Privacy
The short version
Your library and your cooking journal are stored in your own iCloud account. I cannot read them. That is not a promise about restraint — it is how the app is built.
Three things are public, because the whole point of them is to be shared: the handle you choose, the book records you contribute to the catalogue, and any cover photograph you take of a book that is not yet in it.
There is no advertising, no analytics, no tracking, and nothing is sold or shared with anyone.
Who is responsible
Page & Salt is made by [FULL LEGAL NAME], an individual developer based in the United Arab Emirates, trading as Forest Ocean.
For anything in this policy, write to hello@forestocean.app.
The app has two halves, and they behave differently
This is the most important thing on the page, so it comes first.
Your library is private
The books on your shelf, whether you own or want them, your ratings, your notes, your tags, and your entire cooking journal — every cook, its date, its note, its photographs — are stored on your device and synced through your own iCloud account, using Apple's private database.
I have no access to that database. There is no administrative view of it, no export, no back door. If you use Page & Salt without ever contributing anything to the catalogue, nothing about you reaches me at all.
The catalogue is public, and permanent
The index of cookbooks and recipes is a shared resource. When you contribute to it, what you contribute becomes part of it — visible to every other reader, and lasting.
That is the trade the app is built on: the reason a book you own is already indexed is that someone else indexed it before you.
What is collected
Three things, and only these.
Your handle
You choose a handle the first time you add a book. It is the only identity the app has. It does not have to relate to your real name, and I do not ask for your name, your email address or your date of birth.
Your handle appears beside the books and recipes you index, so that contributions are credited. It is stored in the shared catalogue, which means I can see it.
Cover photographs you contribute
If you add a book the catalogue does not already hold, the app invites you to photograph its cover. That photograph is stored in the shared catalogue and shown to other readers who add the same book.
Photographs you take in your cooking journal are a different thing entirely. They stay in your private iCloud, and are never part of the catalogue.
Book details you type
The title, author, page numbers, ingredients and other details you enter when indexing a book. These become catalogue records shared with everyone.
What is not collected
No name, no email address, no phone number, no postal address. No location. No health or fitness data. No financial information. No purchase history. No contacts. No browsing or search history. No usage statistics, no crash reports, no diagnostics.
There are no advertisements, no advertising identifiers, no third-party analytics, no attribution or marketing tools, and no software development kits from other companies embedded in the app.
Nothing is ever sold, rented or shared with data brokers. Nothing is combined with data from other companies. Page & Salt does not track you, in Apple's sense of that word or in any other.
Why the three things are collected
To make the app work, and for nothing else. The handle exists so contributions can be credited. The book records and cover photographs exist so that the catalogue is useful to the next reader. There is no secondary purpose.
Looking up a book you scan
When you scan a barcode for a book that is not already in the app's cache and not in the shared catalogue, the app asks Google Books whether it knows that ISBN.
Only the ISBN is sent. Your handle does not travel with it, nor your library, nor any identifier of you or your device beyond what any internet connection reveals. Google's own privacy policy governs what Google does with the request.
If you look up a book and then decide not to add it, nothing is written anywhere — not to the catalogue, not to the cache.
Apple and iCloud
Page & Salt runs on Apple's CloudKit. Your private library sits in your own iCloud storage under your Apple Account, governed by Apple's privacy policy and terms. The shared catalogue sits in a database associated with the app.
Signing in to iCloud is what allows you to contribute. The app is given a way to tell contributors apart, but it is not given your Apple Account name or email address.
How long things are kept
Your private library lasts as long as you keep it. Deleting the app does not delete it; reinstalling restores it from your iCloud. Deleting it from within the app, or removing the app's data from your iCloud settings, removes it for good.
Catalogue records are kept indefinitely, because the catalogue is a shared reference that other readers depend on.
Deleting your account
You can delete your Page & Salt account from within the app. When you do:
- Your handle is released, and becomes available for someone else to claim.
- Your credit on every book and recipe you indexed changes to Anonymous contributor.
- The records and cover photographs you contributed remain in the catalogue.
That last point is deliberate, and worth understanding before you contribute rather than after. Removing a contributor's work would break the catalogue for everyone who relies on it — an index with holes in it is worse than no index. Your name comes off; the work stays.
If a specific record needs removing for a good reason — it is wrong, it infringes someone's rights, or a photograph should not have been shared — write to hello@forestocean.app and it will be dealt with individually.
Children
Page & Salt is rated 12+ and is not designed for or directed at children under 13. Nothing in it is built to identify a reader's age, and no information is knowingly collected from children.
Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have rights over information held about you: to ask what is held, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to object to its use, and to complain to a data protection authority.
In practice, the answer here is short, because so little is held. What is held about you is your handle and whatever you chose to contribute publicly, all of which you can see in the app. To ask a question, request a correction, or raise a concern, write to hello@forestocean.app. Requests are answered within 30 days.
The legal basis for holding the three things named above is that they are necessary to provide the service you asked for. Nothing is held on the basis of marketing consent, because there is no marketing.
This policy is governed by the laws of the United Arab Emirates. Readers in the United Kingdom and the European Union keep the rights their own law gives them, and nothing here is intended to reduce those.
Changes to this policy
If what the app collects ever changes — for example, if a future version adds crash reporting so that faults can be fixed — this page will be updated in the same release, and the date at the top will change. The App Store privacy label will change with it. New collection will never be introduced quietly in the hope that nobody rereads this page.