Half Five — Privacy Policy
Last updated: 18 September 2026
Who we are
Half Five is published by Spark Curiosity Ltd, a company incorporated in Jersey, registered office 5 Fremont Perle, St John, Jersey, JE3 4DN. Spark Curiosity Ltd is the data controller for everything described here.
Spark Curiosity Ltd is registered as a controller with the Jersey Office of the Information Commissioner, registration number 101418, as required by Article 17 of the Data Protection Authority (Jersey) Law 2018.
Write to us at data@halffive.app.
Which laws apply
Half Five is available on the App Store worldwide, including in the United Kingdom and the European Union. Three data protection laws apply to what we do with your data:
- the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018, because we're established in Jersey;
- the UK GDPR, because we offer Half Five to people in the UK;
- the EU GDPR, because we offer it in the EU too.
All three work the same way in substance: a lawful basis for processing, and your rights to see and delete your data. So this policy describes them together, and gives the article or schedule reference for each where it helps.
Our representatives outside Jersey
Because we are established in Jersey rather than the United Kingdom or the European Union, we're required to appoint a local representative in each. They are a contact point for you and for the regulator, in addition to us.
- UK representative (Article 27 of the UK GDPR): reachable at data@halffive.app.
- EU representative (Article 27 of the EU GDPR): reachable at data@halffive.app.
The short version
Half Five decides dinner from the meals your household already cooks. To do that, it keeps:
- your household's meals;
- who is in the household;
- what was suggested and answered each evening;
- what you cooked.
If you choose to, it also holds the allergens your household avoids, so that new recipes listing them aren't suggested. That is health information, it is the most sensitive thing Half Five knows, and we ask for your explicit consent before you enter any of it. You can say no and keep the app.
Half Five isn't an advertising business. We don't track you across other companies' apps or websites. There's no advertising identifier and no analytics SDK in the app. We don't sell or share your data with anyone for their own purposes, and your household's allergen list is never sent outside our own database.
What we hold, why, and on what legal basis
Everything in this table is held on our servers, with Supabase (see "Who else handles your data"), so that everyone in your household sees the same thing on their own phone.
"Contract" means Article 6(1)(b) of the UK and EU GDPR, performance of the contract you have with us, and the equivalent condition in Part 1 of Schedule 2 to the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018.
| What | Why | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Your account: your email address, the identifier Apple or Google gives us when you sign in, and your first name if they share it. If you use Apple's Hide My Email, the address is Apple's relay address. | To give you an account, and to show your first name to the people in your household | Contract |
| Apple's sign-in token: the token Apple gives us when you sign in with Apple. Unlike the rest of this table, it is never shown to anyone, including the people in your household. | So that deleting your account can tell Apple to revoke the sign-in, which Apple requires of apps that offer Sign in with Apple | Contract |
| Your household: its name, time zone and settings, and its invite code. The settings are the card time, the cutoff, cooking days, nights a week, who decides, any pause, and whether names show on the lock screen. | So the card comes at the right time, and people you invite can join | Contract |
| The people in it: each adult's first name, the first name of any child an adult adds, when someone joined, and when someone left | So the app can say who answered, and keep leftovers for a child | Contract |
| Your meals: their names and ingredients, how much you like each one, and whether it's archived. Also any recipe you add to a meal (typed text, a web link, or photos of a recipe page or the dish) and the recipe read from it. | To keep your meals and recipes on every phone in the household | Contract |
| The evenings: each night's suggestions and why each was made. Each answer, who gave it, when, and whether it came from the app, a notification or the Live Activity. An answer is yes, no, not cooking, not that one, or what you fancy; and what you fancy is either one of the choices the app offers or a phrase you type yourself, which is kept with that evening's record. What was cooked and when, who is eating on a given night if you say, and leftovers kept for a child. | To decide tonight, and to know what you've had lately so forgotten favourites come back | Contract |
| The week: the meals chosen for the week, the shopping list and what's ticked, extra items, staples and aisle choices | To build the shopping list and share it | Contract |
| Your phone: an installation identifier, the push tokens Apple gives us for notifications and the Live Activity, and a record of each notification we sent and Apple's reply | To deliver the card to the right phones, and to stop sending to phones that have gone | Contract |
| Your subscription: the product, its status and renewal or expiry date, Apple's transaction identifiers, whether it was bought or shared through Family Sharing, and Apple's signed notifications about it | To give your household what the subscription includes | Contract |
The allergens your household avoids
This one doesn't sit in the table above, because the data is more sensitive and the lawful basis is different. "Allergen information, and why we ask for explicit consent" below sets out what that means in practice.
| What | Why | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Allergen information: the allergens your household avoids, chosen from a fixed list of fourteen. It belongs to the household, not to any one person: we don't record who avoids what | So that new recipes from our library that list them aren't suggested | Article 6(1)(a) consent and Article 9(2)(a) explicit consent under the UK and EU GDPR; the equivalent explicit consent condition in Part 2 of Schedule 2 to the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018 |
It's held with the rest of your household's data, so everyone in the house sees the same list. It's used for one thing: leaving out new recipes from our library that list those allergens. It doesn't check your own meals, because nobody has recorded what's in them. It is never sent to Anthropic or to anyone else outside our own database, and it isn't part of the counts described below.
The phrase you type
When Half Five asks what you fancy, you can tap one of the choices it offers or type your own words instead, up to 40 characters.
What you type is kept with that evening's record, for as long as your household exists. It is used in one way: we match it against the names and ingredients of your household's own meals, in our own database, so we can offer you one of them. No model reads it, it goes to no one outside our database, and it isn't part of the counts described below.
It is a box you type into, so please don't put anything in it you would not want kept.
Measuring whether Half Five works
We use the records of the evenings to count, across households:
- how often the card is answered;
- how long deciding takes;
- how often a suggestion was a meal you hadn't had for a while.
These counts are made in our own database. They aren't sent to any analytics company, and they aren't used to make decisions about you.
The legal basis is our legitimate interests in finding out whether Half Five does what it's for, and fixing it when it doesn't: Article 6(1)(f) of the UK and EU GDPR, and the equivalent condition in Part 1 of Schedule 2 to the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018. You can object by writing to data@halffive.app.
On your iPhone
Half Five keeps a copy of your household and meals on your phone, so it opens quickly and works without a signal. It also keeps:
- answers you tapped on the lock screen until they're sent;
- tonight's summary for the widgets;
- your sign-in session, in the iPhone's Keychain.
Signing out removes the copy, the widgets' summary and any export you made.
What else we never collect
- No numbers about food or bodies. Half Five doesn't ask about weight, calories, macros or goals, for anyone. Allergen information, covered above, is the only health data it holds.
- No numbers about children, anywhere in the app.
- No location, no contacts, and no advertising identifier.
- No tracking across other companies' apps and websites.
- No analytics or crash-reporting SDK in the app.
Earlier versions of Half Five
The app this version replaced also held the foods people in a household avoid, under explicit consent. When this version launched, those lists were deleted from our servers along with the rest of that app's household data, and the first time this version opens on a phone that had the old app, it removes what the old app kept there.
Consent doesn't carry over. Consent you gave the old app was consent for the old app. This version asks again, from scratch, before it holds anything.
Allergen information, and why we ask for explicit consent
A household's allergen list is data concerning health: a "special category" under Article 9 of the UK and EU GDPR, and under Part 2 of Schedule 2 to the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018. All three forbid processing that kind of data unless a specific condition is met, and the only condition available to an app like ours is explicit consent — Article 9(2)(a) under the UK and EU GDPR, and the equivalent condition in Schedule 2 Part 2 under Jersey law.
So that is what we ask for, in plain words, before you choose any allergens. Article 11 of the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018 sets the standard for what counts as valid consent: unambiguous, informed, freely given, and always possible to withdraw.
Three things follow, and we mean all three.
- You can say no and keep the app. Skip it and Half Five works as it did before; it just won't filter meals for you. Consent you can't refuse isn't consent, so refusing has to cost you nothing.
- An adult consents for the household. Where the list reflects a child's allergies, the adult who gives that consent must have parental responsibility for that child or the permission of someone who does. This is set out in our Terms. If you aren't that adult, don't give consent.
- You can withdraw at any time, in Settings, and withdrawing deletes the allergen information there and then, from your phone and from your household's record on our servers. It isn't marked inactive, it's erased. Withdrawing doesn't affect the lawfulness of what we did before you withdrew.
Because this processing is central to what Half Five does, we've carried out a data protection impact assessment for it: the risk assessment that Article 35 of the UK and EU GDPR and the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018 both expect before processing like this begins. We keep it under review as the app changes.
What the filter is, and isn't. Half Five leaves out new recipes from its library that list what your household avoids. It doesn't check your own meals, or the familiar meals it offers while you set up, because nobody has recorded what's in those. It's a convenience, not a safety system, and you must not rely on it to keep anyone safe: always read the actual ingredients and the actual packaging before you cook and before you serve. Our Terms set this out at greater length.
Recipes in "Something new" carry allergen labels taken from each recipe's ingredients and checked by a person. Those labels describe the recipe, not anyone in your household, and they are a separate thing from the list above.
Notifications and the Live Activity
At your household's card time, Half Five sends the card as a push notification through Apple's Push Notification service. It can also show tonight on your lock screen as a Live Activity.
To do that, Apple receives the notification's content, which is tonight's meal and a short reason such as "One of yours", along with your phone's push token. Names appear on the lock screen only if your household turns that on, in Settings › Names on the lock screen.
You can turn notifications and Live Activities off in iOS Settings. Tonight's card still waits for you in the app.
Recipes you add
When you add a recipe to a meal (a photo of the page, some text, or a link), Half Five reads the recipe out of it so it can show the ingredients and the method.
To do that, the photo, the text, or the text of the linked page is sent to Anthropic, whose model reads it and sends the recipe back. Nothing else goes with it: not your name, your household, your other meals, or your household's allergen list. Anthropic doesn't use it to train its models. Please photograph the recipe, not people.
For a link, our server fetches the page, so that website sees a request from our server rather than from your phone.
Setting up your household works the same way. You can photograph recipe pages, whole recipes, or a list of what you cook, and add them as a batch; Half Five reads the batch to help fill in your meals as you set up. This needs the subscription, apart from one free read of up to three photos.
A batch's photos and what it finds are kept until the household is deleted, the same as your other meals and recipes. Photos that never end up in a batch are cleared within a day. As with recipes you add, nothing a model finds is treated as an allergen claim, and nothing it finds is matched against your household's allergen list: only library recipes checked by a person carry an allergen label.
Legal basis: contract.
Payment
Half Five's subscription is sold through the Apple App Store, and Apple is the merchant of record. Apple takes the payment, holds the card details, issues the receipt, handles refunds and pays us.
We never see your card number or billing address. We receive Apple's signed record of the subscription, so we know which household it covers and until when.
Your subscription is governed by Apple's own terms and privacy policy as well as ours. Manage or cancel it in Settings › Apple Account › Subscriptions.
Family Sharing is on. If you share the subscription with your Apple family, they get access without a separate purchase, and without us learning anything more about them than the app already holds.
Who else handles your data
| Who | What they do | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Hosts our database, sign-in and file storage, as our processor, under Supabase's Data Processing Addendum | eu-west-2 (London) |
| Apple | Provides Sign in with Apple, push notifications and Live Activities, and sells the subscription as merchant of record, under Apple's own developer agreements and privacy terms | Apple's own infrastructure |
| Provides Sign in with Google. Google tells us your email address and name; your Google account itself is covered by Google's privacy policy. | Google's own infrastructure | |
| Anthropic | Reads the recipes you add and the photos you use to set up your household, as our processor, under Anthropic's Data Processing Addendum | United States, under the EU standard contractual clauses and the UK addendum |
| Vercel | Hosts the website, halffive.app, which counts visits with Vercel Web Analytics and sets no cookies. The app doesn't use it. | Vercel's global network |
| Article 27 representatives | Our UK and EU representatives, a contact point for you and for the regulators | United Kingdom and European Union |
That is the complete list: no advertisers, no data brokers and no analytics vendors. Your household's allergen information goes to none of them; it stays in our own database.
About the pictures. The meal pictures Half Five comes with — on the familiar meals it offers while you set up, and on the recipes in "Something new" — are generated images. They were made by a picture-generating model from our own recipe names and ingredient lists, before anyone installed the app. Nothing from any household went into making them, and everybody sees the same pictures. Photographs you take yourself are a different thing, and are covered above.
The UK GDPR, the EU GDPR and the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018 all require a written contract with any processor. It must put the same obligations on them that apply to us: instructions only from us, confidentiality, no sub-processor without our agreement, and appropriate security. We have that in place with Supabase and Anthropic. For the parts of the service Apple and Google provide, we rely on their own terms.
Transfers
Server-held data sits in London. Spark Curiosity Ltd is in Jersey, which both the UK and the European Commission have recognised as providing an adequate level of protection.
Recipes you add, and the photos you send while setting up your household, are read by Anthropic in the United States, under the standard contractual clauses approved by the European Commission and the UK's addendum to them.
How long we keep things
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Your account | Until you delete it |
| Your household's data: meals, recipes and photos, the evenings, the weeks, and the subscription record | For as long as the household exists |
| When you delete your account and no other adult who can sign in is left | The household and everything in it are deleted at once. Its photos are removed from storage straight away, or by the next nightly clean-up if that fails. |
| When you delete your account and other adults stay | Your account goes. The household's shared records stay with them, with your name replaced by "Former member". |
| Allergen information | Until you clear it, withdraw consent, or your household is deleted, whichever comes first. It belongs to the household, so if you delete your account and another adult stays, the list stays with them until they clear it or withdraw. Withdrawing erases it from your phone and from your household's record at once. Uninstalling the app on its own only removes the copy on that phone. |
| Push tokens | Until you sign out, leave the household or delete your account |
| Apple's sign-in token | Until you delete your account. Deleting it is what we use the token for: we send it to Apple to revoke the sign-in, and the token goes with your account. |
| Records of notifications sent, and Apple's subscription notifications | For as long as the household exists |
| Backups | Deleted data can remain in our database provider's backups until they expire, at most 7 days later |
Your rights
You have the right to:
- ask us for a copy of your data;
- have it corrected;
- have it erased;
- restrict or object to what we do with it;
- take it elsewhere (portability);
- and, for allergen information, withdraw your consent at any time.
You can do most of this yourself, in Half Five:
- Settings › Your data › Export my data makes a file (JSON) of your household's data that you can save or send.
- Settings › Your data › Delete account and data deletes your account and, if no other adult is left in your household, the household with it. We then tell Apple to revoke the sign-in token it gave us, which is what Apple asks of apps that offer Sign in with Apple. Your account is deleted either way, even if Apple cannot be reached at that moment. It doesn't cancel an Apple subscription; do that in Settings › Apple Account › Subscriptions.
- Allergen information can be changed or cleared, or withdrawn and erased in one go, in Settings › Allergens. Withdrawing consent erases it immediately rather than marking it inactive.
- Meals, recipes and the people in your household can be changed or removed in the app at any time.
For anything else, write to data@halffive.app. We will answer within one month.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, you can complain to:
- the Jersey Office of the Information Commissioner (
jerseyoic.org); - the UK Information Commissioner's Office (
ico.org.uk); - if you're in the EU, your own country's data protection authority.
Children
Half Five is set up by adults, and our Terms require an account holder to be 18 or over.
A child doesn't need the app and doesn't have an account. An adult can add a child's first name, so Half Five can keep leftovers for them. That is everything Half Five holds against a child. If your household's allergen list reflects a child's allergies, it is held as the household's list, not against the child by name.
Where the household's allergen list reflects a child's allergies, the adult who gives explicit consent must have parental responsibility for that child, as our Terms require. Half Five never shows numbers about children, and it isn't directed at children.
Security
Data is encrypted in transit, and Supabase encrypts it at rest. On every request, the database checks that the person asking belongs to the household whose data it is. Your sign-in session is kept in your iPhone's Keychain.
Changes
If we change this policy we will change the date at the top. Where the change is significant, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect.