Effective 23 October 2026
Bite is a food diary. You keep your meals for yourself, share them with your friends, and your restaurant meals help other people decide where to eat. Almost everything in it is something you photographed or typed yourself, and it stays yours.
Your restaurant meals are public. When you post a meal at a restaurant, it shows on that restaurant's page for anyone using Bite: your photos, your verdict, the dishes and your note, with your first name. It can also show on that restaurant's page on our website, trybite.co, where anyone can see it without an account; there it never shows your name or face. That is what makes Bite useful. Someone deciding where to eat sees what people actually ordered there, photographed by the people who ate it.
This is the default for every restaurant meal, and it is always your choice:
Post only photos you're happy for strangers to see, and be thoughtful about other people in them.
The short version. We store your diary so it survives a new phone, so the friends you choose can see it, and so your restaurant meals can show on those restaurants' pages, as described above. 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 in California, USA; the Terms of Service say who. In this policy “Bite”, “we” and “us” mean that person. This policy covers the Bite iPhone app and this website, trybite.co.
You sign in with Apple or with your email address. There is no password. With Apple, Bite asks for your name and nothing else, and 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. With email, we store your address and send it a six-digit code each time you sign in. If you signed in with Apple, you can add an email in Settings as a second way in. When you create an account, Bite asks your birthday to check you are 18 or older. Only the answer is kept, on your phone; your birthday is not sent to us.
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, to show the friends you chose what you ate, and, for a meal set to Everyone, to show it on that restaurant's page (see Who can see what).
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, your phone sends the title you type to the Google Books API to suggest matches. Because that request comes straight from your phone, Google also sees your IP address, as any website you visit does. 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. Bite reads your contacts only if you choose to find friends from them, as described next.
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.
If you choose Find friends on Bite on Invite friends, Bite reads your contacts on your phone, and their email addresses, and nothing else, are sent to Bite to show which of them are already on Bite. Nothing is sent until you agree on that screen. If you also ask Bite to tell you when one of them joins, Bite keeps a scrambled copy of each address (a keyed hash) for that, and deletes them when you tap Forget them or delete your account. Phone numbers and photos never leave your phone, and neither do names, except the first name of a contact you invite to a plan or save a seat for, which is stored with that plan or seat. Someone can find you this way only if your email is verified and “Let people with my email find me” is on in Settings (it is on unless you turn it off); turn it off and nobody finds you through their contacts or hears that you joined. Apple's Hide My Email addresses never match.
When you post a restaurant meal and say who was with you, Bite can save each of them a seat. Friends on Bite get a notification. For someone not on Bite, Bite makes a private link, and you text it to them yourself from your phone; Bite never sends texts and never stores their number, only the first name you gave them. The link shows your first name, the place and a smaller copy of your meal's photo, which Bite copies to a public folder only when you send a seat. It is not listed or searchable, and anyone with the link can open it, so share it only with the person it's for. When they post their own meal from that place, the two show side by side to your friends. Nothing is ever posted for anyone. After seven days the seat closes, but the link keeps showing your first name, the place and the photo.
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, and the travel times Bite shows for a place or a plan, go to Apple Maps, which receives your current location to work them out. We don't track you in the background, and we don't keep a history of where you have been. What reaches our servers is the place you chose for a meal or a plan, not your movements, plus two smaller things described below: the pin for a place that isn't on the map, and ranking scores that reflect roughly how far away the places Bite suggested were.
If you log a meal somewhere Apple Maps doesn't list, such as a food truck, a market stall or a pop-up, Bite can pin it. The pin starts at the location saved in the photo you picked, and you can drag it before you save. We store the pin with that meal, rounded to about 100 metres, and the friends who can see the meal can see the pin and get directions to it. If you choose Someone's home, no pin is ever stored, only the neighbourhood. Please don't pin a private home under another kind.
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.
A friend can nudge you when you haven't posted anything they can see for a couple of days; the notification shows who nudged you. When you next post, the friends who nudged you in the last few days are told what you posted. We may also send one notification in the evening, around 7 pm, when several of your friends have posted that day. To send it at your local time, we store your phone's time zone with its push token.
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, which place you looked at, what you did on a place's page (such as asking for directions, calling or opening its website), which place a share was about, and whether a plan happened. 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 coordinates, and none of it goes to an analytics company. Nearby places rank higher, though, so the stored scores reflect roughly how far you were from each place when you searched.
If you join the waitlist, we store your email address and which form you used, and send you one email when you can get Bite. If you ask to claim a restaurant's page, we store the restaurant, your name, your email and your role there, and use them only to check the page is yours and to write to you about it. Taps on the install link are counted by which page and which kind of site 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. Your own page has a link too, trybite.co/@ and your username, and it works only once you've shared it from Bite.
A plan or recipe link never shows your diary, your profile or anything else, and your page's link shows only what's listed above. Photos shared this way are stored where anyone with their address can load them. You can turn a plan or recipe link off in the app, and it stops working. Your page's link can't be switched off yet; making your profile private empties it down to your first name and username.
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 you have been told Bite is available, or until you ask us to remove yours.
Deleting your account. Open Settings from your profile and choose Delete account. That deletes your sign-in record, profile, username, meals and photos, recipes, comments, reactions and selfies, messages, plans and their links, saved places and recipes, friendships, push tokens, feedback, usage events and records of which places Bite showed you, and erases Bite's copy on your phone.
A few things remain:
Bite will still be listed under Sign in with Apple on your Apple ID. To remove it there, open iOS Settings, tap your name, then Sign in with Apple.
Deleting a single meal removes it and its photos, including the smaller copies made for a seat link or your page.
We give everyone these rights, wherever they live: you can ask us to tell you what we hold about you, give you a copy, correct it, or delete it, and we will not treat you differently for asking. If a privacy law where you live gives you more, you have those rights too. We use your data to provide the service you asked for, and to keep it secure and improve it.
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.
Your browser or phone may send a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal. Bite doesn't track anyone across other companies' apps or websites, and doesn't sell or share personal information for advertising, so we treat every visitor as if that signal were on. There is nothing further for it to switch off, and we don't respond to it differently.
You must be 18 or older to use Bite. It is not meant for anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe someone under 18 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: a photo from a meal set to Everyone can be loaded by anyone signed in to Bite, and the ones you publish with a link by anyone with the link. Everything travels over encrypted connections. Only the person who runs Bite can reach the database directly, and only 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. Help with the app is at trybite.co/support.
Earlier versions: 15 October 2026, 13 October 2026.