Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

This policy describes how AllergySearch (search-allergy.com, the "Site") handles user information.

2. Information we collect

The Site may collect: (1) registration details such as email addresses when business owners create an account; (2) content submitted through the contact form; and (3) access logs such as pages viewed and browser type. Your selected allergens and the jurisdictions and allergen categories you choose to show are kept only in your browser's local storage on your own device, and the Site does not collect them (see section 4). Your search filter settings are also kept on your device, but when you next open search they are put back into the URL to run it, so they become part of the URL like the other search conditions described next. The keywords, prefecture, filter settings, sort order and page number of a search become part of the page URL and are included in access logs and sent to the services listed in section 5. Your selected allergens and your location are never placed in the URL (when you search near your location, the URL carries only the distance sort order, not the position) or sent to those services.

The contact form does not require an account or a name. Your message, the page you sent it from, and the email address if you choose to give one are stored so that we can reply and keep a record of what was reported. Giving an address is optional; without one we have no way to answer. To limit abuse of the form we also store a one-way hash of your IP address — the address itself is not stored, and the hash is not used to identify you or linked to anything else.

3. How we use information

Collected information is used to provide and improve the service, respond to inquiries, and prevent abuse. Settings kept on your device (see section 4) are used only so that the same conditions apply on that device.

4. Cookies and browser storage

The Site keeps your selected allergens, the jurisdictions and allergen categories you show, and your search conditions (filter settings) only in your browser's local storage, so that your next visit works the same way. These are settings you chose yourself for the service you are using, and they are stored without a consent screen. They expire 180 days after you last used the site, and you can delete all of them at any time from “Data kept on this device” in the footer. Deselecting every allergen removes the selection.

What you selected — which allergens, and how many — is used only on your device and is never sent to our server (for settings an older version of the Site kept in a cookie, see the end of this paragraph). Both what restaurant and chain pages show for it and the line in search results saying whether each listing's documents can answer for it are worked out on your device. The conditions a search sends to our server (such as keywords, prefecture, filter settings, sort order, page number, display language and country, and your position when you search near your location) do not include the selected items, and your selection changes neither which listings are shown nor their order. Your selection is never added to search URLs or shareable links. For analytics we may send whether any allergens are selected and whether the selection changed while a page was open, neither of which includes which allergens or how many were selected. To make pages respond faster we may also send how long the page took to respond to an interaction, the name of the part of the page you interacted with (for example, the allergen selector, without which allergens or how many were selected), the kind of interaction (tap or key press) and the kind of script that was delaying the page (such as advertising, analytics or a browser extension). If an older version of the Site saved your selection or other settings in a cookie, it is moved into your device's storage and the cookie is deleted the next time that setting is read. If your browser does not let the Site write to that storage, the cookie stays and may keep being sent with requests to the Site; your browser then keeps using those settings for display, but the Site's server does not read the cookie; deleting “Data kept on this device” in the footer removes it as well.

Your country and language selection are stored in cookies. They hold nothing beyond what the URL of the page you are viewing already shows, and are treated as necessary for routing you to the right version of the site.

We also keep, for each listing where you confirmed the notice shown before allergen information is displayed, a record that you did so (the listing's number, the version of the notice you confirmed and an expiry date). Listings we transcribed from published material and manage ourselves, and which show only the standard notice with nothing specific to the listing, share one record instead (the version of the notice and an expiry date, with no listing number): confirming on one of them opens the others that show the same notice. It never opens a listing managed by its operator or one with its own note; those are confirmed one by one. These records are kept only in your browser's local storage, are not sent to our server and do not include your selected allergens. They expire 180 days after you confirmed, the oldest per-listing records are removed beyond 50 listings, and you can delete all of them from “Data kept on this device” in the footer.

You can also clear or block cookies and site data in your browser, but some features may stop working.

5. Advertising and analytics

The Site uses Google AdSense, a third-party advertising service, Google Analytics 4, and Vercel Web Analytics, provided by the company that hosts the Site. Your browser sends these services the URL of the page you are viewing and of the previous page, your browser type, screen size and IP address (used to estimate your approximate location; Google Analytics does not store it). Google Analytics 4 uses cookies to analyze usage. Vercel Web Analytics uses no cookies and does not identify individuals.

Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to this website or other websites. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to users based on their visits to this site and/or other sites on the Internet. When the Site requests ads, it specifies non-personalized ads only. Non-personalized ads are not based on your past visits; they are chosen from contextual information such as the content of the page you are viewing and your approximate location estimated from where you are now. Google still uses cookies or similar identifiers for non-personalized ads, to limit how often an ad is shown and for aggregated ad reporting.

You may opt out of personalized advertising by visiting Google's Ads Settings (https://adssettings.google.com). For details on third-party use of cookies, see Google's policies and terms.

6. Disclosure to third parties

Except where required by law, the Site does not provide personal information to third parties without your consent. One exception is stated on the form itself: a report or inquiry about a listing that a business owner manages is also sent to that owner, together with your reply address if you provided one, whoever entered the listing's content. The owner receives only what was sent after they began managing the listing. In addition, to the extent necessary to provide the service, we entrust processing to the following external services. Each handles data only on our instructions, not for its own purposes.

(1) Supabase (United States) — account authentication and the database holding listing and registration data. The database is located in the Amazon Web Services Tokyo region (ap-northeast-1). (2) Vercel (United States) — serving and running the site. (3) Resend (United States) — mail the Site sends (acknowledgements of enquiries, account-related notices). (4) Cloudflare (United States) — DNS. (5) Google (United States) — the mailbox for mail addressed to the Site, and sending our replies to enquiries. (6) Amazon Web Services (United States) — the Site's scheduled jobs, run in the Tokyo region; one of them checks for allergen-error reports every hour. (7) Anthropic (United States) — AI used to make a first sorting of allergen-error reports, identifying which dish a report is about. It receives only the text of the report, its reference number and time, the page it was sent from and the listing it concerns — never your email address. (8) GitHub (United States) — where the Site's code and listing data are kept, including the proposals to stop showing a dish that follow an allergen-error report (with a summary of the report in our own words). For Google's role in advertising and analytics, see section 5.

The Supabase database is located in Japan, but all of the companies above are established in the United States, and information may be handled from outside Japan in the course of their operation and maintenance.

Maps are drawn with tiles from the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan (OpenStreetMap outside Japan), and the "find on the map from the address" feature in the operator console uses the same authority's address search. These requests go directly from your browser to those services, so your IP address, and for the address search the address you typed, reach them. No cookies are set.

7. Management, access, correction, and deletion

The Site manages collected information appropriately and works to prevent leaks. Specifically:

(1) The Site is run by one person, and only that person — and the processing the operator has set up with the services named above — has access to the information collected. (2) Traffic between your browser and the Site, and between the Site and the external services named above, is encrypted with TLS. (3) The database has row-level access control enabled (PostgreSQL Row Level Security), so each user can read and write only the data belonging to them. (4) Account passwords are held by the authentication service; the Site never handles them in their original form. (5) Administrative credentials are not part of the published source code and are held as configuration of the runtime environment. (6) We limit what is collected in the first place — display settings are kept on your own device wherever possible, and the contact form stores no IP address, only a value it cannot be recovered from (see section 2). (7) The external services the handling is entrusted to, and the countries they are established in, are listed in section 6.

To request access to, correction of, or deletion of your registered information, please contact us via the contact form.

8. Changes to this policy

This policy may be revised as necessary. The revised policy takes effect when posted on this page.

9. Contact

For questions about this policy, please use the contact form in the footer, or write to contact@search-allergy.com.