Privacy policy
The short version: we hold your account details and your menus, we count visits only as totals, we do not track or profile the diners who scan your QR code, and we do not sell anything about anyone.
Who is responsible
Christos Loucas, PLACEHOLDER — street, number, postcode, city, Greece, is the data controller for the personal data described here. Contact: hello@menu-qr.org.
Diners: what happens when a menu is opened
A published menu sets no cookies and stores nothing on the diner’s phone. There is no advertising, no fingerprinting, and no profile of anyone.
- Visits are counted, as totals. The page includes Cloudflare Web Analytics, a small script from Cloudflare that reports that the page was loaded: the page address, the page the diner came from, the type of browser and device, the country, and how fast the page loaded. It sets no cookies, stores nothing on the phone and gives no visitor an identifier. Everything we see is a total. The restaurant sees, for its own menus only: how many times each was opened in the last 7 and 30 days and on each day, the countries and device types, and, once a menu has enough views, its busiest weekday and hour. It never sees where diners came from. Neither we nor the restaurant can tell who opened a menu.
- Our hosting providers process the technical details of the request, including the IP address, to deliver the page and to protect against attacks. These logs are short-lived and we do not use them to identify anyone.
- Apart from that Cloudflare script, a menu page loads nothing from anyone else: its fonts and its logo are served from our own domain, so opening a menu does not send the diner’s IP address to Google Fonts or to any other third party.
- The same counting applies to the pages of this website. We, the operator, also see totals for the site: the most visited pages, the websites visitors came from, countries, device types, and how many visits reach each step from the home page to the editor. These are counts of page views, never a record of what one visitor did.
- Our legal basis is our legitimate interest in knowing how the service is used and in showing restaurants how often their menu is read. We store none of these numbers ourselves; our pages read them from Cloudflare when they are opened.
Restaurants: what we collect
| What | Why | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Email address and name, from sign-up or your Google/Facebook account | To create your account, sign you in, and reply when you write to us | Performance of our contract with you |
| Your menus: dishes, prices, descriptions, logo, colours, and the file you uploaded | To produce and publish your digital menu | Performance of our contract with you |
| Usage records: how many menus you have, how many AI operations you used and what they cost us | To apply plan limits, prevent abuse, and know what serving an account costs | Our legitimate interest in running a sustainable service |
| Messages you send us | To answer them | Our legitimate interest in supporting customers |
| Subscription status, plan and renewal date | To give you what you paid for | Performance of our contract with you |
We do not keep the original file you uploaded after it has been read; only its name, size and type are recorded. We never ask for special categories of data, and a menu should not contain any.
The AI step
When you upload a menu, the file is sent to Google’s Gemini API, which reads it and returns structured text. The file is processed for that request; it is not used to train Google’s models. If your menu contains personal data — a chef’s name, a phone number — it is processed as part of that file, so please upload only what the menu needs.
Payments
Paid plans are sold by Polar as merchant of record. They collect your billing details and card data directly. We never see or store card numbers; we receive only your subscription status and the identifiers needed to match it to your account. Polar is the controller for the billing data it holds.
Who else processes this data
These companies process data on our behalf, under contract, and only for us:
| Company | What they do | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Clerk | Accounts and sign-in Email address, name, sign-in activity | United States |
| Google Cloud / Firebase | Runs the website, the database, file storage and the functions that process menus; delivers published menu pages Account records, menus, logos; technical request logs, including IP address | European Union (Belgium, Netherlands). Published menu pages are delivered from edge servers worldwide, nearest to the diner |
| Google (Gemini API) | Reads the uploaded menu and turns it into structured data The menu file you upload, for the duration of the request | European Union / United States |
| Polar | Seller of record for paid plans: takes payment and issues invoices Billing name, email, address, payment details | United States |
| Cloudflare | Domain name service; protection of the website and menu pages against attacks and abusive traffic; Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts visits to them without cookies Technical request data passing through it, including IP address; for visit counts, the page address, referring page, browser and device type, country and page-load timings | Edge servers worldwide, nearest to the visitor (company in the United States) |
| Namecheap (Private Email) | Hosts our email: messages you send to our contact address Your email address and what you write to us | United States |
Where data reaches a country outside the European Economic Area, the transfer relies on the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses or an adequacy decision.
We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it for advertising. If you are in California: we do not “sell” or “share” personal information as those terms are defined there.
How long we keep it
- Your account and menus: for as long as your account exists.
- After you close your account: deleted within 30 days, except where we must keep something longer by law.
- Emails you send us: up to 2 years, so we have the history of a conversation.
- Billing records: kept as long as tax law requires, which in Greece is generally 5 years.
- Visit counts: kept by Cloudflare for about 6 months. We keep no copy; the numbers are read from Cloudflare when a page shows them.
Your rights
Under the GDPR you can ask us to:
- give you a copy of your data, or send it somewhere else in a portable format;
- correct anything wrong;
- delete your data;
- restrict or object to a particular use, including anything we do on the basis of legitimate interest;
- withdraw consent, where we relied on it.
Write to hello@menu-qr.org and we will answer within one month. You can delete most of this yourself from your account at any time.
If you think we have got it wrong, you can complain to your local data protection authority. In Greece that is the Hellenic Data Protection Authority.
Security
Traffic is encrypted. Sign-in is handled by Clerk, so we never see your password. The database is closed to direct access from browsers; everything goes through our server, which checks that a menu belongs to the account asking for it. Access to production data is limited to the operator.
Children
The service is for businesses and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18.
Changes
If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will tell account holders by email before it takes effect. The date at the bottom of the page always shows the current version.