Privacy Policy

If you create an account:

• Your email address, and a name if you choose to give one.
• Your password, stored only as a one-way hash. We can’t read it.
• The IP address you signed up from, kept to help us spot spam and abuse.
• Where you first came to the site from (for example a search engine, an ad, or a poster’s QR code) and the first page you landed on, so we know which ways of finding us work. See “First-visit cookie” below.
• What you do on the site: ratings, reviews, taste notes, lists, drinks you follow or want to try, matchup votes, points, streaks and badges.

If you use the caffeine tracker: each drink you log, its caffeine amount, when you had it, how much of it, and what it was for if you pick one (for example Class or Gym), plus any semester dates you enter. This is private to you: see “What other people can see.” Estimates such as how much caffeine is still in your system are worked out in your browser.

If you rate without an account: your rating, any review text, the display name you type (optional), and where you first came to the site from.

If you claim a brand page: the work email address you give us (which must be on the brand’s own website domain), your name, your role if you enter one, and when you confirmed the email. We send that address a one-time confirmation link and keep only a scrambled (hashed) form of the link. We also keep whatever you send from the brand dashboard: label facts, corrections, new flavors, notes, and any photos you upload. We use this to check that you work for the brand, to review and publish your updates, and to contact you about them.

If you mark that you serve or served: that answer and your branch (both optional), saved with that rating. We use it for our Military Favorites list and for overall figures about how service members and veterans rate drinks, which we may publish or share. Those figures don’t identify you, and your answer isn’t shown next to your name or review. To remove it, change the answer when you update your rating, delete the rating or your account, or contact us.

From every visitor:

• Your IP address, briefly, to limit how often forms can be submitted. It’s held in a short-lived counter, not tied to an account.
• Usage data collected by Google Analytics (see below).
• If you arrive from an AI assistant such as ChatGPT, we count which assistant sent the visit and which page it landed on. Nothing that identifies you.
• If an AI assistant uses our free data connector (/api/mcp), we count each call by tool name and the name of the assistant app, and we keep a scrambled (hashed) form of the caller’s IP address in a counter, deleted within about an hour, to limit request rates. We don’t see your conversation, and the connector has no accounts or sign-in. See the connector page.

Barcode scanning: when you scan a can, your camera feed is processed in your browser. Only the barcode number is sent to us, to look up the drink. No images leave your device.

Your display name (or “A drinker” if you didn’t set one), your ratings and reviews, your badges, your points on the leaderboard, and any lists you make public. Lists you mark private are visible only to you. Your email address is never shown publicly, and neither is your caffeine tracker: it isn’t on your profile or anywhere else on the site.

If a brand confirms a drink’s label facts, the drink page says the brand confirmed them and on what date. The name and email address of the person who confirmed them are never shown.

• To run your account and show your ratings, lists and badges.
• To calculate drink scores and rankings from everyone’s ratings.
• To send account emails: verifying your address and resetting your password.
• To send occasional updates about the site. Every one includes a way to opt out, and account emails aren’t affected.
• To prevent spam, abuse and fake ratings.
• To understand which pages are useful and improve the site.
• To see which ways of reaching people (search, ads, posters, emails) bring members who stick around.
• To show you your own caffeine totals and charts. We don’t use your tracker log for anything else.

• Sign-in cookie: keeps you logged in.
• Guest rating cookie: if you rate without an account, lets you claim that rating by signing up within an hour. It expires after an hour.
• Service answer cookie: if you mark that you serve or served and then create an account, carries that answer to your rating form. It expires after an hour.
• Matchup cookie: a random ID so a guest can vote in the daily matchup once. It lasts a year.
• First-visit cookie (edr_src): records where you first came from and which page you landed on. It’s set by our site, isn’t shared with anyone, and expires after 90 days. If you sign up or rate, its contents are saved with your account or rating.
• Google Analytics cookies: set by Google to measure visits.
• Advertising cookies and similar technologies: set by our advertising partner Mediavine and the advertisers it works with, to show and measure ads and, where allowed, to personalize them. See “Advertising” below.
• Browser storage: your theme setting, the bedtime and (if you enter it) body weight you set in the caffeine tracker, and a flag so an AI referral is counted only once per visit.

Affiliate links (for example to Amazon) take you to that retailer’s site, which may set its own cookies so that we’re credited for a purchase.

We use a few service providers to run the site. They handle your data only to provide their service:

• Netlify hosts the site and its database.
• Brevo sends our emails.
• Google Analytics measures visits. You can opt out with Google’s opt-out browser add-on.
• GitHub stores our encrypted database backups.
• Mediavine and its advertising partners show ads on the site. They collect information about your visit through the ad code, as described under “Advertising”.

We may also disclose information if the law requires it, to protect people’s safety, or as part of a sale or transfer of the site. We don’t sell the information you give us (your email address, ratings, lists, tracker entries and the like), and we don’t hand it to advertisers.

The site shows ads served by Mediavine and the advertisers and ad networks it works with. To show and measure ads, they may use cookies and similar technologies and may collect information such as your IP address, a device or cookie identifier, your browser and device type, the pages you view and approximate location. They may use it to choose and personalize ads, including by building a profile of your interests across other sites. We don’t give them your account details, ratings, lists or tracker data.

Those companies handle that information under their own policies. Mediavine’s privacy notices, its opt-out and its privacy request form are in its Privacy Center. To limit personalized ads you can:

• Opt out through the Digital Advertising Alliance or the Network Advertising Initiative (United States), or Your Online Choices (Europe).
• Use your browser’s settings to block or delete cookies, or a browser that blocks trackers.
• Adjust your Google ad settings.

Opting out doesn’t remove ads; it limits how well they’re matched to you. Affiliate links are separate: see “Cookies and browser storage”.

We keep account information until you delete your account. Ratings count toward a drink’s score while your account exists. Deleting your account permanently removes your ratings, reviews, lists, points, badges and caffeine tracker log, and the affected drinks’ scores are recalculated. Daily matchup votes are kept only as anonymous tallies. Deleted data can remain for a time in our encrypted backups, which we keep to recover from failures.

Brand-page claims and what was sent with them are kept while the claim is active and for as long as we need a record of where a drink’s facts came from. Ask us and we’ll delete your contact details.

• Change a rating or review by rating the drink again.
• Rename, make private, or delete your lists from the list’s own page.
• Delete any entry in your caffeine tracker or a semester you’ve set up, or reset the whole tracker, from the tracker page. Resetting deletes only your tracker data, not your account.
• Opt out of update emails from the link in any of them.
• Delete your account and everything tied to it yourself, from the Delete my account page (also linked at the bottom of your profile). It takes effect immediately and can’t be undone.
• Ask us to change your display name, remove a rating, or give you a copy of your data through the contact page. We’ll confirm the request came from your account’s email address before acting on it.

Passwords are hashed, the site is served only over HTTPS, and backups are encrypted. No system is perfectly secure, so use a password you don’t use elsewhere.

The site isn’t meant for children under 13, and we don’t knowingly collect their information. If you believe a child under 13 has created an account, tell us through the contact page and we’ll delete it.

If we change this policy, we’ll update the date at the top, and we’ll email account holders about significant changes. Questions go through the contact page. See also our Terms of Service.