Privacy policy

Who we are

Cask & Note is a whiskey tasting journal operated by Nicholas Horton, an individual based in the State of Maryland, United States ("we", "us"). This policy explains what the app collects, where it goes, and what you can do about it. It is written to be read, not to be survived.

Questions or requests about your data? Email [email protected]. You can also use Profile → Feedback in the app.

What you give us

Your account: a name, an email address, and either a password or a Sign in with Apple or Google identifier. That is what identifies your journal as yours.

Your pours: the whiskeys you log - distillery, expression, style, region, proof, age, mash bill, batch and barrel numbers, how it was served, your score out of ten, the flavor notes you tag on the nose, palate and finish, and anything you write down.

Your sessions: when you logged a pour, and optionally where - Home, Bar, Distillery or Elsewhere, a place name, and a map pin if you drop one.

Your Bunker: the bottles you own or have owned, their fill levels, when you opened and finished them, where they sit on your shelves, what you paid, and the notes and photos you attach.

Your hunt list: bottles you are looking for, the price you would pay, and where you have seen them.

Your photos: the label, bottle and session photos you take or choose.

Your conversations with Stillman: everything you type to the in-app guide and everything it says back, kept so you can reopen a conversation.

Your feedback: anything you send through the in-app contact, feedback and bug-report forms, including a bug report you choose to attach a chat transcript to.

What we collect with your permission

Location: only if you grant it, and only while you are using the app, to attach a place to a session you are logging. The app never collects location in the background, and you can revoke the permission at any time in your device settings.

Camera and photo library: only if you grant it, and only to take or choose the photos you attach to pours, sessions and bottles, or to scan a label.

AI sharing: before the app sends anything to an AI provider - a message to Stillman, a label photo to be read, or context from your journal - it asks you first. Your answer is saved for your account on that device. You can decline and keep using the journal normally, or turn off new AI requests later in Profile → Account settings. Turning it off does not recall what was already sent; write to us if you want a deletion request passed on.

Advertising measurement

On iPhone, Cask & Note asks whether you allow it to track activity for advertising measurement. If you allow it, Meta may receive an advertising identifier together with app-install and app-launch events, used only to measure and improve our own ads for Cask & Note. If you decline, advertiser-identifier collection stays off. Apple and participating ad networks may still give aggregate, non-identifying attribution that does not identify you to us.

What leaves your device, and who gets it

Supabase hosts the database, the sign-in system and the photo storage behind this app. Your account, your pours, your sessions, your Bunker, your hunt list, your chat history and your photos are all stored there, and every row is locked to your own account so that no other user can read it.

Your login is shared with our other apps, and that is the part worth reading twice. Cask & Note does not have a Supabase project to itself: it shares one with the other apps we build. Inside that project, your identity - your email address, your name, and any Apple or Google sign-in you linked - sits in a shared area that all of those apps use, while everything about whiskey sits in an area only this app uses. The practical upshot is that if you ever install another of our apps, you can sign in with this same account instead of making a second one.

Sharing a login is not the same as sharing your journal. Each app in the family keeps its own data in its own area, and Cask & Note's screens only ever read Cask & Note's. Joining an app is its own deliberate step, so being signed in does not enrol you in an app you have never opened. Pro and the AI usage allowance are counted per app as well: Pro here does not unlock Pro anywhere else, and using up your Stillman messages here does not use up anything elsewhere.

Anthropic provides Stillman, the AI guide. When you ask Stillman something, the text of your conversation and relevant context from your journal - pours you have scored and your notes on them, the bottles in your Bunker, and your hunt list - are sent to Anthropic's API to produce the answer. Under Anthropic's commercial terms this data is not used to train their models.

Google Gemini reads label photos. When you scan a bottle label, the photo you chose is uploaded to Google's Gemini API along with the instruction to pull the printed details off it - distillery, expression, style, proof, age statement, mash bill, batch and barrel numbers. Your photo of a label leaves your phone and is processed by a Google vision model. That is the plainest way we know to say it. Scan requests do not include your journal, your Bunker or your chat history, and the result always lands in a review screen for you to correct before anything is saved.

Web search (Pro only). When you ask Stillman about a specific bottle or release, it may search the web. Anthropic runs that search for us: a short query derived from your question goes to its search provider, and public pages are read to build the answer. Your journal, your photos and your account details are not part of the query, and the search provider does not learn who you are. Answers that used a search show the pages they relied on.

RevenueCat manages subscriptions. It receives an app account identifier and your store purchase history - product, transaction, renewal and expiry - so the app knows whether Pro is active and can restore a purchase on a new phone. Apple or Google (whichever store you purchased through) handles the payment itself; Cask & Note never sees your card details.

Apple and Google handle sign-in when you use Sign in with Apple or Sign in with Google. They tell us that the sign-in succeeded and give us an identifier and, unless you hide it, an email address. They do not receive your journal. If you use Apple's Hide My Email, we only ever see the relay address.

Expo delivers app updates. An update check sends the technical details needed to pick a compatible build, plus error information used to spot a bad release. Update requests do not include your journal, your photos or your messages.

Our website host, Cloudflare Pages, serves the marketing site at caskandnote.com.

Meta measures the ads that promote Cask & Note. Its SDK receives app-install and app-launch events plus technical request information used for attribution and campaign reporting. Cask & Note does not send Meta your name, email address, pours, photos, your Bunker, your hunt list, your location, your conversations with Stillman, or your subscription history through this integration. We do not sell your data or show third-party ads.

Improving the bottle catalog (anonymous)

Cask & Note ships with a catalog of distilleries and expressions so autocomplete can find what you are drinking. It will never be complete - new single barrels and store picks appear every week - so when you type a distillery or expression name that the catalog does not recognise, we log that text so we can add it in the next catalog update.

What is logged: the unmatched distillery string, the unmatched expression string, and a count of how often it has come up. What is not logged: your user id, your account, your device, your score, your notes, your photos, or anything else from your journal. These rows are not linked to you and cannot be traced back to you, which is the whole point - the app learns that "Smoke Wagon Uncut Unfiltered" is a real bottle without learning that you drank one.

If you would rather your typed bottle names never contributed to this, email us and we will turn it off for your account.

How we use all of this

To run the app: storing and syncing your journal and Bunker, drawing your stats and achievements, and producing Stillman's answers.

To keep the service affordable: per-account counters limit how often the AI features can be called, which stops one account running up a bill for everyone.

To fix what breaks: crash reports and the bug reports you send.

We do not sell your data. We do not show ads in Cask & Note, not on the free tier, not ever. We use the advertising measurement described above only to measure and improve our own ads for Cask & Note, and we do not build an advertising profile of you.

Keeping it, and deleting it

We keep your data for as long as your account exists.

You can delete your account in Profile → Account settings → Delete account. That removes everything this app holds about you: your pours, your sessions, your Bunker bottles and their history, your hunt list, your achievements, your conversations with Stillman, your feedback, every photo you uploaded, this app's record of your Pro status and your AI usage, and your membership of Cask & Note itself. It is a real deletion, not a flag on a row, and it cannot be undone.

Because the login is shared, deleting here does not always delete the login. If Cask & Note is the only app of ours you use, the sign-in goes too - the email address, the password and any linked Apple or Google sign-in - and nothing of you is left with us. If you also use another of our apps, the login has to survive so that app keeps working, and it is deleted when you leave the last one. Either way, the whiskey is gone the moment you confirm here.

Two honest caveats. First, the anonymous unmatched-bottle-name rows described above are not linked to you, so there is nothing in them to find and delete. Second, our processors keep their own backups and transaction records on their own schedules; we ask them to delete and they do, but a backup snapshot taken before you left may exist for a while. Write to us if you want us to chase a specific one.

Deleting your account does not cancel a subscription. Cancel that separately in your Apple Account or Google Play subscription settings.

No longer have the app installed? See Delete your account for how to ask by email instead.

Age

Cask & Note is about whiskey. It is rated 18+ for alcohol references, it asks whether you are of legal drinking age before you can use it, and it is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect anything from anyone under 18, or from anyone below the legal drinking age where they live, which is higher than 18 in some places. If you believe a child has given us information, email us and we will delete it.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will update the date at the top and tell you in the app before the change takes effect. Continued use is not how we will get your permission for a genuinely new use of your journal; we will ask separately for that.