MealCrew
MealCrew is a family meal-planning service. This policy explains the information MealCrew uses to operate the service and how that information is handled.
Information you provide
MealCrew may store account information such as your display name, username, email address, profile photo, family membership and notification preferences. When you use MealCrew, you may also provide family meal plans, recipes, ingredients, pantry items, shopping-list information, meal requests, ratings, favorites, notes, uploaded food/family/profile images and feedback messages.
Food allergies and dietary preferences
You can choose to tell MealCrew about food allergies and dietary preferences, for yourself in My Account and for your whole household in Family settings. Providing them is optional. MealCrew stores food allergies with your account or household and uses them to keep meals with a declared or detected conflict out of suggestions and meal picking for the people they apply to. Dietary preferences, such as vegetarian, kosher or low carb, are eating choices rather than medical information; MealCrew stores them the same way and uses them only as an optional filter. This information is used to provide these MealCrew features and for nothing else. Because meals are planned for the family together, allergies and preferences you provide are also applied when other members of your household plan meals that include you.
MealCrew is a meal-planning tool, not a medical or food-safety service. Allergen information on recipes comes from recipe authors and from automatic ingredient matching, can be incomplete or wrong, and is never a guarantee that a meal is safe for someone with an allergy. Always check ingredients yourself.
Account email and communications
Email addresses are used for account verification, password recovery, family invitations, requested notifications and other transactional MealCrew messages. MealCrew does not require you to opt into advertising email in order to use the service.
Family sharing
MealCrew is designed around household accounts. Information intentionally added to a family workspace can be visible to other members of that family according to their permissions. Connected families may see only the recipes or meal-plan information that MealCrew specifically makes shareable; private household/account information is not intentionally exposed through those sharing features.
Connected calendars (Google and Apple)
Connecting an outside calendar is optional. If you connect one, MealCrew uses it for one purpose: to show the events from the calendars you choose inside MealCrew, next to your meal plan and Family Schedule. Calendar information is not used for advertising, is not sold, and is not used for MealCrew's usage statistics.
What MealCrew receives. For a connected account or device MealCrew stores the names of its calendars and, only for the calendars you turn on, each event's title, location, description or notes, start and end, whether it is an all-day event, its time zone, the calendar service's own identifiers for the event and for a repeating series, and when it was last changed. Imports cover roughly the past 30 days and the next 365 days. MealCrew does not import guest or attendee lists, video-meeting details, attachments or alarms.
Google Calendar. You authorize MealCrew through Google with read-only calendar permissions. MealCrew stores the email address of the Google account you connected (to label the connection) and an encrypted authorization token that lets MealCrew's server keep the calendars you turned on up to date, about every five minutes. MealCrew cannot add, change or delete anything in your Google Calendar. MealCrew's use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements.
Apple Calendar (iPhone and iPad app). Apple Calendar access uses the calendar permission on your device. MealCrew asks for full calendar access because that is the only permission that lets an app read events; MealCrew only reads, and never adds, changes or deletes anything in your calendars. MealCrew never receives or stores your Apple ID, your iCloud password or any Apple account credential. When you connect, the app sends MealCrew the names of the calendars on that device; events are sent only from the calendars you turn on. MealCrew's server cannot reach your Apple calendars by itself, so they are refreshed when MealCrew is opened on that iPhone or iPad. To tell which device a connection belongs to, the app creates a random identifier for that installation and reports whether the device is an iPhone or an iPad. One device at a time can be the source of your Apple calendars. An Apple calendar that has not been refreshed for 30 days is hidden in MealCrew until that device refreshes it.
Who can see imported events. Every calendar starts private to you. For each calendar you choose Just me, Entire family, or you and one family member you select. Imported events stay read-only outside-calendar information: they do not become MealCrew Family Schedule events, are not included in MealCrew's outgoing calendar feed, do not generate MealCrew reminders, and are not shown to connected families.
Removing calendar information. Turning a calendar off removes its imported events from MealCrew. Disconnect and remove imports on the Connected Calendars page removes that connection's calendars and imported events right away; for Google it also deletes the stored authorization token and asks Google to revoke it, and you can remove MealCrew's access yourself at any time in your Google Account's third-party access settings. For Apple, you can also turn off Calendars for MealCrew in the Settings app under Privacy & Security; the next time MealCrew is opened on that device, the events imported from it are removed. Leaving a family or deleting your account removes your calendar connections and their imported events. Copies can remain in disaster-recovery backups until those backups rotate out, as described under Account deletion.
Notifications and app installations
If you allow notifications in the MealCrew Android or iPhone/iPad app, MealCrew stores the push-notification token that Google or Apple issues for that app installation, linked to your account, so notifications you asked for can be delivered. Notifications are delivered through Apple's and Google's push services. You choose which notifications you receive in My Account, and you can turn notifications off entirely in your device settings.
Usage and diagnostic information
MealCrew records limited service-usage information used to understand adoption, activity, feature use, performance and troubleshooting. This can include page activity, account activity dates, browser/device information submitted with feedback, and privacy-conscious visitor identifiers. MealCrew does not need to read the contents of your private family data to count ordinary site activity, and visits to the Connected Calendars pages are not recorded in those statistics.
Cookies and local device storage
MealCrew uses browser cookies/session data to keep you signed in, protect forms and operate the service. The installed/web-app version may also cache static app files for offline/error handling. Unsaved drafts on selected forms may be stored temporarily in your current browser/app session. Passwords, uploaded files and security tokens are excluded from that draft-recovery storage.
Photos and uploaded files
Photos you choose to upload are stored so MealCrew can display them in the features where you added them. Camera/photo access is requested through your browser or device only when you choose a feature that needs it.
Third-party processing
MealCrew may rely on service providers or software components needed to deliver features such as email delivery, image/text processing, hosting, networking or app-store distribution. Examples: if you choose to sign in with Google, Google confirms your identity to MealCrew; when you type a location for a Family Schedule event, place suggestions come from Google Maps; push notifications travel through Apple's and Google's push services; and connected calendars work as described above. MealCrew does not sell your personal information and does not currently operate an advertising network or behavioral-advertising program.
Account deletion
You can initiate permanent account deletion from My Account → Delete My Account. You can also review the public deletion instructions at Delete Account & Data, including if you no longer have the app installed. A regular family member can delete their personal account without deleting the rest of the family's shared data. A family data owner must transfer family ownership before deleting themselves when other members remain. If the account is the only member of its family, deleting the account also deletes the active family workspace and its associated shared MealCrew data.
For disaster recovery, MealCrew automatically creates a complete snapshot (the database together with uploaded photo/file contents) about once a day and keeps the newest 7. An administrator can also create database-only backups; the newest 30 of those are kept. MealCrew's hosting provider additionally keeps scheduled backups of the storage volume. Deleted information, including imported calendar events, can therefore remain temporarily in those recovery copies until they rotate out. Complete snapshots are intended to restore the service as a whole, not to resurrect an individual deleted account.
Disaster-recovery backups are not intended as an active copy of a deleted account and are not ordinarily used to restore one deleted user's account.
Security
MealCrew uses HTTPS for its public service, hashed passwords, account-verification/reset tokens, CSRF protections and family/admin permission checks. No internet service can promise absolute security, so MealCrew's security and backup practices are reviewed as the service grows.
Children and family accounts
MealCrew is designed for household meal planning, but it is not specifically directed to children as an independent online service. Family administrators are responsible for deciding who should have access to their household workspace.
Changes to this policy
This policy may be updated as MealCrew adds features, changes infrastructure or prepares for app-store distribution. The effective date above will be updated when the policy materially changes.
Contact
Privacy or account questions can be sent to mealcrewapp@gmail.com. Signed-in users can also use MealCrew's Contact & Feedback page.