Privacy Policy

Pal8 ("we," "us," or "our") operates a voice AI platform that helps restaurant customers explore menus through natural conversation. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, store, and protect your personal information when you use our website, mobile application, and voice AI services (collectively, the "Service").

By using the Service, you acknowledge that you have read and understood this Privacy Policy. If you do not agree with our practices, please do not use the Service.

• Provide the Service: Process voice queries, display menus, deliver personalized recommendations, and send campaign notifications you've opted into.
• Build Your Taste Profile: Analyze conversation transcripts, onboarding selections, and app activity to understand your food preferences across restaurants.
• Personalize by Location: Use your location to show nearby restaurants, tailor recommendations to the areas you frequent, and improve the relevance of your feed.
• Neighborhood Insights for Restaurants: Generate anonymized, aggregated neighborhood analytics for restaurant operators — such as popular flavor preferences, peak dining times, and dietary demand in their area. These insights are computed from the collective data of many users. Individual identities, locations, and personal details are never shared with restaurants. Restaurants see only aggregate counts and percentages (e.g., "67% of nearby diners prefer bold flavors"), never individual profiles.
• Location-Based Offers: If you opt in (disabled by default), nearby restaurants may include you in relevant promotional campaigns based on the areas you visit. You can enable or disable this at any time in your profile settings.
• Safety & Moderation: Detect abusive content, prevent platform misuse, and enforce our terms of service.
• Improve the Service: Analyze usage patterns to fix bugs, improve AI accuracy, and develop new features.
• Communications: Send push notifications for rewards and campaigns you're eligible for (opt-out available in app settings).

To deliver our Service, certain data is processed by trusted third-party infrastructure providers. These providers are bound by strict contractual obligations, do not use your data to train their own models, and maintain enterprise-grade security standards.

We will never sell your personal information. Your voice interactions, taste profiles, location history, and any other data that identifies you is used solely to deliver and improve the Pal8 experience — it is never sold, rented, or traded to any third party. We may, however, sell or license anonymized, aggregated trend data — insights derived from many users that do not identify, and cannot reasonably be used to identify, any individual — to third parties such as consumer brands, food companies, and market researchers. See Section 5 for details.

We do not sell, rent, or trade data that identifies you personally. We share data only in these limited circumstances:

• Infrastructure Providers: As described in Section 4, trusted providers process data solely to operate the Service on our behalf. These include:
  • Square (payments and order fulfillment) — when you place an order, we share your email, the pickup name, and pickup phone number you provide with Square to process payment and route your order to the restaurant.
  • We use Resend to deliver transactional email (verification codes, order confirmations, support replies). Resend receives your email address and the contents of the message we send you, and processes it solely to deliver our email on our behalf.
  • We deliver push notifications through Expo's push service (and, in turn, Apple and Google's notification gateways). Expo receives your device push token and the notification content (e.g., order status) to route the message to your device.
  • For restaurant owners, we share your business email and name with Stripe, our subscription-billing processor, to manage your plan and payments. Stripe processes this data under its own privacy policy.
• Restaurant Operators: Restaurants receive anonymized, aggregated insight reports and neighborhood analytics. They see aggregate counts and percentages about their area — never your name, contact information, individual location history, or conversation transcripts.
• Anonymized, Aggregated Trend Data: We may sell or license aggregated, de-identified insights — such as flavor, cuisine, and dietary trends across regions or time periods — to third parties including consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands, food companies, and market researchers. This data reflects patterns across many users and does not identify, and cannot reasonably be used to identify, any individual. It never includes your name, contact information, precise location, or conversation transcripts.
• Legal Requirements: We may disclose data if required by law, subpoena, or court order, or to protect the safety of our users.

We keep personal data only as long as needed for the purposes described in this policy, then delete it or strip the parts that identify you. Specific periods:

• Voice audio: Never stored as a recording — processed in real time only.
• Conversation transcripts: Cleared 90 days after the session; session metadata (no transcript text) is kept.
• Order records: Kept as financial/tax records, but the buyer name, pickup phone number and order notes are stripped after 2 years (24 months). The food items, totals and tax are retained for accounting and refund history.
• AI usage and operational logs: Internal usage records are deleted after 12 months; error and moderation logs after 30 to 90 days.
• Account, taste profile, favorites, location history and behavioral data: Retained for the life of your account and deleted when you delete your account (see Section 6). We may also age out granular location history and activity events on a rolling basis.
• Deletion record: When you delete your account we keep a minimal, secured record that the deletion occurred, as required to demonstrate compliance.

Data we share with third-party processors (for example, the name, email and phone you provide at checkout, which is sent to Square) is retained by those processors under their own privacy policies; deleting your Pal8 account does not by itself delete data already held by a third-party processor.

You have the following rights regarding your personal data:

• Access & Portability: View your profile and taste profile data in the app, and request a downloadable copy of the personal data associated with your account — including your profile, taste profile, favorites, order history, notifications, location history, activity events, and support messages.
• Correction: Update your account information at any time in your profile settings.
• Deletion: Permanently delete your account and all associated data — including your taste profiles, favorites, conversation history, location history, behavioral data, notifications, support messages, content reports, and dining-session entries — through the app. This action is irreversible. Order records are kept as financial records but stripped of the name and phone number you provided at checkout, and we keep a minimal secured record that the deletion occurred. Information already shared with payment, email, and push providers is governed by their own retention policies.
• Opt-Out of Notifications: Disable push notifications in your app or device settings at any time.
• Opt-Out of Location-Based Offers: You control whether nearby restaurants can reach you with offers based on the areas you visit. This is disabled by default and can be toggled in your profile settings at any time.
• Revoke Location Permission: You can revoke location access at any time through your device settings. The app will continue to function using your selected cities or zip code.

To exercise your right to deletion, use the "Delete Account" option in the app.

We take the security of your data seriously and implement industry-standard measures to protect your information from unauthorized access, alteration, disclosure, or destruction. This includes encryption in transit and at rest, secure authentication, rate limiting, and continuous monitoring.

The Service is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has provided us with personal data, please contact us and we will delete it promptly.

If you are a California resident, you have additional rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA):

• Right to Know: You may request the categories and specific pieces of personal information we have collected, including location data and behavioral data.
• Right to Delete: You may request deletion of your personal information, including location history.
• Right to Opt-Out of Sale: We do not sell your personal information. We may sell or license anonymized, aggregated data that does not identify you (see Section 5); under the CCPA/CPRA, de-identified and aggregate consumer information is not treated as personal information. To the extent any such data is ever deemed a sale of personal information, you may opt out by contacting us through the app.
• Right to Limit Use of Sensitive Personal Information: Precise location, along with the dietary restrictions and allergy (health-related) information and voice-derived personal details you provide, is classified as sensitive personal information under the CPRA. We use it only for the purposes described in this policy (personalized recommendations and aggregate neighborhood insights). You may limit this use by revoking location permission on your device and by deleting your allergy and dietary entries in the app.
• Non-Discrimination: We will not discriminate against you for exercising your privacy rights.

To exercise these rights, use the account management options within the app.

If you are a Connecticut resident, the Connecticut Data Privacy Act (CTDPA) gives you the right to access, correct, delete, and obtain a portable copy of your personal data, and to opt out of targeted advertising, the sale of personal data, and certain profiling. SENSITIVE DATA: Pal8 processes two categories of sensitive data as defined by the CTDPA — your precise geolocation (GPS coordinates and location history) and consumer health data (food allergies and dietary restrictions you provide). We process this sensitive data only with your consent and only as reasonably necessary for the purposes described in this policy. You may withdraw consent at any time by revoking location permission on your device and by deleting your allergy and dietary entries in the app. We do NOT sell your precise geolocation data, and we will not sell any sensitive data without your separate, explicit consent. To exercise any CTDPA right or to appeal a denied request, use the account management options in the app or contact us at the email below; we will respond within 45 days as required by law.

Pal8 uses artificial intelligence throughout the Service. When you interact with our voice assistant, you are communicating with an AI system — not a human. The AI processes your speech, generates responses about restaurant menus, and builds taste preferences based on your interactions. Automated decisions made by the AI (such as menu recommendations and campaign targeting) are based on your stated preferences, behavioral activity, and conversation history.

We use Cloudflare Turnstile to protect our service from automated abuse. Turnstile analyzes browser behavior to verify human visitors without requiring visual puzzles. This process collects minimal data and Cloudflare does not use this data for advertising or tracking purposes. For more information, see Cloudflare's privacy policy and the Turnstile Privacy Addendum.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Changes will be reflected on this page with a new "Last Updated" date. We encourage you to review this policy periodically.