Bites

Privacy Policy

Last updated: 3 October 2026

Bites is a crowdsourced app for comparing real food prices near you. This policy explains, in plain language, what information the app collects, why, who else sees it, and how you can get rid of it. If anything here is unclear, email bites.snacking@gmail.com and ask.

Who is responsible for your information

Bites is operated by Dylan Steiner, based in South Africa. For the purposes of the Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 (POPIA), that is the responsible party for the information described here.

Contact: bites.snacking@gmail.com

What Bites collects

Information	Why
Your name, email address and password (or your Google or Apple account, if you sign in that way)	To create your account, sign you in, and show who reported a price. Your name is public. Your email address is not shown to other users.
Profile photo, if you add one	Shown next to your posts. Optional.
Your location, while you are using the app	To find restaurants near you and work out how far away each price is. Only collected while the app is open, only if you allow it, and never in the background. If you say no, search still works — you just have to tell it where to look.
Photos you upload — food photos, and photos of receipts or menus	Food photos appear on your posts. Receipt and menu photos are read by Google's Gemini AI to pull out the item and price, and are kept as evidence that a price is real. Receipt and menu photos are never displayed publicly in the app.
What you post — prices, ratings, written reviews, vibe tags, comments, likes, follows and saved places	This is the actual content of Bites. Prices, ratings, reviews and comments are public. Saved places are private to you.
Basic technical information — device type, app version, crash and error logs	To keep the app working and fix crashes.

What Bites does not do: it does not track you across other apps or websites, does not sell your information to anyone, does not show ads, and does not use your information to build an advertising profile.

What other people can see

Public: your name, your profile photo, the prices you report, your star ratings, your written reviews, your food photos, your comments, and your contribution count and badges.
Private to you: your email address, your password, your saved places, your price alerts, your notifications, and your blocked accounts list.
Approximate, not exact: Bites publishes the restaurant a price was reported at. It never publishes where you were when you reported it.

Who else your information goes to

Bites is a small app built on other companies' infrastructure. The following services process information on its behalf, and only for the purposes below:

Google Firebase (Authentication, Firestore, Storage, Cloud Functions) — stores your account, your posts and your photos, and runs the app's backend. Data is held on Google's servers, which are outside South Africa.
Google Maps Platform / Places API — finds nearby businesses and their addresses.
Google Gemini API — reads the receipt or menu photos you choose to scan, to extract the item names and prices. This only happens when you scan something.
Expo — delivers app updates and crash reports.

Because these providers store data outside South Africa, using Bites involves your information being transferred abroad. Each of these providers is contractually bound to protect it and to process it only on instruction.

Information may also be disclosed if the law requires it, or where it is necessary to investigate abuse, fraud, or a threat to someone's safety.

How long it is kept

Your account and profile — until you delete your account.
Your posts, photos, comments and reviews — until you delete them, or delete your account.
Reports of bad content — kept as a moderation record, so repeat problems can be spotted.
Crash and error logs — kept for a short period, then discarded.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account yourself, at any time, from inside the app: Profile → the gear icon → Delete My Account. You do not need to email anyone or ask permission.

When you delete your account, the following is permanently removed: your login, your name, your email address, your profile photo, every photo you uploaded, your written reviews, your comments, your likes, your saved places, your follows, your notifications and your price alerts.

One thing is deliberately kept, in anonymous form. The price observations themselves — for example "Classic Burger, R89, at a named restaurant, on 4 September" — stay in Bites. A price is a fact about a restaurant rather than information about you, and other people's searches depend on it. Everything connecting those records to you is stripped: your account link, your review text and your photo are all removed, so what remains is a price with a date and no author. If you would prefer your price reports removed entirely as well, email bites.snacking@gmail.com before deleting your account and that will be done for you.

Deleting the app from your phone on its own does not delete your account.

Your rights

Under POPIA — and under the GDPR if you are in the UK or EU — you can ask to:

see what information Bites holds about you;
correct anything that is wrong (your name, email and photo can be changed in the app under Edit Profile);
have your information deleted (see above);
object to how it is being used, or withdraw your consent — for example by turning off location permission in your phone's settings;
get a copy of the information you gave Bites in a common, machine-readable format, so you can take it elsewhere.

To make any of these requests, email bites.snacking@gmail.com. A reply will normally come within 30 days. If you are not satisfied with the response, you can complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa or, if you are in the EU or UK, to the data protection authority in your country.

If you are in the EU or UK

Bites is available in Europe. The GDPR (and the UK GDPR) require us to say on what legal basis each kind of information is used:

To run your account and show what you post — because it is needed to provide the service you signed up for.
Your location — your consent, given through your phone's location permission. You can withdraw it at any time in your phone's settings.
Reading receipt and menu photos with Gemini — your request, each time you choose to scan something.
Keeping Bites safe (moderation, abuse reports, crash logs) — our legitimate interest in keeping the app working and free of abuse.
Keeping anonymous price records after an account is deleted — our legitimate interest in accurate price history for everyone. You can ask for your price reports to be removed as well (see above).

Your information is stored by Google outside the EU and UK. Google protects these transfers with the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses (and the UK equivalent).

Security

Accounts are protected by Firebase Authentication, and the database enforces rules about who may read and write what. Traffic between the app and the servers is encrypted. No system is perfectly secure, so please use a password you do not use anywhere else.

Children

Bites is not intended for children under 13, and accounts should not be created by anyone under that age. If you believe a child has created an account, email bites.snacking@gmail.com and it will be removed.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a way that materially affects you, the date at the top will be updated and a notice will be shown in the app. Continuing to use Bites after that means you accept the updated policy.

Bites · Terms of Service · Support · bites.snacking@gmail.com