TasteBuddy Privacy Policy

TL;DR: we do not use cookies and we do not collect any personal information or track visitors of tastebuddy.io. If you decide to create an account, we ask for the bare minimum and only share it with services that are absolutely necessary for the app to function.

You are free (and we encourage you) to enter some personal information that can be used to provide more in-depth analysis on the sensory evaluation of wines and spirits. None of this information will ever be used for any other purpose, nor will it be sold or shared with third parties.

We are committed to complying with the GDPR or any other data protection regulations brought to our attention. We believe in an open web that respects the privacy and security of individuals. At its core, and in order to provide valuable data to its users, TasteBuddy collects some personal information. This information is used solely for this purpose and not for profit. Although you will have to take our word for it, we have no plans to ever sell or use your personal information for advertising or consumer targeting purposes.

Website usage analytics

Tastebuddy and its documentation available at docs.tastebuddy.io collects website traffic metrics using a self-hosted instance of Plausible Analytics. We do not track individuals and we do not link our users' connection logs to the website analytics. The sole purpose of measuring website traffic is to understand the needs of our customers to focus the development of Tastebuddy.

Plausible Analytics is fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, PECR and other privacy regulations. As a visitor to TasteBuddy website:

• No personal information is collected
• No information such as cookies is stored in the browser
• No information is shared with, sent to or sold to third parties
• Information is not shared with advertising companies
• No information is mined and harvested for personal and behavioural trends
• No information is monetized

You can read more about Plausible Analytics' privacy policy here.

Data collection

When you create an account on tastebuddy.io, the following information is required and therefore collected by TasteBuddy:

• A valid email address: required for account creation and login. If an account is deleted, the email address is deleted from our database and cannot be recovered
• A password: required to log in to the platform and use the services offered by TasteBuddy. The password is fully encrypted before being stored in the database, and we have no way of accessing it. Tastebuddy is built on Django, which uses the PBKDF2 algorithm with a SHA256 hash, a password stretching mechanism recommended by NIST. This should be sufficient for most users: it is quite secure and requires a huge amount of computing time to crack.

Optionally, users can enter personal information in their profile. Tastebuddy can also collect this information:

• First and last name: used for easier identification of tasters on the platform;
• Date of birth: used to sort tasters' preferences based on their age;
• Gender: used to sort tasters' preferences based on their gender;
• Country of origin: used to sort tasters' based on their nationality;

This data is only used to provide a better and more in-depth understanding of the products. It is considered to belong to the user's organisation (Tastebuddy's client), and Tastebuddy is not responsible for how the organisation uses the user's personal information.

User profiling

In essence, TasteBuddy allows the characterisation of a user's taste for wine and/or spirits: it is clear that consumer profiling is one of the services offered by TasteBuddy.

However, TasteBuddy is not linked to any third party and does not sell any of the data. This data is considered the property of the organisation under which it was collected, and as such, TasteBuddy claims no rights over it and cannot be held responsible if the data collector does not respect this privacy policy.

Last updated: October 29th, 2024