Privacy Policy

1. About this policy

Hey Plately is a registered business name of Zachary Scott Loftus (ABN 20 376 583 786), a sole trader based in Queensland, Australia. In this policy, "Plately", "we", "us" and "our" mean that business.

We are committed to protecting the privacy of our users in accordance with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs). This Privacy Policy explains what personal information we collect, how we use it, and your rights as a user.

By using the Plately platform at heyplately.com.au, you agree to the practices described in this policy.

2. Information we collect

We collect the information you give us when you create an account and use Plately:

• Account information: your name, email address and password. Passwords are stored hashed and never in a readable form.
• Food preferences: dietary requirements, allergies and intolerances, cuisine preferences, foods you dislike, cooking skill, how much time you have to cook, your shopping day and your weekly budget.
• Health information: if you choose to provide it, your weight, height, age and sex, your activity level, your calorie and protein targets, your weight goal and target date, and each weigh-in you log. Pregnancy, if you select it as a dietary requirement, is treated as health information.
• Progress photos: photos you choose to attach to a weigh-in. They are stored privately, shown only to you, and deleted when you delete them or your account.
• Meal logs: meals you log by photo, barcode or description, including the description and calorie estimate produced from a photo, and when it was logged. A meal photo is used to produce the estimate and is not kept.
• Household and family profiles: if you use family profiles, the name, relationship, age, allergies, dietary requirements, dislikes and notes you enter for each person in your household, including children.
• Partner linking: if you link with a partner, the name and food preferences each of you has entered, your plan dates, and the dinners you have agreed to share, so that both plans and a combined shopping list can be built.
• Usage data: your meal plans, ratings, saved recipes, weekly check-in answers, and the days you open the app.

We also automatically collect technical information when you use Plately, including your IP address, browser or device type, and pages viewed, to keep the service secure and to understand how it is used.

3. How we use your information

We use the information we collect to:

• Generate personalised meal plans tailored to your household's preferences, dietary needs and nutritional goals
• Produce shopping lists based on your meal plans
• Generate meal plans, shopping lists and calorie estimates using an artificial intelligence model provided by Anthropic (see section 4). Your preferences, health information, family profiles, meal photos and the meal descriptions you type are sent to that model for this purpose.
• Send you transactional and service-related emails (such as account confirmation, meal plan notifications and reminders)
• Improve and develop the Plately product based on how users interact with it
• Respond to your support enquiries and communications
• Comply with our legal obligations

We will not use your personal information for purposes beyond those described here without first obtaining your consent.

4. Third-party services

To deliver the Plately service, we share your information with the following third-party providers. Each provider handles your data in accordance with their own privacy policies.

• Vercel (vercel.com): hosting and infrastructure, and storage of progress photos. Vercel also provides the privacy-preserving analytics we use to see how the site is used; it does not use cookies or identify you.
• Neon (neon.tech): our database, hosted in Sydney, Australia.
• Anthropic (anthropic.com): the artificial intelligence model that generates your meal plans and shopping lists and estimates calories from your meal photos and descriptions. Anthropic processes this data in the United States.
• Brevo (brevo.com): our email provider, for account and reminder emails. Brevo processes data in the European Union.
• Unsplash (unsplash.com): recipe photos are loaded from Unsplash's image service, which receives your device's IP address when a photo is displayed.
• Open Food Facts and UPCitemdb: when you scan a barcode, the barcode is looked up with these services directly from your device.
• Sentry (sentry.io): crash reporting in the mobile app, which receives technical details of an error and the device it occurred on.

Some of these providers are outside Australia. By using Plately you consent to your information being disclosed to them for the purposes above.

We do not sell, rent or trade your personal information to any third party for marketing purposes.

5. Data security

We take reasonable steps to protect your personal information from misuse, interference, loss, and unauthorised access, modification or disclosure. This includes:

• Encrypted data transmission using HTTPS/TLS
• Access controls limiting who within our team can access personal data
• Secure, hosted database infrastructure
• Encrypted password storage

While we take these precautions, no method of transmission over the internet or electronic storage is 100% secure. We cannot guarantee absolute security.

6. Data retention and deletion

We keep your personal information for as long as your account is active. When you delete your account from your profile page, your account, your meal plans, logs, weigh-ins, progress photos and family profiles are deleted immediately, and copies in our backups are removed within 30 days. A linked partner keeps the shared dinners already recorded in their own plan. Where the law requires us to keep a record, we keep only what it requires.

To request access to or deletion of your personal data, please contact us via our contact page.

7. Your rights under Australian Privacy Law

Under the Australian Privacy Principles, you have the right to:

• Request access to the personal information we hold about you
• Request correction of inaccurate or out-of-date information
• Make a complaint if you believe we have breached the APPs

To exercise these rights, please contact us via our contact page. We will respond within 30 days.

8. Children's privacy

Plately is for adults, and you must be 18 or over to hold an account. If you add children to your household through family profiles, we collect the name, age, allergies and food preferences you enter for them, from you and only for planning your household's meals. We do not knowingly collect personal information directly from anyone under 18.

9. Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of significant changes by email or via a notice on our platform. Your continued use of Plately after any changes constitutes your acceptance of the revised policy.

10. Contact us

For any privacy-related questions, requests or complaints, please contact us via our contact page.

Zachary Scott Loftus, trading as Hey Plately
ABN 20 376 583 786
Queensland, Australia

If you are not satisfied with our response, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC).