Chef WhisperPrivacy Policy
Last updated 19 August 2026
Chef Whisper extracts recipes from cooking websites. This policy describes exactly what the service does with your data. It is written to match how the software actually behaves rather than to cover every possibility.
What we store
If you never sign in, we keep no record tied to you. Extracting a recipe, reading it, and exporting it to Dropbox or Google Drive all work without an account. We do count extractions — see what we count below — but those counts carry no identifier, so nothing links them back to you.
When you create an account, we store:
- your email address;
- your name, if your sign-in provider supplies one;
- an identifier from Google, if you sign in with Google;
- a random internal identifier, and the date the account was created.
We never store a password, because we never ask for one. Sign-in is either through Google or through a one-time link sent to your email. Those links are stored only as an irreversible hash, so the link in your inbox cannot be recovered from our database.
Recipes you save
A recipe is stored only when you press Save to My Recipes. Recipes you merely view are not saved to your account.
Recipe content is stored once per web address and shared by everyone who saves it, so the stored recipe reveals nothing about who saved it. Your account is linked to it separately.
The browser extension
The extension first asks our server to read the recipe from the page address. Only if that fails does it send us the content of the page you are viewing, and that content is used to render the recipe in the response and then discarded — it is not written to our database or cache. It reads a page only when you click the extension's icon.
What we count
To know which cooking sites work and which fail, we record one row per extraction containing: the website's domain (for example allrecipes.com, never the full page address), whether it came from the website or the browser extension, whether we had it cached, and the time.
If you are signed in, that row is linked to your account. If you are not, it carries no identifier at all — no account, no IP address, no cookie or session id — so it is a tally, not a record of you. Deleting your account unlinks your rows rather than deleting the counts.
This counting is the only measurement we do on our own servers, and no third party receives it. We use no advertising and no third-party analytics — the one exception is the performance timing described below, sent only to Sentry and only for the purpose stated there.
When something breaks
If the site hits an unexpected error, we send a report to Sentry, an error-tracking service, so we find out about faults without waiting for someone to tell us.
A report contains the page path (for example /recipes), the technical detail of the fault, and our own code. Before it is sent we remove everything after the ? in the address — which is where sign-in links and recipe addresses appear — along with cookies and anything you submitted in a form. Reports are not used to build a profile of you.
We also send Sentry brief timing for how long each step of extracting a recipe takes — fetching the page, parsing it — so we can see where a slow request comes from. This is sent for recipe extraction requests whether or not anything went wrong, but carries the same scrubbing: no page address, no recipe content, only which step took how long.
Cooking mode and your microphone
Cooking mode is off until you press Start Cooking and your browser asks for the microphone. Nothing is recorded before that, and closing cooking mode stops it.
While it is on, your browser records only the short bursts where it hears speech — silence is never uploaded. Each clip is sent to our server, held in a temporary file while it is turned into text, and deleted immediately afterwards. Recordings are never stored, never linked to your account, and are not used to train anything. The speech recognition runs on our own server; the audio is not sent to any other company.
Reading the recipe aloud works the other way round: the text of the step being read is sent to Microsoft, which returns the spoken audio. That is recipe text only — it carries no account details, and it happens only while cooking mode is open.
Other data
Your IP address is used to apply rate limits and is not stored in our database. We use a cookie to keep you signed in; it is not used for advertising or tracking.
Who else receives data
- Google — if you sign in with Google.
- Resend — delivers sign-in emails; receives your address.
- Sentry — receives an error report when something breaks, and brief step-by-step timing for recipe extraction requests, with cookies, form contents and the address bar's query removed either way.
- Dropbox / Google Drive — only when you export a recipe there.
- Microsoft — receives the recipe text read aloud in cooking mode, to turn it into speech. It never receives your microphone audio.
- Cloudflare and DigitalOcean — provide the network and servers the site runs on.
We do not sell your data, and we do not share it for advertising.
Keeping and deleting
Account data is kept until you ask us to delete it. Sign-in links expire within minutes. Extracted recipes are cached briefly to avoid re-fetching a page you are cooking from.
To delete your account and saved recipes, email [email protected]. Because recipe content is shared across everyone who saved it, deleting your account removes your account and its links, not the recipe text itself — which contains nothing identifying you.
Changes
If this policy changes materially, the date above changes with it.