Save Recipes - Mr. Cook

I read some good reviews of this app and downloaded it. When I got to the section about the privacy policy, I clicked on it and saw the longest privacy policy I’ve ever seen: just under 30,000 words. That’s about 60 single spaced pages of text. Fortunately, ChatGPT was easily able to read through it and highlight a few red flags. You may find this completely acceptable, but as someone who is concerned with privacy I do not, so I will be deleting the app and canceling my subscription immediately. From ChatGPT: 1. Meta Integration Is Extensive This is not just “we have a Facebook page.” They explicitly use: Meta Pixel Facebook Conversions API Advanced Matching Custom Audiences Instagram Ads Audience Network That combination enables: cross-site tracking, attribution, ad retargeting, profile enrichment, lookalike audience generation. The most important language is this: “Contact Information ... names, email addresses and telephone numbers ... transmitted to Meta” and: “behavioral and interest data ... for targeted advertising and audience building” That means: if you use the app/site, and especially if you create an account with a normal email address, Meta can potentially correlate: recipe interests, cooking behavior, subscription status, site interactions, conversion events, with your broader Meta advertising identity. Even hashed identifiers are still very effective for matching. 2. The Tracking Is Broader Than Strictly Necessary This is not a minimalist: “we only use analytics to improve the app” policy. They are doing: retargeting, conversion tracking, remarketing, audience segmentation, click tracking, personalized ads, Meta custom audiences, Google Ads remarketing. That’s a full commercial marketing stack. For a recipe app, one could reasonably argue this is more aggressive than necessary.

This app has easily saved me countless hours of time in so many ways, from time spent choosing what to eat, or dealing with the worst websites on the internet (janky cooking blogs littered with ads and trackers 😤), to making something spontaneously based on what I have in my fridge with its AI recipe generator (and they can be remixed or changed easily). Meal planning and making a grocery list takes less than a minute, even faster after building your recipe library. Thank you to the devs for making such a well designed and functional app, with just the right amount of AI to level it up.