Privacy Policy

Last updated: November 1, 2026

Top Tried is a personal record of the things you've tried: restaurants, movies, books, games, places, and more. This page explains, in plain English, what data we collect, why we collect it, and what control you have over it.

The short version: your shelf belongs to you. We store the entries you create so you can come back to them. We don't sell your data, we don't run ads, and we don't share your data with third parties beyond the infrastructure providers we use to run the service.

Who runs Top Tried

Top Tried is an independent project operated by an individual, not a company. If you have a question or a request about your data, email privacy@toptried.com.

What we collect

Account information

When you create an account, we store:

• Your email address (used to sign you in and, rarely, to send a service email).
• Your display name, if you provide one, or the one your identity provider returns.
• A unique user ID assigned by Firebase Authentication.
• If you sign in with Google, the same fields above as returned by Google. We do not request, receive, or store any other information from your Google account.
• If you claim a public username, that username and the fact that it's linked to your account.

The entries you create

Everything you add to your shelf is stored under your account:

• Titles, subtitles, categories, tags, notes, descriptions, ingredients, and any other text you enter.
• Scores, statuses (tried or want to try), ranks, and pin selections.
• Images you upload or image URLs you paste, plus images we fetch from the source you referenced (for example, a book cover from a book database).
• The city or location you associate with a restaurant or place.

Technical data

To keep the service running securely, our infrastructure providers automatically log a small amount of technical data:

• IP address, browser type, and device information at the time of a request.
• Firebase Authentication timestamps (when you signed in and from where).
• Server logs for our backend API, which record request paths and error information but not the content of your entries beyond what's needed to serve the request.

We do not use analytics platforms, advertising trackers, or third-party cookies on Top Tried. We do not fingerprint you, and we do not build behavioral profiles.

How we use your data

We use the data described above only to:

• Sign you in and keep your session active.
• Store, display, and let you edit or delete the entries on your shelf.
• Show your public profile (only if you explicitly choose to make it public) at a URL of the form toptried.com/u/<your-username>. Public profiles show only the entries you've pinned or that fall in your top ranked items per category you've chosen to show.
• Enrich entries you create, for example, fetching a book cover from a public book database, or a restaurant photo from Google Places, based on the title and location you provide.
• Generate private recommendations for you, as described under Recommendations.
• Keep the service secure and reliable, including investigating abuse.

We do not sell your data. We do not share your data with advertisers. We do not use your data to train machine learning models.

Where your data is stored

Top Tried is built on top of a small set of infrastructure providers:

• Firebase (Google Cloud): authentication, Firestore database, and static hosting. Data is stored in Google Cloud's US regions.
• Google Cloud Run: our backend API, which enriches entries and mediates certain external calls. Same region.
• Google Places API: queried on your behalf to find a photo or address for a restaurant or place you add. We send only the title and city you provide.
• Anthropic Claude API: used to turn what you capture into a structured entry and to draft short descriptions. When you add an item, we send what you submitted: the text you typed, the link you pasted (plus the title, description and other public metadata we read from that web page), or the photo you uploaded. For description drafts we send the entry's title, category, subtitle and city. We never send your email address or other account information. Anthropic processes this data to return a result; we do not use it to train models.
• Public catalogs: Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and TVmaze (movies and TV), Google Books and Open Library (books), Apple iTunes Search (music and podcasts) and RAWG (games) are queried on your behalf with the entry's title and, where relevant, its creator and year.

Each of these providers has its own privacy policy. We share the minimum information needed to fulfill the request.

Public profiles

By default, everything on your shelf is private and visible only to you. If you choose to make your profile public in settings, a subset of your entries becomes visible to anyone who knows your public URL:

• Only the categories you explicitly choose to show.
• Within each shown category, only your top five ranked items plus any entries you've pinned to your profile.
• Everything else, including any entry marked "want to try", and any entry outside your top five that you haven't pinned, stays private.

For each public item we show only its title, subtitle, category, image, score, rank, description, creator, release year, city and source link. Your tags, private notes, dishes, and the original text, link or photo you used to add the item are never public.

You can turn your public profile off at any time from settings. When you do, no one else can view your profile URL.

Shared links

When you share a single item, anyone with the link can see that one item. Your name, username and other items are never shown. To see whether sharing is useful, our server keeps private counts for each link you create: how many times it was opened, how many people tapped or used "Add to my list", how many accounts were created from it, and whether those new accounts went on to share something. These counts are tied to the link and your account, are never shown to anyone else, and are deleted when you delete your account. If you sign up after opening someone's link, we record which link brought you, never anything about your list.

Recommendations

The For you tab suggests things you might love. Here is exactly how it works:

• Personal recommendations. Our server builds a short taste summary from your own entries: the titles, creators, ranks and scores of what you've tried, items you rated low, things you've marked "Not for me", and your area (your profile location, or the most common city among your restaurants). That summary is sent to the Anthropic Claude API to propose ideas. It never includes your name, email, username, notes, tags, or photos. Each idea is then checked against the public catalogs listed above (and Google Places for restaurants near your area) so every recommendation is a real thing.
• Where it's kept. Your recommendations and your "Want to try" / "Tried it" / "Not for me" feedback are stored privately in your account. Only you can read them, and only our server can write them. They're refreshed at most about once a day, or when you tap refresh. They're included in your data download and erased when you delete your account.
• Anonymous "people like you" signals (on by default, opt out any time). To suggest things that people with similar taste love, our server periodically counts which items are loved together across users (for example, "people who love A also love B"). These counts are stored with no user identifiers, cannot be read by any user, and a pair of items is only used once at least 5 different people share it, so no one's list can be reconstructed from them. Only items you clearly loved (high score or near the top of a list) are counted. You can turn this off in Account → Privacy & data → Help improve recommendations for everyone; from the next count onward, your items are excluded.

Recommendations never make anything public, and other people never see your recommendations or your feedback.

Cookies and local storage

Top Tried uses cookies and browser local storage strictly to sign you in and remember your preferences (such as your last used view). We do not use tracking cookies. Signing out clears the session.

Your rights and controls

You control your data. At any time you can:

• Edit or delete any entry on your shelf from within the app.
• Change your public profile visibility or choose which categories are shown.
• Change your password or reset it via email.
• Delete your account by emailing privacy@toptried.com. We will delete your account and all associated entries within 30 days, and confirm when it's done.
• Request a copy of your data by emailing the same address. We'll send you a JSON export.

Children

Top Tried is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13. If you believe a child has created an account, email privacy@toptried.com and we will delete the account.

Data retention

We keep your data for as long as your account exists. If you delete your account, we delete your entries within 30 days. Server logs are kept for a short period (typically 30 days) for operational and security purposes and then rotated out.

Changes to this policy

If we make a material change to this policy, we'll update the "last updated" date at the top and, if the change is significant, we'll notify signed-in users the next time they open the app.

Contact

Questions about this policy or your data: privacy@toptried.com.