongdiep, licensed under CC BY 4.0 (source), used with scaling and placement adjustments, and the "Harness Motorcycle Boot" model by SebastianLee, licensed under CC BY 4.0 (source), used with scaling, shaft-cropping and placement adjustments, likewise used with scaling, placement, and colour adjustments. No personal data is involved in this content; it's credited here and in our Terms so the attribution is easy to find.

Changes

If this policy changes, we'll update this page and its effective date. Creators who have accepted the creator content terms also get an email about changes that affect them.