Privacy Policy

What we collect when you join

Joining asks only for what we need to create a waitlist account. We do not collect a street address.

• Name, email, and password
• Role: food lover, home cook, or both
• Town or neighbourhood from our list (with map coordinates for that place — not your home address)
• Irish mobile number
• Your consent to these terms and this policy (we store when you agreed)
• Home cooks also: kitchen name, HSE registration status (self-reported), and dishes you cook
• Food lovers (and “both”) also: dishes you would like to find nearby

After you confirm your email we mark the account as verified. Qualifying food lovers may receive a €5 launch voucher code. Passwords are hashed and never stored in plain text.

Contact form

If you write to us from the site we store your name, email, subject, and message so we can reply.

Why we use it

We use this data to create your account, confirm your email, send welcome and contact-acknowledgement emails, allocate the first-50 €5 voucher where you qualify, and plan neighbourhood drops. Legal bases: contract (running your account), consent (when you agree to these policies and waitlist emails), and legitimate interests (keeping the list honest and answering messages).

How we keep it secure

We treat account data as confidential. In practice that means:

• The site is served over HTTPS, so data is encrypted in transit
• Stored data is encrypted at rest in a hosted database
• Passwords are hashed with a one-way function — we cannot read them back
• Access is restricted: when you are signed in you can read your own profile; other people’s profiles are not publicly listed
• Server-only keys stay on our servers and are never sent to your browser
• We take backups and limit who on the LocalBites team can reach production data

No security setup is perfect, but these are the controls we rely on today.

Sharing

We use a hosted database and authentication service to run accounts, a specialist email provider to send confirmation, welcome, and contact emails, and a website host for the public site. Optional visit counts (only if you accept cookies) are processed by that host. We do not sell your details. We may share data if Irish law requires it. Some processors are outside Ireland, including the United States, under standard contractual clauses.

Retention and your rights

We keep waitlist profiles while the launch is active, then for as long as we need them to run accounts or meet legal duties. You can ask for access, correction, deletion, or a copy of your data, and you can withdraw consent for waitlist emails. You may complain to the Data Protection Commission in Ireland.

Cookies and similar storage

Account details live in your profile, not in cookies. Essential cookies keep sign-in secure. Optional page-view counts on our host run only if you accept them in the cookie banner. You can change that choice from the Cookie Policy. Related terms: Terms and Conditions.