Privacy

The Kosher (the website at thekosher.app, our iOS and Android apps, and the associated WhatsApp assistant) is operated as the data controller for the personal information described below. Contact: hello@thekosher.app. We try to do as little with your personal data as the product can survive on.

What we collect

• Account basics — your email address (for login), an optional display name, and any kashrus profile fields you set in /me/settings.
• Phone number, only if you choose to link one at /me/phone. We use it to recognize you when you message the WhatsApp bot. We don't share it with other users.
• WhatsApp interactions — every message to the bot is logged for analytics, but the phone number itself is stored only as a salted SHA-256 hash. We can't recover the original number from the analytics table.
• User-submitted content — restaurants you submit, claims you make, corrections you flag, reviews you write, hashgachot you propose. These are tied to your account.
• Location — in our mobile apps, if you grant permission, we use your device location to show kosher restaurants near you. It's used to run the search and is not stored as a location history or shared with other users. You can revoke the permission anytime in your device settings.
• Push notifications — if you enable them in the mobile apps, we store a device push token tied to your account so we can notify you (e.g. a new venue near your home base). Turn them off anytime in your device settings.

Who sees what

• You can see and edit everything tied to your account.
• Other users see only your published reviews and the venue rows you've helped curate. Your email, phone, and kashrus profile are private.
• Admins see the moderation queues (submissions, claims, corrections) and aggregate WhatsApp traffic. They never see decrypted phone numbers in the analytics view.
• Third parties: we send your queries to Anthropic (Claude) and OpenAI (Whisper transcriptions) so the bot can respond. We send geocoding queries to Google Maps. None of those services receive your phone number.

Deletion

Email hello@thekosher.app and we'll delete your account and any data tied to it. The anonymized WhatsApp analytics rows survive (they can't be traced back to you anyway), but anything keyed to your user_id is gone.

Advertising, financial, health, and government use

The Kosher is not a government app. It does not provide health features, financial features, payments, loans, insurance, investments, banking, cryptocurrency, or credit products. The app does not contain ads, advertising pixels, or advertising SDKs, and we do not use the Android Advertising ID for advertising or analytics.

Cookies

Auth cookies for staying logged in. No third-party tracking, advertising pixels, or analytics SDKs.

Changes

If we materially change what we collect or how we use it, this page updates and signed-in users get a banner notice.