Privacy Policy
DISH INTELLIGENCE INC.
Effective date: August 10, 2026
Last updated: August 10, 2026
1. About this policy
DISH INTELLIGENCE INC. ("DISH," "we," or "us") operates the DISH mobile application, the DISH website, and the tools we provide to restaurants. We refer to all of it together as the Service.
This policy explains what information the Service collects about you, why we collect it, who we share it with, and what control you have over it. It applies whenever you use the Service, whether you are a diner rating a dish, a chef or restaurant representative maintaining a presence on DISH, or a visitor to our website.
Our registered address is 1430 Broadway, Suite 2200, New York, NY 10018, and you can reach us at build@thedishapp.com.
2. The short version
The full policy is below. In brief:
- We collect what you give us when you sign up and use DISH: your phone number, name, birthday, the dishes you rate, the photos and videos you post, and the taste and dietary preferences you choose to share.
- We use it to run the app, to identify the dish in your photos, and to show you food worth eating.
- Your posts, ratings, and profile are visible to other people on DISH. Your dietary information, your birthday, your phone number, and your contacts are not.
- We do not run ads, we do not sell your information, and there are no advertising or tracking tools in the DISH app.
- You can edit your profile, turn off location access, and delete your account and its contents from inside the app.
3. Information you provide to us
Account and identity information. You sign up with your phone number, which we verify by sending you a one-time code. Your phone number is how we identify your account. Setting up your profile also requires your first and last name, a username, and your birthday. You can add an email address, but for a diner account you do not have to.
Profile and taste information. Your profile can include a photo, a bio, your home city, links to your social accounts, the dishes and lists you save, the people you follow, and the cuisine preferences you set. You also choose whether your profile is public or private when you set it up.
Dietary and allergen information. You can tell us about dietary preferences and allergies so we can flag dishes accordingly. We treat this as the most sensitive information we hold. It is visible only to you — other diners, restaurants, and chefs cannot see it through any part of the Service, and it is automatically removed from our internal system logs. You can change or remove it at any time, and DISH keeps working if you do.
Information about your dining companions. DISH lets you save a guest profile for someone you eat with — for example a partner's or friend's allergies — so you can take them into account when choosing where to go. Guest profiles are private to you. Nobody else can see them, and you can delete one at any time without deleting anything else. Please only record this kind of information about someone if they are comfortable with you doing so.
Content you post. When you post, we collect your photos and videos, your rating, your tags, and any text you write. Videos include their audio if you have granted microphone access.
Photos you take within the DISH app have their embedded metadata removed before upload, including the location data that cameras normally write into image files. Images uploaded through our website, and the original video files you record, may retain the metadata your device attached to them. Separately, if you have allowed location access, we record where a photo was taken as part of the post's own information, so we can work out which restaurant you are at. That location is used to identify the dish and is not shown to other users.
Your contacts. If you allow it, DISH can check your phone's contacts to find people you already know on the app. We do not store your contact list. Phone numbers are converted into irreversible cryptographic fingerprints that we use only for matching, and the original numbers and names are discarded. We cannot read your address book from what we keep.
Searches. We keep a record of what you search for on DISH, so we can show you your recent searches and improve results.
Professional and creator information. If you use DISH as a chef, host, restaurant representative, or creator, we collect the details that establish that role: your position, the restaurants you are affiliated with, the cuisines and techniques you work in, how long you have been cooking or working in hospitality, your social handles, and a business email or brand name where relevant. Restaurants can confirm that someone genuinely works for them. We do not ask you for identity documents, and we do not use a third-party identity verification service.
Communications. When you contact us, report content, or respond to a survey, we keep a record of the exchange.
4. Information we collect automatically
- Device and app information — your device platform and operating system version, the DISH app version and build, and when your session was last active.
- Location — with your permission, your device's location while you are using the app. DISH never accesses your location in the background. Location is used to find restaurants near you, to set your home city, and to identify which restaurant a dish photo was taken at.
- Activity on the Service — the posts you like, the people you follow, the lists you save, the tags you answer, and similar interactions.
- Error and diagnostic information — when something goes wrong, our error-monitoring provider receives a technical report that can include your account identifier, your contact details, and your IP address.
The DISH app itself does not log your IP address. Our hosting provider records it as part of ordinary web request logs, as essentially all hosting providers do.
5. Information we receive from others
- Restaurant and menu data providers — we license restaurant, menu, and dish information so that the dishes you want to rate already exist in DISH. This is information about businesses, not about you.
- Other users — someone may mention you, follow you, or match with you through contact matching.
6. How we use information
Running the Service. Creating and securing your account, showing you your diary and saved dishes, delivering your posts to the people who follow you, sending notifications you have asked for, providing support, and keeping the app working.
Identifying dishes in your photos. When you post a photo of a dish, we send the image to Google's Gemini service along with a list of dishes from menus near where the photo was taken, and ask it to suggest which dish it is. The suggestion is a starting point: DISH fills in the restaurant and dish for you, and you can change or dismiss it. We do not send your name, username, or account details with the image. Google's handling of the image is governed by its own terms.
Improving the Service. We look at how the Service is used to fix problems and build new features. We do not train or fine-tune our own artificial intelligence models on your photos, your reviews, or anything else you post.
Safety and enforcement. Investigating reports, enforcing our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines, preventing fraud and abuse, and protecting the people who use the Service. Decisions to restrict or remove an account are made by a person, not automatically.
Legal compliance. Complying with law and legal process, responding to lawful requests, and establishing or defending legal claims.
7. How we share information
We share information in the following circumstances, and not otherwise.
- With other users. Your profile, posts, ratings, and reviews are visible to others according to your privacy setting. Content you make public can be seen, saved, and screenshotted by anyone, and we cannot retrieve it once that has happened.
- With the companies that run our infrastructure. Hosting and database providers, photo and video storage and streaming, text-message delivery for sign-in codes, push notification delivery, transactional email, error monitoring, maps, and the dish-recognition service described above. They may use the information only to provide those services to us.
- For legal reasons. With law enforcement, regulators, or courts where we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary to comply with law, enforce our terms, or protect someone's rights or safety.
- In a corporate transaction. In a financing, merger, acquisition, or insolvency, information may be disclosed to counterparties and may transfer to a successor.
- With your direction. Anywhere else you ask us to.
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for advertising. DISH does not run advertising, does not contain any advertising, marketing, or attribution software, and does not send identifiers to advertising platforms.
Two things are worth naming precisely. When you search for a place, your search text and IP address go directly to Google's places service in order to return suggestions. Our map provider receives standard usage information when maps are displayed. Neither of these is advertising, and neither receives your DISH identity.
8. Your choices
- Your profile and preferences. Editable in the app at any time, including your dietary information and whether your profile is public.
- Permissions. Camera, photos, microphone, location, contacts, and notifications can each be granted or revoked in your device settings. DISH works without any of them — you can post from your library without camera access, record video without audio, search by name without location, and use the app normally without contacts.
- Notifications. Turn off push notifications on your device, or use the notification settings in the app.
- Delete your account. You can delete your account from the settings screen in the app. Deletion is immediate and permanent — there is no grace period and no way to recover the account. Your profile, posts, photos, videos, comments, saved lists, contact fingerprints, and search history are deleted, and your videos are removed from our video provider. A small amount of incomplete upload data that was never attached to a post may persist for a period afterwards.
9. Your privacy rights in US states
Depending on where you live, state law may give you the right to know what personal information we hold about you, to obtain a copy of it, to correct it, to delete it, to opt out of targeted advertising and of the sale or sharing of your information, and to limit how we use sensitive information. You also have the right not to be treated differently for exercising these rights.
Because DISH does not sell personal information, does not share it for advertising, and does not use it for targeted advertising, the opt-outs relating to advertising do not apply to anything we do. Where required, we honor browser-based opt-out preference signals, including Global Privacy Control.
To make a request, email us at build@thedishapp.com. We will ask for enough information to confirm that the request is really coming from you. If we decline a request, we will tell you why, and you may appeal our decision by replying to our response.
10. Where your information is held
DISH is operated from the United States, and our servers and primary database are located there. Some of the providers we rely on operate internationally, so information may be processed outside the United States in the course of delivering messages, streaming video, or providing the services described above.
11. Retention
We keep your information for as long as your account is active. When you delete your account, we delete your information from our live systems immediately. Copies may persist for a limited period in routine backups before ageing out.
12. Security
We protect your information with encrypted connections, access controls that restrict every part of our system to the people entitled to see it, automatic removal of sensitive fields such as phone numbers, contacts, and dietary information from our internal logs, error monitoring, and automated security scanning of our code before it ships. Signing in uses a one-time code rather than a password you have to remember.
No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee that information will never be accessed improperly. Please let us know promptly if you think your account has been compromised.
13. Children and teens
You must be at least 13 years old to use DISH. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone younger, and if we learn that we have, we will delete it. A parent or guardian who believes their child has given us information should contact us at build@thedishapp.com.
14. Other services
DISH links to restaurants, reservation and delivery platforms, and other websites and apps that we do not control. Linking to them is not an endorsement, and their handling of your information is governed by their own policies. We encourage you to read them.
15. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy. If we make a material change, we will update the date at the top of this page and notify you through the Service or by email before the change takes effect. Continuing to use DISH after a change takes effect means the updated policy applies to you.
16. Contact us
DISH INTELLIGENCE INC.
1430 Broadway, Suite 2200
New York, NY 10018