Privacy

What we collect, and why

If you do not sign in: we do not collect personal information about you directly, but Google Tag Manager runs on the site and measures your visit — pages viewed, roughly where in the world you are, and what kind of device you used. Our hosting provider also keeps ordinary server logs for security and reliability, as every web host does.

If you create an account, we collect:

• Your email address. This is how you sign in — we send a link to it rather than asking you to keep a password. We use it to sign you in and, if we ever need to, to contact you about your account. Your email address is shown on no page, to anyone.
• A password, only if you choose to set one instead of using sign-in links. It is stored hashed; we cannot read it.
• Your profile, if you fill it in: display name, biography, website link and location. All optional.

If you sign in with Google, Google tells us your email address, name and profile picture. We ask for nothing else. Google will know you signed in here; what they do with that is covered by their own privacy policy, not ours. Signing in with an email link avoids this entirely.

If you contribute a recipe or an edit, we store what you wrote along with a record that you wrote it. That record is what makes a wiki’s history meaningful.

What is public

Your name, display name, biography, website, location, role, join date and edit counts appear on your public profile and on the contributors page. Anyone can see them, including search engines, and they may be copied or archived by others beyond our control. Only fill in what you are content to publish. Your email address is not among them.

Your public name is generated rather than chosen — a word and an animal, like SneakyOtter. You did not supply it and it says nothing about you. You can draw a new one whenever you like.

Your edits are public and attributed to you in each recipe’s history. That is the point of a wiki: readers can see how a recipe reached its current state, and who changed it.

Cookies

Three kinds:

• The one that keeps you signed in. Set when you sign in, refreshed while you browse, cleared when you sign out. The site cannot keep you signed in without it, so there is nothing to decline.
• Measurement cookies, set by Google Analytics (loaded through Google Tag Manager). These are not essential — the site works identically without them — and they share your visit with Google. They are set only if you accept. Until you answer, and forever if you refuse, Google is told to store nothing: the container still loads but runs in a mode where it writes no cookies and identifies nobody.
• Advertising cookies, set by Google AdSense. These pay for the site. They are not essential either, and they are what makes an ad personalised rather than generic. They are set only if you agree. Refuse and you still see advertising — it is simply chosen without using anything about you, which earns less and is your decision to make, not ours.

Google Analytics tells us which pages are read and roughly where in the world readers are. Google may use that data in the ways set out in how Google uses information from sites that use its services.

To change your mind: change or withdraw your answer. That clears your answer and switches measurement off immediately; the banner asks again on your next visit.

To opt out everywhere, not just here: install Google’s official opt-out add-on, which stops Analytics on every site you visit, not just this one. Any content blocker or your browser’s tracking protection does the same job. Nothing on this site breaks either way — the recipes, search and your account all work identically.

Who else handles your information

• Our database and sign-in provider stores this information on our instructions and cannot use it for their own purposes.
• Our hosting provider serves the site and keeps standard server logs.
• Cloudflare sits in front of the site as a delivery and security layer, so every request you make passes through it — including your IP address, the page you asked for, and what browser you are using. It uses those to filter attacks and to serve pages from a location near you. It is named here rather than described vaguely because it sees every visit, whether or not you have an account and whether or not you agree to anything else on this page.
• Google, in three ways: Google Tag Manager measures how the site is used on every page, Google AdSense sells and serves the advertising, and Google also handles sign-in if you choose a Google account rather than an email link. What Google does with what it learns is covered by their privacy policy, not ours.

We do not sell your information, and we do not hand your account details, your email address or anything you have written to advertisers or data brokers. Advertising on this site is served by Google, which — if you agree to it — uses cookies in your browser to choose what to show you.

Where it is stored: the United States, in Oregon. If you are outside the United States, your information is processed there.

Keeping your information

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

Measurement data is kept for 14 months, then deleted by Google automatically. There is no legal number to copy here — the rule is that data may be kept no longer than the purpose needs, and the period has to be stated rather than left open. Fourteen months is a year plus a margin, which is what it takes to compare a month against the same month last year; it is also the longest Google Analytics allows, and comfortably inside the 25 months European guidance treats as the ceiling for audience measurement.

Your answer to the cookie question expires after 13 months, and we ask again. Consent that is stored forever stops being a decision and becomes something that happened to you once; 13 months is the interval European regulators use.

If you delete your account, we delete your account, your email address and your profile. Recipes and edits you made stay on the wiki, with your name replaced by an anonymous marker. The edit survives; you do not.

We keep the edits for two reasons. A page history with holes in it cannot be checked, and every reader relies on being able to see how a recipe reached its current state. And contributions are published under a licence that cannot be withdrawn — other people have already built on them. The terms say the same thing.

One standard, wherever you are

Two places set the bar, and they set it differently. The UK and the EU require opt-in: nothing non-essential may be set until you agree. California requires that a Global Privacy Control signal — a setting in some browsers and extensions that tells every site not to sell or share your information — be honoured as a binding request, with nobody asking you anything.

We apply the stricter half of each to everybody. You are asked first wherever you are reading from, and if your browser sends the signal we honour it — including over an acceptance recorded here, because a deliberate browser setting is a clearer statement than a banner click from months ago. Deciding how much privacy someone gets by looking up where they live is a poor way to run a website.

How we ask, and how to change your mind

Who asks you does depend on where you are reading from, and that is not a preference of ours — Google requires a certified consent platform for advertising in some countries, and a banner we wrote ourselves does not qualify however carefully it is built. What is being asked, and what happens until you answer, is the same everywhere.

• In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, Google’s own consent platform asks, and offers three answers: Consent, Do not consent, and Manage options if you would rather decide purpose by purpose. Our banner stands aside there so you are not asked twice.
• Everywhere else, our own banner asks, with the same two answers it always had.
• If your browser sends Global Privacy Control, neither appears. You have already answered, and we take that as the answer.

Either way the answer is remembered in your browser, and until you give one, everything that can be refused is refused. You can change it whenever you like on the cookies page, which opens whichever of the two applies to you.

Your rights

You can ask us to:

• show you what we hold about you;
• correct anything wrong — most of it you can edit yourself in profile settings;
• delete your account — you can do this yourself in profile settings, immediately, without asking us;
• send you a copy of your contributions;
• stop using your information in a particular way.

Email [email protected] and we will respond within one month. If you are in the UK or the EU and think we have handled your information badly, you can also complain to your national data protection authority.

Children

RecipeWiki is not aimed at children, and we do not knowingly create accounts for anyone under 13. If you believe a child has created an account, email us and we will remove it.

Changes

If we change how we handle your information, we will update this page and say what changed. Last updated 18 August 2026: measurement now asks first. Nothing is stored until you accept, refusing is one click, and the answer can be changed at any time from this page. Before this, the page said you could refuse and the site gave you no way to — that sentence was wrong for as long as it stood, and this is the fix rather than a rewording of it.

Yarkii LLC · [email protected] · Back to the wiki