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.

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.

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.

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

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 personal information or share it for other companies’ advertising.

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.

• 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.