Privacy

Who we are

Cooking Stories is run by Humarks, Moudanion 27, 18451 Nikaia, Greece. Humarks decides how your data is used and is responsible for it (the “controller”, in GDPR terms). You can reach us at [email protected].

If you only read recipes

You can browse every public recipe without an account. We use Cloudflare Web Analytics to count visits. It doesn’t set cookies or follow you to other sites, and we only see totals, such as how many people opened a page and which country they came from.

Like any web server, ours keeps short technical logs (IP address, browser, the page requested) to keep the site running and spot abuse. We delete them within 30 days.

If you sign in

Signing in creates an account. For it we store:

• your email address, which we use to send sign-in links and nothing else
• your sessions, with the IP address and browser they were started from, so you stay signed in and can spot a session that isn’t yours
• the recipes you write, the recipes you save, and your notes
• when you last confirmed that a recipe you shared is yours to share

If you report a recipe

A report needs your name and email address. We keep them with what you wrote, and use them to handle the report and to email you about it. The author of the recipe doesn’t see them, unless a court or an authority orders us to share them.

To stop one sender flooding us with reports, we also store a scrambled form of your IP address. We can’t turn it back into the address; it only tells us when several reports come from the same place.

Who sees your recipes and notes

Your notes are private. Nobody else can read them.

Each recipe you write has its own setting. “Just me” keeps it private. “Anyone with the link” lets people you share the link with read it, but it isn’t listed on the site or in search engines. “Everyone” lists it on the site. Either way, we have a quick look at a shared recipe before anyone else can open it.

The person who runs the site can see recipes and notes in the database when fixing a problem or reviewing a shared recipe, and won’t look otherwise.

Cookies and local storage

We don’t use tracking cookies. The site sets two cookies of its own:

• a session cookie when you sign in, which keeps you signed in and expires after about a week without a visit
• a language cookie when you switch languages, which remembers your choice for a year

When you tick off ingredients, the ticks are saved in your browser only. They never reach our server.

Services we rely on

These companies handle data for us, under data processing agreements:

• Hetzner, in Germany, runs the server and the database
• Brevo, in France, sends our emails: sign-in links, and messages about reports and reviews
• Cloudflare sits in front of the site to keep it fast and protected, and provides the visit counts

Our data stays in the European Union. Cloudflare has servers around the world and may handle requests outside the EU, under the EU’s standard contractual clauses.

How long we keep things

Your account and everything in it stay until you ask us to delete them. Reports stay for as long as we need them to handle the case and any follow-up. Sign-in links expire after 10 minutes. Backups roll over within 30 days, so deleted data disappears from them too.

Your rights

You can ask for a copy of your data, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete your account and everything in it. Write to [email protected] from the email address you sign in with, and we’ll reply within 30 days.

We process your data to provide the service you signed up for, and the visit counts on our legitimate interest in knowing how the site is used. We handle reports because the EU Digital Services Act requires us to. If you think we’ve got something wrong, you can complain to the data protection authority in your country.

Cooking Stories isn’t meant for children under 16, and we don’t knowingly collect their data.

Changes

If we change how we handle your data, we’ll update this page and the date at the top. If the change is significant and you have an account, we’ll email you first.