Effective 13 October 2026
An earlier version. This is the Privacy Policy that took effect on 13 October 2026, kept for the record. It was replaced on 15 October 2026. Read the current version.
Bite is a food diary you share with your friends. Almost everything in it is something you photographed or typed yourself, and it stays yours.
The short version. We store your diary so it survives a new phone and so the friends you choose can see it. Your account is private: a meal is seen by your friends or by you alone, and you pick which. Nothing you post is public unless you share a plan or recipe link yourself. We don't sell your data, we don't run ads, and there are no advertising or tracking SDKs in the app or on this site. You can delete your account, and what's in it, from Settings.
Bite is made and run by one person, Nate Bautistas, an individual in California, USA. In this policy “Bite”, “we” and “us” mean him. This policy covers the Bite iPhone app and this website, trybite.co.
You sign in with Apple. It is the only way in. Bite asks Apple for your name and nothing else: we don't ask for your email address and there is no password. Our sign-in system keeps the account identifier Apple issues for Bite, so the same Apple ID brings your diary back on a new phone.
Your name, your username, and anything you choose to add: a profile photo, city, bio, favourite cuisine and pinned meals. We also record when you joined and give you a member number. You can change or clear everything except the join date and number.
When you post a meal we store what you gave us: the place, your verdict and photos, and any dish names, note, price, occasion, date and the friends you say you ate with. Only some of it is required. We use it to show you your diary, your Taste page and your recap, and to show the friends you chose what you ate.
The camera is used only while you take a photo in Bite. If you pick photos from your library, Bite gets only the ones you pick. If you let Bite see your photo library, it shows your last three days of photos while you log a meal, so you can pick one, and reads the photo you pick for its time and location to fill in the day and suggest the place. Bite never looks through your library on its own. Nothing from your library leaves your phone until you choose to post it.
Before a photo is uploaded, Bite re-saves it as a new image. The copy we store carries no location, capture time or device details.
You can add a recipe to a meal by typing it, pasting a link, or saying it out loud. Talking uses your microphone and Apple's speech recognition, and it is set to run on your phone only. Bite does not record or upload audio, and the transcript is not uploaded. On phones with Apple Intelligence, the on-device model helps sort what you said into ingredients and steps. What we store is the recipe you end up saving.
If you paste a recipe link, your phone fetches that page directly to read the recipe. If you search for a cookbook, the title you type is sent to the Google Books API to suggest matches; we keep only the book title and author you pick.
You add someone by sending a request to their username. When they accept, you follow each other and you are friends. We store who follows or has asked to follow whom, and who you have blocked.
People can find you by typing your username or its first few letters. Search matches usernames only, never names. Turn off Show me in search in Settings to leave search; anyone with your exact username can still send you a request. We never ask for your contacts.
We store the comments and emoji reactions you leave on friends' meals. A reaction can also be a selfie: those photos are stored privately and shown only to you and your friends.
You can message your friends and invite them to a plan: a place, a time and who is coming. We store your messages and plans on our servers so they reach the other person and survive a new phone. Messages are encrypted in transit and at rest by our host, but they are not end-to-end encrypted. If you add a plan to your calendar, Bite asks for write-only calendar access and never reads your calendar.
We store the places and friends' recipes you save. If you post what you're craving, your friends can see it for eight hours.
With your permission, Bite uses your precise location while you are using the app to find places near you and guess where you are eating. Place searches go to Apple Maps. We don't send your location to our servers, we don't track you in the background, and we don't keep a history of where you have been. What we store is the place you chose for a meal or a plan, not your movements.
If you allow notifications, we store your device's push token so we can tell you about messages, requests, comments, reactions and plans. Notifications are delivered through Apple's push service. Reminders to post are scheduled on your phone, and you can switch them off in Settings.
If you send feedback or report something, we store your message along with the app version, build, iOS version and device model, so we can reproduce a problem. A report also records what you reported and who posted it.
We record a fixed set of first-party events tied to your account: things like opening the app, the steps of posting a meal, sending a request, sharing a link, saving a place, a search for something you're craving, and which place you looked at. Each carries the app version and build. When Bite suggests places, we also record which places it showed you, in what order, and the scores that ranked them, so we can make suggestions better. None of this includes an advertising identifier or your location, and none of it goes to an analytics company.
If you join the waitlist, we store your email address and which form you used, and send you one email when the beta opens. Taps on the beta link are counted by which page they came from. We use Vercel Web Analytics for page views; it uses no cookies and doesn't follow you across sites. This site sets no cookies, so there is no cookie banner. A shared recipe page remembers the ingredients you ticked off in your own browser's storage, and that never reaches us. Our hosts keep short-lived technical logs, such as IP addresses and request times, to run the service and keep it secure.
Nobody but you can change who sees your meals.
A plan or recipe can get its own link. The link is made only when you share it, it is long and random, and anyone who has it can open it without the app.
A link never shows your diary, your profile or anything else. Photos shared this way are stored where anyone with their address can load them. You can turn a link off in the app, and it stops working.
We don't sell your personal information, and we don't share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. There are no ads in Bite. We use a few providers to run the service, and they handle data only on our behalf:
We may disclose information if the law requires it, or to protect someone's safety, and we will tell you unless we are not allowed to. If Bite is ever sold or merged, this policy will still apply to what you shared under it, and we will tell you first.
Your account and what you put in it are kept until you delete them. Waitlist emails are kept until the beta opens and you have been told, or until you ask us to remove yours.
Deleting your account. Open Settings from your profile and choose Delete account. That deletes your profile, username, meals and photos, recipes, comments, reactions and selfies, messages, plans and their links, saved places and recipes, friendships, push tokens, feedback and usage events, and erases Bite's copy on your phone.
A few things remain:
Deleting a single meal removes it and its photos.
Wherever you live, you can ask us to tell you what we hold about you, give you a copy, correct it, or delete it. If you are in California or another US state with a privacy law, these are your rights under that law, and we will not treat you differently for using them. If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area, you can also object to or restrict how we use your data, and complain to your data protection authority. We use your data to provide the service you asked for, and to keep it secure and improve it, which is our legitimate interest.
To make a request, write to hello@trybite.co from the app's Contact link or tell us your username. We may need to confirm the account is yours, and we will answer within 30 days.
We do not sell or share personal information as California law defines those words, and we have not done so in the past 12 months.
You must be 13 or older to use Bite. It is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, write to us and we will delete it.
Bite's servers are in the United States. If you use Bite from elsewhere, your information is sent to and stored in the US, where privacy law may differ from yours.
Who can see what is enforced by the database itself, not only by the app: the server will not return a meal, photo or message you are not allowed to see, even to a modified app. Photos live in private storage behind the same rules, except the ones you publish with a link. Everything travels over encrypted connections. Only Nate can reach the database directly, and he does so to run Bite, fix a problem, review a report, or when the law requires it. No system is perfect; if something goes wrong that affects you, we will tell you promptly.
When this policy changes we update the date at the top. If a change is material, we will say so in the app before it takes effect.
Questions, requests, or anything that looks wrong: hello@trybite.co. Bite is operated by Nate Bautistas, California, USA.