Half Five — Privacy Policy
Last updated: [date]
Who we are
Half Five is published by Spark Curiosity Ltd, a company incorporated in Jersey, registered office [registered office from entity.md]. Spark Curiosity Ltd is the data controller for everything described here.
Spark Curiosity Ltd is registered as a controller with the Jersey Office of the Information Commissioner, registration number [JOIC number].
Write to us at privacy@halffive.app.
Our UK representative
Because we are established in Jersey rather than the United Kingdom and we offer Half Five to people in the UK, we have appointed a representative in the UK under Article 27 of the UK GDPR. If you are in the UK you may contact them instead of, or as well as, us:
[UK Article 27 representative — name, postal address, email to be inserted verbatim from the representative's own wording]
The short version
Half Five is a dinner app, not a health app and not an advertising business. We do not track you, we do not profile you across other services, we have no advertising identifiers, and we do not sell or share your data with anyone for their own purposes.
The most sensitive thing Half Five knows — the foods your household must avoid — never leaves your iPhone. It is stored on the device and is used on the device to keep unsafe meals off your card.
What we hold, why, and on what legal basis
On your iPhone only
These are stored in the app's own storage on your device. We cannot read them, and they are not uploaded anywhere.
| What | Why | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| The names of the people in your household, and whether each is a child | So the app can say "Isla at 5:30, Seb and Kate at 7:45" instead of "Person 1" | Article 6(1)(b) — performance of the contract you have with us |
| The foods each person avoids, including allergies and intolerances | So a meal containing them is never offered | Article 6(1)(a) consent, and Article 9(2)(a) explicit consent (see below) |
| Your sitting times and eating pattern | To work out the two sittings off one cook | Article 6(1)(b) |
| What was cooked, and the one-tap verdict on how it went | To make tomorrow's suggestion better than today's | Article 6(1)(b) |
| Your kitchen equipment, cuisine preferences, pantry, and what you said is making dinner hard | To narrow what gets suggested | Article 6(1)(b) |
On our servers
Half Five uses Supabase as its backend. Data held there sits in Supabase's eu-west-2 region (London), in project eykopqmxznqmtkzeaueq.
| What | Why | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Your email address, and your Apple user identifier if you sign in with Apple | To give you an account and let more than one person share a household | Article 6(1)(b) |
| Your household record — its name, invite code, eating pattern and sitting times — and which accounts belong to it | So the people in your house see the same dinners | Article 6(1)(b) |
| Recipes your household adds or edits, and photographs you take of dishes | To keep your own recipe book across your devices | Article 6(1)(b) |
| The days you have planned a cook for, and the sittings on each | To draw your week | Article 6(1)(b) |
We do not hold your household's allergen list, your member names, or your verdict history on our servers. Those stay on the device.
What we never collect
No location. No contacts. No advertising identifier. No analytics, telemetry or event tracking of any kind — there is no analytics SDK in the app, and no product-usage events are sent anywhere. No calorie, weight, body or fitness data: Half Five talks about food, not numbers, and there is no switch to turn that on.
Allergen data, and why we ask for explicit consent
The foods your household avoids are data concerning health under Article 9 of the UK GDPR. Article 9 forbids processing that kind of data unless a specific condition is met. The only condition available to an app like ours is Article 9(2)(a) — your explicit consent — so that is what we ask for, in plain words, before you type anything into the "anything to avoid?" screen.
Three things follow, and we mean all three:
- You can say no and keep the app. Skipping that screen leaves Half Five fully working; it just will not filter meals for you. Consent that you cannot refuse is not consent, so refusing has to cost you nothing.
- Where a child's allergies are concerned, the adult setting up the household gives that consent on the child's behalf, and by using Half Five you confirm you have parental responsibility for any child you add. This is set out in our Terms.
- You can withdraw at any time, in Settings, and withdrawal deletes the allergen data from the device there and then. It is not marked inactive, it is erased. Withdrawing does not affect the lawfulness of what we did before you withdrew.
Notifications
Half Five sends you three reminders on weekday evenings: the card at 4:30, a plate-out nudge before the early sitting, and the one-tap verdict at 8:30.
These are local notifications. Your iPhone schedules them and your iPhone shows them. They are composed on the device from what is already on the device — which is why one of them can say a child's first name — and they are not sent through Apple's push service or through us. There is no push token, and no notification content is transmitted anywhere.
You can turn them off in iOS Settings at any time.
Payment
Half Five is sold by subscription through the Apple App Store. Apple is the merchant of record: Apple takes the payment, holds the card details, issues the receipt, handles refunds, and remits proceeds to us. We never see your card number, and we do not hold your billing address.
Your subscription is governed by Apple's own terms and privacy policy as well as ours. Manage or cancel it in Settings › Apple Account › Subscriptions.
Family Sharing is enabled: if you share the subscription with your Apple family, they get access without a separate purchase and without us learning anything more about them than the app already holds.
Who else touches your data
| Who | What they do | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Hosts the database, authentication and file storage described above, as our processor | eu-west-2 (London) |
| Apple | Sells the subscription as merchant of record, and provides Sign in with Apple | Apple's own infrastructure |
| Article 27 representative | Our UK representative — a contact point for you and for the ICO | United Kingdom |
That is the complete list. No advertisers, no data brokers, no analytics vendors, no AI model providers.
Transfers
Server-held data sits in London. Spark Curiosity Ltd is in Jersey, which the UK has recognised as providing an adequate level of protection, so no additional transfer safeguard is needed for the data we hold there.
How long we keep things
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Your account and household record | For as long as your account exists, then deleted within 30 days |
| Recipes and dish photographs you added | Until you delete them, or 30 days after you delete your account |
| Planned cooks and sittings | 24 months, then automatically deleted |
| Allergen data | Until you withdraw consent or delete the app — deleted immediately in either case |
| Verdict history | 24 months on the device |
Your rights
You have the right to ask us for a copy of your data, to have it corrected, to have it erased, to restrict or object to what we do with it, to portability, and — for allergen data — to withdraw consent at any time.
You can do most of this yourself: Settings › Delete account erases your account and, if you are the only person left in your household, your household's data with it. Allergen data can be erased on its own in Settings › Allergens and consent › Withdraw and delete.
For anything else, write to privacy@halffive.app. We will answer within one month.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data you can complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk) or, in Jersey, to the Jersey Office of the Information Commissioner (jerseyoic.org).
Children
Half Five is bought and set up by an adult. Our Terms require the account holder to be 18 or over. Children's first names, and their allergies, are entered by that adult about their own household — Half Five is not directed at children and children do not have accounts.
Changes
If we change this policy we will change the date at the top and, where the change is significant, tell you in the app before it takes effect.