Privacy Policy

Effective date: September 30, 2026 App: Otto (the "App") Website: https://ottosapp.com (the "Site") Provider: Juan Diego Lugo ("we", "us", "our")

Otto is a recipe app — a quiet cookbook that lets you save, import, cook, plan, and share recipes. This policy covers both the App and our Site. It explains what information we handle, why, and the choices you have. We've tried to write it plainly.

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The short version

• We collect the minimum needed to run the App: your account (email, and a name if your sign-in provider gives one) and the content you create (recipes you save or import, meal plans, and shopping lists).
• Your cooking-journal plate photos, food preferences, and reminder settings stay on your device — they are not uploaded to us.
• We do not sell your data, we do not show ads, and we do not track you across other apps or websites. There is no advertising or cross-app tracking in Otto.
• You can delete your account from inside the App at any time.

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1. Information we collect

a) Information you give us

• Account information. When you create an account, we receive your email address. If you sign in with Apple, Google, or Facebook, we receive your email and, if the provider supplies it, your name and a provider account identifier; signing in with Google also gives us a profile photo URL the provider hosts (we don't otherwise use or display it). We use a third-party authentication provider (see §4) to manage sign-in and passwords; we do not store your password ourselves.
• Your content. Recipes you save or import, meal plans, and shopping list items — including items on lists you choose to share with people you invite. If you add a photo to a recipe, that photo is uploaded and stored so it can display in the App; see "Recipe photos" below.
• Recipe photos you upload. A photo you attach to a recipe (as opposed to a cooking-journal photo, which stays on your device — see §1(c)) is uploaded to our storage provider and served by a direct link. Choose photos you're comfortable being reachable by anyone who has that link.
• Membership and purchases. If you join Otto Club, our payment processor (see §4) manages the purchase and tells us your membership status and its expiration date, so the App can unlock what you paid for. We never see or store your card details — Apple's App Store handles payment directly.
• Messages you send us. If you email support or send feedback or a bug report from the App, we receive what you write and basic context you include (such as the App version and your device's operating system).

b) Information collected automatically

• Limited technical/diagnostic data. To keep the service reliable, our servers process routine request information (such as a request's time, the operating system type, IP address, and approximate location derived from it) and error/diagnostic logs when something goes wrong. This includes what you search for in Otto's recipe catalogue: our infrastructure provider's request logs record the search term alongside your account and the request's IP address and approximate location, for a limited retention window, to keep the service reliable and secure. We use this to fix bugs, protect the service, and understand load — not to build an advertising profile, and not shared with advertisers. The App does not include third-party advertising or analytics SDKs.
• Voice input. If you use the microphone to talk to Otto instead of typing, your speech is processed by Apple's on-device or server-side speech recognition (depending on your settings and connectivity) to produce a text transcript. Otto receives only that transcript, never the audio itself.

c) Information that stays on your device (we do not collect it)

• Cooking-journal photos of your finished plates, your food preferences (diet and cuisines), your reminder settings, and onboarding state are stored only on your device. They are not uploaded to our servers. If you delete the App, this on-device information is removed with it.

d) Our website

Our Site is a static marketing and legal site. It has no accounts, no sign-in, and no shopping. It sets no cookies and embeds no advertising or cross-site tracking scripts — so there is nothing to consent to and no cookie banner.

We do measure aggregate page views on the Site using Vercel Web Analytics, a cookieless analytics tool. It records which page was viewed, the referring site, and coarse details such as country, browser, and device type, and uses a daily-rotating hash to estimate visitor counts. It does not set cookies, does not keep a persistent identifier for you, does not build a profile, and does not follow you to other websites. We use it only to see which pages people find useful. There are still no analytics of any kind inside the App itself.

Our hosting provider also processes standard server request data (such as IP address and browser type) to serve pages and protect against abuse.

e) Information from third parties

• When you use a social sign-in, the provider (Apple, Google, or Facebook) sends us the limited profile information described in §1(a). We do not receive your social media posts, contacts, or friend lists.

f) The contact form on our Site

The one exception to (d): our Site has a contact form. If you use it, we receive what you enter — your email address, your message, and, if you provide them, your name and a subject. We use this information for one purpose: to read and reply to your message. Sending the message uses Resend (an email delivery provider), which processes it to deliver it to our inbox. Our server also briefly processes your IP address to limit abuse of the form (rate limiting); it is not stored with your message. We keep contact messages like ordinary email correspondence — as long as needed to handle your request and a reasonable period after — and you can ask us to delete them at juandiego@ottosapp.com. The form sets no cookies and uses no CAPTCHA or tracking.

g) How Otto uses AI

Several App features are powered by a third-party AI provider (Anthropic). We send it only what a feature needs to do its job:

• what you type when you chat with Otto or paste recipe text to import it;
• the photo itself, if you import a recipe by taking or choosing a picture of it;
• the public caption of a post (for example on TikTok or Instagram), when you import it by link and the page doesn't publish the recipe in a standard format, so Otto can read the recipe from it;
• an ingredient name, when our own nutrition data doesn't already have it, so Otto can estimate its nutrition.

Ingredient names that reach this step are also checked against USDA FoodData Central, a public U.S. government nutrition database, and the matched result is kept in a shared lookup table so the next person who cooks with the same ingredient doesn't need a fresh lookup — see §7 for how that table relates to your account.

Anthropic processes this content to generate the response Otto shows you (a recipe, a chat reply, a nutrition estimate); we don't use it to train models, and it is not sold or used for advertising.

Asking before AI is used. The first time you use one of Otto's AI features (Ask Otto, or importing a recipe from a link, pasted text or a photo), Otto shows you what will be sent and to whom, and asks your permission. If you choose Not now, nothing is sent, Otto's AI features stay off and the rest of Otto (your cookbook, cook mode, plan and shopping list) works as usual. You can change your choice any time in the app under Account › AI features.

What is sent, and what isn't. Only the content you give that feature: the words you type, the link, text or photo you share, and the ingredient names in your recipes (used to match them to nutrition data). It goes through our server to Anthropic, the company that makes the Claude AI model, to produce the answer. Your email, name and the rest of your account are not sent with it. Under Anthropic's commercial terms, Anthropic does not use what Otto sends to train its models. Ingredient names are only sent after you allow it; until then, nutrition is estimated from Otto's built-in table, so a few unusual ingredients may go unmatched.

2. How we use information

We use the information above to:

• create and secure your account and sign you in;
• store and sync the recipes, plans, and lists you create;
• power features you ask for (importing a recipe from a link, sharing a recipe or list, planning your week);
• respond to your support messages and fix problems;
• keep the service safe and working (debugging, preventing abuse, rate-limiting).

We rely on these information practices to provide the App you asked for. We do not use your information for advertising or to track you across other services.

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3. Recipe browsing

Some recipes you browse come from a third-party recipe database (TheMealDB). Requests to browse or search those recipes are handled to return results; we don't use that browsing to build an advertising profile.

4. How we share information

We do not sell your personal information. We share it only with service providers that help us run the App, and only as needed:

• Authentication & database provider (Supabase). Manages sign-in, runs the servers the App talks to, and stores your account and content.
• Sign-in providers you choose (Apple / Google / Facebook). Only when you use social sign-in, and only to authenticate you.
• AI provider (Anthropic). Powers chat, recipe import, and nutrition-matching — see §1(g) for exactly what we send it.
• Payment processor (RevenueCat). Manages Otto Club subscriptions and tells us your membership status; Apple's App Store handles the actual payment.
• Recipe data provider (TheMealDB). For browsing built-in recipes.
• Nutrition data provider (USDA FoodData Central). For ingredient nutrition lookups — see §1(g).
• Video provider (YouTube). Some recipes include a cooking video. It plays in YouTube's embedded player only when you open it, and YouTube (Google) receives that request, including your IP address and device information, under Google's privacy policy. We don't send YouTube your account details.

We may also disclose information if required by law, to protect our rights or users' safety, or in connection with a business transfer (e.g., a merger or acquisition), in which case we'll honor the commitments in this policy.

5. Sign in with Apple and "Hide My Email"

If you use Sign in with Apple and choose to hide your email, Apple gives us a private relay address instead of your real one. We use that relay address the same way we'd use a normal email — to run your account. You can manage or stop the relay in your Apple ID settings at any time.

6. Sharing you initiate

• Public share links. If you create a share link for a recipe, anyone with that link can view the shared recipe — the link is designed to be hard to guess, but it is public to whoever holds it. You can revoke a share link in the App.
• Collaborative shopping lists. If you invite others to a shared list, the items on that list, and the first names/labels associated with who added or checked items, are visible to the people you invite.

Please share only what you're comfortable making visible to the people who receive the link or invitation.

7. Data retention and deletion

• We keep your account and content for as long as your account is active.
• You can delete your account at any time from the App (Profile → delete account). Deleting your account removes your account and the recipes, meal plans, and favorites associated with it from our systems, along with your membership record at our payment processor (RevenueCat).
• Please note: content you chose to share may persist after deletion — for example, a public share link you created or an item on a shared list may remain visible to others until it is separately revoked or removed. Revoke share links and leave/clear shared lists before deleting if you want that content gone. (We're working to make account deletion sweep this content automatically; until then, this is the honest state.)
• On-device information (journal photos, preferences) is removed when you delete the App from your device.
• One thing survives deletion, and it isn't yours: when Otto works out nutrition for an ingredient, it keeps the ingredient name and what it matched to in a shared lookup table — so the next person who cooks with "smoked paprika" doesn't cost anyone another lookup. Those rows carry no account, no user ID and nothing linking them to you, and they are not deleted with your account because after deletion there is nothing to connect them to. Your recipes, plans and favorites are deleted as described above.
• We may retain limited records where we're required to for legal, security, or fraud-prevention reasons.

8. Your rights and choices

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, or export your personal information, and to object to or restrict certain processing. You can exercise the core of these directly — view and edit your content in the App, and delete your account — or contact us at juandiego@ottosapp.com and we'll help.

• California (CCPA/CPRA): We do not sell or "share" personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising, and we don't use it for targeted advertising.
• EEA/UK (GDPR): Our legal bases are performing our contract with you (running the App), legitimate interests (keeping the service secure and reliable), and your consent where required. You may lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority.

We will not discriminate against you for exercising these rights.

9. Where your information is processed

We and our service providers process and store information in the United States. If you use Otto from outside the U.S., you understand your information will be transferred to and processed in the U.S., where privacy laws may differ from those in your country.

10. Security

We use reasonable technical and organizational measures to protect your information (such as encrypted connections and access controls). No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure, so we can't guarantee absolute security, but we work to protect your data and to address issues promptly.

11. Children's privacy

Otto is not directed to children under 13 (or the minimum age required in your country), and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has provided us personal information, contact us at juandiego@ottosapp.com and we'll delete it.

12. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the App evolves. When we make material changes, we'll update the effective date above and, where appropriate, notify you in the App. Your continued use of Otto after an update means you accept the revised policy.

13. Contact us

Questions or requests about your privacy? Reach us at:

Juan Diego Lugo Email: juandiego@ottosapp.com https://ottosapp.com

Governed by the laws of the State of Florida, United States, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles.