Privacy

The short version

By default this site collects nothing about you: no analytics, no advertising, no tracking cookies, no mailing list. Your saved kitchen lives in your own browser. If you choose to create an account, your email address and — only after another explicit choice — your synced kitchen data are stored for you, and nothing else. If you choose to use the cooking assistant, each question travels with the kitchen data needed to answer it. Both are optional and off by default.

What is not here

Most privacy policies describe data collection. This one mostly describes its absence, because listing things that do not exist is the only honest way to describe a site that does not do them.

• Accounts are optional, and off by default.You can read, cook, save, plan and shop with no account at all, exactly as before. If you choose to sign in (with your email address and a six-digit emailed code — there are no passwords), an account is created for you. Nothing about your kitchen leaves this device until you additionally turn on cloud backup & sync, which is its own labelled button. See “If you sign in” below.
• No analytics. No analytics service is installed. Page views are not counted.
• No cookies from this site. Nothing is stored in your browser to identify or track you.
• Some things are saved on your own device, and only there.They are kept in your browser’s own storage, on the device you are using. Precisely:
  • which recipes you have saved — stored as the recipe’s number in the book, not its text — and the date you saved each one;
  • whether you have marked a saved recipe as a favourite;
  • any collections you make: a name you chose, an identifier for it, when you created and last changed it, and which recipes you put in it;
  • your place in Cook Mode — the step you are on, which ingredients you have ticked off, and the serving size you picked — which lasts until you close the tab;
  • your shopping list: which recipes you added, the amount you chose for each and when you added it; anything you typed in yourself, with the heading it sits under and when you added it; which items you have ticked off; and which items you have set aside as ones you do not need. The ticked and set-aside items are each stored as an identifier for the item, not as a note about you. What the list holds is the recipe’s number and your multiplier, not a copy of the recipe — the ingredients are worked out from the cookbook each time you open the page, including for anything you have set aside. When you send a week of your meal plan to the list, each entry it adds also records which week sent it and which planned meal it came from, so that sending the same week again can replace exactly those entries and nothing else. Those entries then follow the planned meal they came from: if you change its serving size the amounts follow, and if you delete the meal its ingredients leave the list. Deleting a planned meal does not erase the entry itself — it is kept, no longer counting towards anything, so that nothing is destroyed by a change you made somewhere else;
  • your meal plan: which recipes you planned — each stored as the recipe’s identifier, not its text — the day and meal you chose for each, the serving size you picked, an identifier for each planned meal, and when you added or last changed it. Where you have said a meal made leftovers, the plan also records that the card is leftovers rather than something to cook, and which meal it came from. Nothing about leftovers is worked out for you: the site does not know how much you cooked, how much was eaten, what keeps or for how long, so nothing is ever added, expired or warned about on your behalf;
  • what you have told it is in your kitchen: the name of each ingredient exactly as you typed it, whether you marked it as something you have or something you need to buy, an amount and unit only if you typed one, an identifier for each entry, and when you added or last changed it. Nothing here is worked out on your behalf: no ingredient is assumed to be in your kitchen, no amount is guessed at, and nothing is used up when you cook a recipe. It changes only when you change it;
  • your preferences — which day your planning week starts on, and which serving size the add panels preselect;
  • if you turn on cloud sync: a small bookkeeping record of what was last synced, so the next sync can tell what changed on this device;
  • what you have recorded cooking: which recipe, when, where you were in the site when you said so, and a serving size only if you gave one. Nothing here is recorded automatically — opening a recipe, or spending an hour in Cook Mode, creates no record. Every entry exists because you pressed “I cooked this”, and you can delete any of them, or all of them, at any time;
  • your meal plan templates: a name you chose, and which recipes sit on which day of the week at what serving size. A template holds no dates and no shopping state;
  • if you are in a household: which one you are currently working in. The membership list itself is never stored on your device — it is read from the server each visit, so this site can never show you access you no longer have;
  • which reminders you have dismissed, for the day you dismissed them. Reminders themselves are not stored: they are worked out from your plan and list each time a page opens, and disappear on their own when they stop being true;
  • a version number for each of the above, so that a later version of this site can read what an earlier one saved.
  No recipe text is copied into your browser this way; the saved list holds references, and the recipes themselves are part of the site. None of it is sent to us or to anyone else, none of it identifies you, and there is no account it could be attached to. Clearing your browser data removes it, and we have no copy.
• No advertising and no ad networks. No third party is given space here.
• No newsletter or mailing list. There is no signup and no list.
• One form. The sign-in page accepts your email address, solely to send the sign-in code. There is no contact form, comment box or search that reports what you typed.
• No payments. Nothing is sold here.
• No database of visitors, and no profiling.

If you sign in

Accounts and their data are handled by Supabase, the authentication and database service this site uses, on a project controlled by us. Signing in stores your email address and a session token in your browser so you stay signed in on that device. The sign-in code email is sent by Supabase to the address you gave; we send nothing else to it.

If you then turn on cloud backup & sync— a separate, labelled button that lists exactly what will move — the same records described above (saved recipes, favourites, collections, shopping list state, planned meals, what you have told it is in your kitchen, and preferences, all stored as identifiers and your own choices, never recipe text) are kept in that database and associated with your account, so your other signed-in devices can read them. Every row is protected by database-level rules that make it readable and writable only by your account. We do not use this data for anything except showing you your own kitchen; there is no analytics, profiling or marketing attached to it.

If you join a household, you and its other members share one shopping list, one meal plan and one kitchen inventory. Those three, and only those three. Your saved recipes, favourites, collections, what you have cooked, your templates and your preferences are never part of a household, and joining one copies nothing — a household is a separate set of the same three things, and you choose which you are looking at. Leaving a household ends your access to all of it immediately, including entries you added yourself, because those entries belong to the household rather than to you.

Invitations are single-use links that expire. We store only a one-way hash of each link, never the link itself, so a copy of our database could not be used to join anything. The code travels in the part of the address after the #, which browsers do not send to servers — so it cannot appear in a server log.

If you create a share linkfor a plan or a list, we store a read-only snapshot of what you chose to share, at the moment you shared it. It does not update afterwards, so nothing you add later is visible through an old link. It contains no name, no email and no identifier of yours; anyone with the link can open it without an account; and you can turn it off at any time from your account page, which stops it working immediately. As with invitations, only a hash of the link is stored. Recipe links are simply the cookbook’s own public addresses and involve no record at all.

Deleting your account, from the account page, deletes your account and every cloud record belonging to it, including your share links. What is stored on the device you are holding stays there until you clear your browser data — the page says exactly this before you confirm.

The cooking assistant

The cooking assistant is optional and works only when you are signed in and have pressed the consent button on its page. When you ask it a question, that question — together with the kitchen data needed to answer it: your saved recipe titles and favourites, collection names, planned meals, a summary of your shopping list, what you have told My kitchen, what you have recorded cooking, your meal plan templates, your preferences, and the full text of at most three cookbook recipes chosen for that question — is sent through our server to Anthropic, the AI provider, which generates the answer. This is the only purpose it is used for.

If you are working in a household, that household’s plan, list and kitchen travel with the question too — and the server checks that you really are a member before any of it is used, so naming a household you do not belong to gets you nothing. Your own saved recipes and cooking history are never described as anybody else’s.

We do not store your questions or the answers. We keep one number per hour — how many questions your account asked — to prevent abuse of the service, and your consent choice is stored in your browser. Anthropic’s handling and retention of API data is described by its own privacy documentation. The assistant cannot change anything: it reads the data sent with your question and nothing else, and it has no access to other people’s accounts.

If you never open the assistant, none of this happens — no data of yours is ever sent to an AI provider.

Reminders and installing the app

Reminders about what you have planned appear at the top of the Planner and Shopping pages. They are worked out from your own plan and list each time a page opens, are not stored anywhere, and are not sent to us or to anyone else. There is no activity feed and no unread count, because there is nothing kept to count.

You can also let this site show a notification outside the page — used for one thing, a cooking timer finishing while you are on another tab. We never ask for that permission on arrival: it is offered on the account page, once, and if you decline we do not ask again. Nothing is sent to a server to make it work, and there is no push subscription, so a closed browser cannot be woken by this site.

If you install this site as an app, your browser stores a copy of the pages you have visited so they open without a connection. That copy contains the cookbook only. It can never contain your account, your synced data, a household’s list, an assistant answer or a shared link, because the store it uses is restricted to this site’s own address and everything of yours arrives from a different one. Signing out clears it.

Hosting and server records

This site is published on Cloudflare Pages at thesoutheastasiantables.com. Like essentially every web server, Cloudflare keeps ordinary technical records of requests — timestamps, IP addresses, the page asked for — as part of serving and protecting the site. Those records are Cloudflare’s, made by the act of serving a page to you, and are described by their own privacy documentation.

Nothing beyond that is collected by this site. No analytics sit on top of those logs, nothing is joined to them, and we do not read them to build any picture of who visits or what they cook.

Links to other sites

This site links to the book’s Kindle listing on Amazon. Following that link takes you to Amazon, a service with its own privacy practices, which are Amazon’s and not ours; any purchase happens there, and nothing about it comes back to this site.

Children

The site is a cookbook companion with no accounts and no data collection, so it collects nothing from anyone of any age.

If this changes

Features that would involve real data — a contact route, a newsletter, accounts, analytics — are possible later. If any is added, this page will be updated to describe it before or at the same time as the feature ships, and the review date at the top will change.

This page describes the site’s actual behaviour. It is not legal advice and does not attempt to be a compliance document for every jurisdiction its readers may be in.