Privacy Policy
Effective October 17, 2026 · Applies to gauchonutri.com · If this English version and the Chinese version differ, the Chinese version controls.
GauchoNutri is an independent student project (not affiliated with UC Santa Barbara) that helps you plan what to eat from the real UCSB dining menus. You tell us some things about your body and diet, so we try to be clear about what we collect, why, and who sees it. The short version: we collect it only to make your recommendations, we never sell it or use it for ads, and you can export or delete it any time.
1. What we collect
| Category | Details | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Account | Email, password (stored only as a salted hash — we can't see it), nickname | Logging in, sending plan emails, password resets |
| Survey | Goals, fitness experience, sex, age, height, weight, body fat % (optional), activity level, diet and restrictions, allergies, taste preferences, favorite dining commons, which meals you eat there, milk and drink habits, email schedule | Calculating your daily targets, filtering out dishes you can't eat, building recommendations |
| Usage | Plates you pick, dish ratings, fullness feedback, weight entries, what you type in the chat box, email delivery records | Making suggestions fit you better; adjusting calories based on your weight trend |
| Technical | A session cookie for login, and a language cookie; IP addresses in server logs (used only for abuse prevention and debugging, kept briefly) | Keeping you logged in, security |
We do not use any advertising, tracking or third-party analytics scripts, and open/click tracking is turned off in our emails.
2. Who we share it with
Only the service providers that run the site, and only what each one needs:
- Fly.io (Los Angeles data center): hosts the website and the encrypted database.
- Resend: sends plan and account emails (receives your email address and the email content).
- Anthropic (Claude): writes the AI analysis, understands chat requests and translates new dish names. We send diet-related survey answers, your chat messages and the day's menu — not your email or nickname. Under Anthropic's commercial terms, API data is not used to train models by default.
- Cloudflare: DNS only; it doesn't handle site content.
We do not sell your personal information or share it for advertising (including as defined by the California CCPA). We won't give it to anyone else unless the law requires it. Menus and nutrition data come from UCSB Dining's public website; collecting them involves none of your information.
3. Research data (optional, off by default)
We'd also like to help research on AI and nutrition — for example, whether recommendations help people eat closer to their goals in a real dining hall. Your data may be used for research only if you opt in at signup or in Settings, and then:
- Only de-identified data is used: email, nickname and other direct identifiers are removed, values like age, height and weight are bucketed, and analysis is mainly aggregate.
- It's used only for academic research on dining recommendations and nutrition estimates (possibly with university research teams) — never commercially, never sold.
- Any formal research study will be described separately and ask for consent as required by research ethics review.
- You can withdraw consent in Settings at any time; your data won't be included in new research after that.
- Saying no doesn't affect any feature of the site.
4. How long we keep it
If you try the survey without signing up, your data is tied only to a login cookie in your browser and is deleted automatically if you don't sign up within 30 days.
We keep this data while your account exists. When you delete your account, the data is removed from the database immediately; automatic disk backups are kept for at most 5 days and then overwritten.
5. Your rights
- Access and export: Settings → My data → Export downloads everything (JSON).
- Correct: retake the survey or change your targets and email settings any time.
- Delete: Settings → Delete account removes your account and all data.
- Unsubscribe: every plan email has a one-click unsubscribe link.
- Withdraw research consent: switch it off in Settings.
6. Security
HTTPS everywhere; passwords hashed with salted PBKDF2; server secrets stored encrypted; rate-limited login; signed one-click email links. No system is 100% secure — if an incident affects your data, we'll email you as soon as possible.
7. Children
GauchoNutri is meant for college students. Don't use it if you're under 13; if you're under 18, use it with a parent's or guardian's knowledge. We delete accounts we learn belong to children under 13.
8. Not a medical service
Recommendations are general healthy-eating information, not medical or nutrition advice. If you have a medical condition, an eating disorder or a serious allergy, talk to a doctor or registered dietitian, and always rely on the allergen labels in the dining hall.
9. Changes and contact
We'll email you before any significant change to this policy. Questions, or want to use any of the rights above? Email hello@gauchonutri.com.