Privacy Policy
Sommplicity · DRAFT v2 · 16 October 2026 · not yet approved
DRAFT FOR GINA'S APPROVAL. This is version 2. Version 1 of 24 August 2026 stays in force until this one is approved and published. Version 2 adds friends, profiles, points, leaderboards, shared bottle cards, place names and notifications, which version 1 predates.
This explains what Sommplicity collects, why, how long it is kept, and what you can ask us to do about it. It is written to be read rather than to be defensible, and every period in it is a period the software actually enforces.
Some things below are done by a person rather than by a button, and where that is true it says so.
Who is responsible for your data
Sommplicity is run by Gina Biernacki as a sole trader, based in California.
We are in the United States and UK and EU data protection law still applies to us. Because we offer the app to people in the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area, those rules cover how we handle their data, and this policy is written to that standard for everyone rather than giving different people different promises.
Contact: support@somm-plicity.com
Postal address: 1198 S. Van Ness Ave #40152, San Francisco, CA 94140
Write to that address about anything in this policy, including a request to see or delete your data. There is no separate privacy desk. It reaches a person.
What we collect, and why
Things you give us
| What | Why we have it |
|---|---|
| Your email address | To sign you in. It is the only way we can reach you. |
| Photographs of wine labels you scan | To identify the bottle, and to show it back to you. |
| Bottles you save, tasting notes, reactions and notes to yourself | This is your Wine Memory. It is the product. |
| Your name, a handle if you choose one, and a profile photograph if you add one or sign in with Google | So friends can recognize you. See What other people can see below. |
| Friends you add, bottles you send or cheer, questions you ask a friend about a bottle | These are the social features. They exist only between you and the people you chose. |
| A note you write for your friends on a bottle | So your friends can read it. It is kept apart from your private notes. |
| Your home city, if you add one: the city, its state or region and country, and a rough area around it (about 10 km, never your exact location) | So friends can see where you are based, and so Add a friend can show people near you first. See Home city below. |
| A place name you confirm for a tasting, such as a restaurant or a town | So you can find the tasting later, and so friends can see where you drank it if you share your activity. |
| A notification address for your phone, if you allow notifications | To tell you about a friend request or a new friend. |
| Corrections you send us | To find out where the scanner got a bottle wrong. |
| Feedback and bug reports, including any screenshot you attach | To fix things. |
| Your answers in Daily Practice | To decide what to ask you next. |
Things the app records as you use it
| What | Why we have it |
|---|---|
| Which screens you open and which features you use | To find out what works. Never the content of what you wrote. |
| Crashes and errors, and how fast screens load | So a broken screen gets fixed rather than reported anecdotally. Sent without anything identifying you attached. |
| Your device model, operating system version and app build number | To reproduce a bug on the device it happened on. |
Location and place names
We never receive your exact coordinates. The one time Sommplicity asks where your phone is now is when you tap Use my location to set your home city, and only then (see Home city below). If a photo you choose has a location saved inside it, your phone asks Apple's location service to turn it into a place name, such as a restaurant or a town, and offers that name to you as a suggestion. That lookup goes from your phone to Apple, not to us. The coordinate is then dropped and never sent to us, and photos are re-encoded before upload so the file we store carries no location either. Sommplicity never tracks where you go.
A place name you accept is saved, and it is personal data. It is stored against that tasting. Your friends can also see it, with the wine and the day, if Share loved wines in Discover is on (see below). You can leave the place empty, change it, or remove it.
Home city
| What | Who sees it, and how to change it |
|---|---|
| Your home city, only if you add one. You can type it, or tap Use my location, which asks your permission at that moment, reads your phone's position once and turns it into a city name on your phone through Apple. For an account with bottles, the app may also ask Based in a city, worked out on your phone from where most of your bottle photos were taken. Nothing is saved until you tap Save or Yes. We keep the city, its state or region and country, and a rough area around it rounded to about 10 km. Your exact location is never sent to us or kept. | Shown under your name to anyone who can see your profile (your friends, or anyone signed in if your profile is public), on your profile and when you are suggested in Add a friend. Nobody is ever shown your rough area; Add a friend uses it only to list people near each other first. Turn off Show on my profile, or remove the city, in My Account, then Home city. It is deleted with your account and included in your data export. |
We do not buy data about you from anyone, we do not sell or rent your data to anyone, and there is no advertising in Sommplicity.
What other people can see
A new account starts friends only. Only the people you approve as friends can see your profile and what is on it. You can make your profile public at any time in My Account, then Profile and privacy, and every setting below is on that same screen.
Friends means people you have approved. Anyone signed in means every Sommplicity account. Nobody outside Sommplicity can see any of this: there are no public web pages for profiles or bottles.
Shown when someone reaches your profile, whatever your settings
| What | Who can see it |
|---|---|
| Your name and your handle | Anyone signed in who opens your profile, and anyone you send a friend request to. A friends only profile shows nothing else to someone who is not your friend. |
On your profile, each with its own setting
These follow your profile: with a friends only profile they reach your friends, and with a public profile they reach anyone signed in. Each one except the first can also be set to Only me.
| What | The setting that controls it |
|---|---|
| Your profile photograph, and how many friends you have | Who can see your profile (Public or Private) |
| Loved wines: the bottles you marked Loved, with your photograph of each label | Loved wines |
| Your Top 10 | Top 10 |
| Taste profile: the grapes and regions in the bottles you loved | Taste profile |
| Points and level | Points and level |
| Practice rhythm: how many days in a row you have practiced | Practice rhythm |
| Bottles you bookmarked as Want to try (friends only, never anyone else) | Taste profile |
In Discover, the social feed
| What | The setting that controls it |
|---|---|
| Each bottle you mark Loved, as a card with your name, profile photograph, your photograph of the bottle, the wine and its region | Share loved wines in Discover, and Loved wines. It reaches friends, or anyone signed in if your profile is public. |
| The place name of a tasting and the day it happened, and a note you wrote for your friends | Share loved wines in Discover. Friends only, even when your profile is public. |
| A place's page, listing the friends who drank there, which wine and which day | Share loved wines in Discover. Friends only. |
| A milestone card, such as 10 wines from Burgundy or your 50th wine: your name, photograph, the region or grape, the number and the day. Never a bottle, photograph, note or place. | Share milestones, which only works while Share loved wines in Discover and Loved wines are on. It starts on for a new account. It reaches friends, or anyone signed in if your profile is public. |
Suggested in Discover people
| What | Who can see it |
|---|---|
| Your name and photograph, suggested with an Add friend button | Someone who shares a friend with you sees your name and which friend you share. Your photograph, level, loved bottle count and favorite grape appear only where your settings above already show them to that person. With a public profile, anyone signed in may see you suggested. Nobody who is already your friend, or has a request open with you, sees you suggested. |
Find friends from contacts
| What | Who can see it |
|---|---|
| If you tap Find friends from contacts and allow it, the email addresses in your contacts are turned into one-way codes on your phone, and only those codes are sent to Sommplicity to check against accounts. We keep no copy of your contacts, the codes or the result. Names and phone numbers never leave your phone. | Nobody. A person can appear in your results only if Let people find me by email is on for them, which it is unless they turn it off in Account, Social, and only if you hold their email address. They are not told that you looked. |
Leaderboards
| What | The setting that controls it |
|---|---|
| Your name, photograph and weekly points on the Everyone leaderboard | Appear on Everyone leaderboard. Only possible with a public profile, and off for a new account. |
| Your points on the Friends leaderboard | Points and level. Friends only. |
Things you do with a friend
When you add a friend to a tasting, send a friend a bottle, ask a friend about a bottle, or cheer a friend's bottle, that friend sees it, with your name. A friend request or a new friendship sends the other person a notification carrying your name.
Things you share yourself
If you use the share button on a bottle, the picture or text you see in the preview goes wherever you send it. That is your choice, and it leaves Sommplicity.
Never shown to anyone else
Your cellar, your private notes, what you paid, your email address, and your scans. A bottle you saved but did not mark Loved is not on your profile or in Discover; it appears to friends only on a place's page, if you gave its tasting a place name and Share loved wines in Discover is on, or in your Top 10 if you put it there. The one exception for a label photograph is the reference image use described under Your photographs, which carries no name and has its own switch.
Your photographs
This is the part most people want to know about, so it is stated in full rather than summarised. The complete rules are in our photo retention policy and these are the same rules.
How long a photograph is kept
| The photograph | Kept | Then |
|---|---|---|
| Taken to identify a bottle | 30 days from the scan | Deleted automatically, file and record |
| A capture you walked away from before a result | 30 days, same as above | Deleted automatically, file and record |
| Attached to a correction you sent us | 90 days from the correction | Deleted automatically, file and record |
| Attached to a bottle in your Wine Memory | Until you remove that bottle, or delete your account | Deleted immediately on either |
| Refused by the app before upload | Never reaches us | Nothing to delete |
Saving a bottle to your Wine Memory is what turns a 30-day photograph into one we keep. If you later remove the bottle, the photograph goes with it.
Deletion is real and it is not reversible. There is no archive, no recycle bin and no soft-delete tier. A scheduled job removes the file from storage first and the database record second, every day.
Where photographs are stored, and who can see them
In private storage, filed under your own account. Another account can open one of your photographs in only two cases, and the storage rules enforce both, not just the app:
- Your photograph of a bottle you marked Loved, and your profile photograph, can be seen by the people listed under What other people can see, under the settings listed there.
- A label photograph a person has reviewed and approved as a wine's reference image, without your name, as described below.
Every other photograph, including every scan, is reachable only by you.
The vision model that reads the label
To identify a bottle we send the photograph to a third-party vision model inside the request itself, not as a link, so at no point does your photograph sit at an address anyone else could open. The provider receives the image in order to read the label and does not retain it as training data under the terms we use.
Looking up a wine we do not hold
When the label is not in our catalogue, we send the words printed on it, and nothing else, to the same provider, which searches the open web for that wine. Nothing about you travels with it: the search sees the bottle, not the person holding it.
Using label photographs to improve Sommplicity
What we do. When a scan resolves to a wine, we may derive a mathematical fingerprint of the label and keep it, and we may keep a copy of the label photograph to use as that bottle's reference image, which other users may see.
Why we are allowed to. Our legal basis is legitimate interests. A wine identification app is only useful if it recognises bottles, and photographs taken by the people using it are the only practical source of label images: they are not available to license from anywhere, and photographing every bottle in the world is not something a small app can do. We have written down the assessment behind this.
What this is not. We do not use your photographs to advertise anything, we do not sell them, and we do not publish them anywhere outside Sommplicity.
What we check first. A photograph is reviewed by a person before any other user sees it. A label photograph can accidentally include a face, a room or a receipt, and none of those reaches anybody else.
You can say no, at any time, in one tap. My Account, then Photos and data. Turning it off stops any future photograph of yours being used this way, and removes any reference image of yours already in use. It does not affect your own photographs, your Wine Memory, or anything else about how the app works for you.
When you delete your account, your photographs go with it, including any being used as a reference image. The anonymous fingerprint stays, because it describes a wine label rather than a person and carries no link to you or your account. It cannot be used to identify you, to reconstruct your photograph, or to work out what you scanned.
Who else handles your data
Everyone below is a service Sommplicity runs on. Each one is here because the app cannot work without it, not because we chose to share anything.
| Who | What they do for us | What they see |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Hosting, sign-in, database and file storage | Everything, as the place it is stored |
| OpenRouter, and the AI model providers it passes each request to (today Google, and providers hosting Qwen and OpenAI open models) | Reads the label photograph, and searches the web for a wine, its producer or its price when we do not hold them | The photograph, and the words printed on the label, for the length of one request. Never your name or your account. |
| Sentry | Crash and error reporting | Technical details of a failure only. Not your account, not your email, not your photographs. |
| Resend | Sends email, including a feedback report you send us | Your email address, and the text of a report you send |
| Expo | Delivers app updates, and delivers notifications to your phone | Your phone's notification address, and the words of the notification, such as a friend's name |
| Apple | App distribution, Sign in with Apple, notifications to iPhones, and turning a photo's location, your phone's location or a city you type into a place name on your phone | Whatever Apple's own terms describe |
| Sign in with Google, if you use it | Whatever Google's own terms describe. If you sign in with Google, we copy your Google profile photograph once and never ask Google again. |
How long we keep everything else
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Your account, profile and Wine Memory | Until you delete your account |
| Friends, cheers, bottles sent between friends, questions about bottles, tasting guests | Until you remove them, or delete your account |
| Place names on tastings, and notes written for friends | Until you change or remove them, or delete your account |
| Your profile photograph | Until you replace or remove it, or delete your account |
| Your phone's notification address | Until you delete your account, or your phone stops accepting Sommplicity notifications |
| Corrections you sent us | Until you delete your account |
| Feedback and bug reports | Until you delete your account |
| Learning progress and practice history | Until you delete your account |
| Crash reports | Held by Sentry under their retention period |
| Photographs | As set out above |
We do not keep an anonymised residue of your account. When an account goes, it goes.
Your rights
You can ask us to do any of the following, free, and we will respond within 7 days. These are the rights UK and EU data protection law gives people there, and we extend all of them to everyone using Sommplicity, wherever they live, because operating two standards is how one of them quietly stops being true.
| Right | What it means here |
|---|---|
| See your data | We send you a file containing your rows and your saved photographs. |
| Correct it | Anything wrong gets fixed. |
| Delete it | Your account and everything held against it is removed. No queue, no waiting period, no reversal. |
| Take it elsewhere | The export is a file you can open and keep, not a database dump. |
| Object to a use | Including the label reference image use described above, which has its own switch in the app. |
| Restrict a use | Ask us to hold something without using it while a question is resolved. |
How to ask: email support@somm-plicity.com, or use the buttons in the app under My Account, then Photos and data. Today both are fulfilled by a person running a script. That is a deliberate choice at this size and not a limit on the right.
What survives an account deletion, and why it is not yours. Catalogue information your activity helped create or improve: a producer, a wine, a vintage, a grape link. These describe bottles, not people, and carry no reference to you. A deletion that unwound them would delete other people's knowledge rather than your data.
If you are not satisfied and you are in the United Kingdom, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk. In the European Economic Area it is your national data protection authority. In California it is the California Privacy Protection Agency at cppa.ca.gov, or the Attorney General. We would rather you told us first.
If you live in California
We do not sell your personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. There is no advertising in Sommplicity at all, so there is nothing to opt out of.
You have the rights in the table above, and exercising any of them will never mean worse service, fewer features or a different price. Ask the same way: support@somm-plicity.com.
Children
Sommplicity is not for children. You confirm you are of legal drinking age in your country when you sign in. We do not knowingly collect anything from anyone under that age, and if we learn that we have, we delete it.
Security
Photographs and files are private by default and scoped to your account by database policy rather than by application code, so a bug in a screen cannot expose another person's data. Sign-in is by one-time email code, by email and password, or by Apple or Google. If you choose a password, our hosting provider stores it hashed and Sommplicity never sees it or keeps a copy.
No system is perfect. If you find something wrong, support@somm-plicity.com reaches a person who will act on it.
Changes to this policy
If we change how your data is used in a way that affects you, we will tell you in the app before the change takes effect rather than quietly updating this page. The version and date at the top change every time anything here does.
Related
The full photograph rules, including the reasoning behind every period, are in our photo retention policy. The licence you grant over content you upload is in our terms of use.