Privacy Policy

Pulse is operated by Brew and Food, LLC ("Pulse," "we," "us"), which runs brewandfood.com and its related apps to help people find and verify live happy hours and deals. Brew and Food, LLC is responsible for the personal data described here. This policy explains what we collect, why, and the choices you have. Pulse is an early-stage, community-run app — this policy is written in plain language on purpose, and we'll update it as the product grows.

Information we collect

• Account information. Sign-in is handled by Clerk (our authentication provider) via Google or email. We receive your email address and a unique account ID — Pulse never sees or stores your password.
• Date of birth and phone check. When Pulse asks you to confirm you are 21 or older, we store the date of birth you give, only to check that you meet the age requirement. It is never shown to venues or other people. When Pulse asks you to verify a phone number, we text you a code and keep only a one-way fingerprint of the number (so one number can belong to one account) and its last four digits, never the number itself. Both are deleted when you delete your account.
• Location.Most in-app activity (casting a Pulse, verifying a deal, live venue chat) records your location as a coarse, hashed map cell — not your exact coordinates — so we can judge proximity without storing a precise history of everywhere you've been. Opening a venue's page, including from its QR code, records nothing about you. Before October 15, 2026, opening a venue's page recorded precise coordinates for that moment; those older records are deleted when you delete your account. Sharing your location is always optional — you can skip it and still browse the map using a default city view.
• Approximate location from your IP address. When you submit a new deal, we derive a rough distance estimate from your network connection as an informational cross-check — this is never precise enough to identify an address, and it never affects your trust score, a deal's confidence, or whether any action of yours is accepted.
• Content you submit.Photos, notes, deal details, vibe tags, venue replies, and live venue-chat messages you choose to post, along with your account ID and the venue/deal they're attached to.
• Photos you submit as evidence.When you photograph a menu, sign, or happy-hour flyer, we send that photo to Anthropic's Claude AI to read and extract details (schedule, prices, items) for you to review before anything is saved — your original photo is stored with location metadata (e.g. any embedded GPS coordinates) removed before it's kept.
• Phone number (optional). Only if you opt into SMS alerts for a favorited venue. Used solely to send those alerts, verify the opt-in, and process STOP/START requests — never for anything else.
• Usage & device data.Basic technical data (browser type, device type, pages visited, in-app feature usage) and, if you enable them, push notification tokens for your device. This is collected by our own first-party analytics — we don't send it to a third-party analytics or advertising network.
• Payment information (venue owners only). If you subscribe to Pulse Pro, billing is handled entirely by Stripe. Pulse receives confirmation that a subscription is active — we never receive or store your card number.

How we use it

• Show you live deals and happy hours near you
• Verify that a check-in or evidence submission genuinely happened on-site
• Extract structured details (schedule, items, prices) from a photo you submit, for you to review before it's saved
• Compute your trust score from your contribution history
• Send notifications you've opted into (nearby alerts, trust updates, scan alerts, SMS alerts)
• Process venue owner subscriptions and provide dashboard analytics
• Investigate reported content and enforce our Terms of Service
• Understand how the app is used, in aggregate, so we can improve it
• Keep the app secure and diagnose problems

How we share it

We don't sell your personal data. We share it only with the service providers that run the app on our behalf, each bound by their own privacy terms:

• Clerk — authentication
• Stripe — venue owner billing
• Resend — transactional and newsletter email
• Geoapify — map tiles, venue search/geocoding, and the approximate IP-based location estimate described above
• Anthropic — reads photos you submit as evidence to extract structured details, as described above
• textbee — delivers text message alerts and sign-in codes, only if you've opted in

Other Scouts can see content you choose to post (photos, notes, deal check-ins) and, if you follow each other, your general activity. Signed-in Scouts can see leaderboards: your screen name and points for the week, by the ZIP code of the venues where you scouted, updated once a day. Leaderboards never show times or the venues you visited, and you can hide your name from them at any time. Venue owners may share aggregated, anonymized trend data (e.g. neighborhood foot-traffic patterns) with hospitality partners — this never includes identifiable data about an individual user.

Your choices

• Location sharing is optional at every step — you can browse without it
• Manage or disable push and email notifications from your Profile settings
• Hide your name from leaderboards with “Show my name on leaderboards” on the Leaders page
• Opted into SMS alerts? Reply STOP to any message to opt out immediately, or manage it from your Profile settings
• Request a copy of your data or ask us to delete your account by emailing privacy@brewandfood.com
• Every marketing email includes an unsubscribe link

Cookies & similar technologies

Signing in sets a session cookie through Clerk, our authentication provider, so you stay signed in between visits. Our own product analytics uses a randomly generated identifier stored in your browser's local storage, not a cookie, to recognize repeat visits from the same browser — this identifier isn't linked to your name or email unless you're signed in. We don't use third-party advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

Data retention

We keep your information for as long as your account is active, or as needed to provide the service. If you delete your account, we remove or anonymize your personal information within a reasonable time, except where we're required to keep records (e.g. billing history) for legal or accounting reasons. Live venue-chat messages are an exception with a shorter window by design: once a happy hour ends, its chat closes to new messages and the existing messages are deleted about 48 hours later.

Children's privacy

Pulse is for adults 21 and over. It is not directed at, and we do not knowingly collect information from, anyone under 21. If you believe someone under 21 has created an account, contact us and we'll remove it.

Security

We use reasonable technical and organizational measures to protect your information, including:

• We never see or store your password — sign-in is delegated entirely to Clerk
• We don't keep a history of your precise GPS coordinates — most location data is reduced to a coarse map cell before it's stored, as described above
• Photos you submit have location and device metadata stripped before they're stored
• All traffic between your device and Pulse is encrypted in transit (HTTPS)
• We rate-limit sensitive actions and verify on-site presence before accepting evidence that depends on it

No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure, so we can't guarantee absolute security. If you believe you've found a security vulnerability in Pulse, please report it to security@brewandfood.com rather than disclosing it publicly — we'll acknowledge reports promptly.

Changes to this policy

As Pulse grows we may update this policy. We'll change the effective date above and, for material changes, make a reasonable effort to let you know in-app.

Contact

Questions about this policy? Email privacy@brewandfood.com.