Privacy Policy

Last updated: November 5, 2026

Glug is built on a simple idea: knowing wine is just about knowing what you like. The more you log, the more we learn about you and the better we get at recommending the right bottles. This policy outlines what we collect.

Who we are

Glug is operated by Glug Wine, Inc. If you have questions about this policy, reach us at privacy@glug-wine.com.

What we collect

When you create a Glug account and use the app, we collect the following:

We do not collect your device's location, contacts, or payment information. A restaurant you add to a scan does record where you were when you scanned, and adding one is always your choice.

Waitlist

If you join the waitlist on glug-wine.com, we collect your name, mobile number, email address, whether you use an iPhone or Android phone, your Google account email (only if you use Android, so we can invite you to the Google Play test), your neighborhood, how often you order wine at restaurants, and, if you tell us, who told you about Glug. We use this only to invite you to Glug and to contact you about Glug. We do not sell it or share it with advertisers. You can ask us to delete it at any time by emailing privacy@glug-wine.com.

How we use your data

What other Glug users can see

Glug lets you follow people, see what they log, and like and comment on their logs. This is who sees what. A link you share from the app can also show a log or a scan's top picks to people outside Glug; see Share links below.

From the app you can share a link to one of your logs, to the top picks of a wine list scan, or to your profile. A link opens in Glug when the app is installed, and a page on glug-wine.com when it is not. In Glug, a log link opens the log for the people who can see it there and sends anyone else to your profile; a link to a scan's top picks shows them to anyone who can see your logs in Glug and sends anyone else to your profile; and a person you have blocked, or who has blocked you, sees only that the link is not available.

On glug-wine.com, a log's page shows the log to anyone who has the link, signed in to Glug or not, when the log is shared and your profile is public: your display name and profile photo, the wine and its vintage, your rating, whether Glug marks the wine as rare, the restaurant's name and neighborhood if the log has one, the wine's color and the date. Otherwise the page says only that the log is private, or that it is no longer available if it was deleted. A scan's page shows your display name and photo, the restaurant's name and up to three wines with your match percentage while your profile is public, and otherwise says only that the picks are private, or no longer available if the scan was deleted. A profile link's page still shows nothing about you.

When you first share a scan's top picks, Glug keeps a copy of what you shared with that scan: up to three wines, as their producer, name, vintage, color and type, which Top Pick slot each one filled, whether the wine is rare and your match percentage, the restaurant's name if the scan had one at that moment, and when you first shared it. The copy does not change afterwards, so removing the restaurant from the scan later does not remove its name from the link. Deleting the scan, or your account, deletes the copy and the link stops working.

A link is the key to what it shows: anyone you send it to, or who gets it from them, can open it, and it keeps working for someone you have blocked, because the page on glug-wine.com cannot tell who is looking. Glug does not record who opens a page. Our server answers each page from the link alone, without a sign-in, and limits how often one device can ask; our hosting providers keep ordinary request logs. The pages ask search engines not to index them. A link never shows your notes, prices, occasion, food pairings, any photo of a wine or of your scan, or a restaurant's address or map coordinates.

Push notifications

Glug can send notifications to your phone when someone follows you, asks to follow you, accepts your follow request, likes your log or comments on it. They are off until you turn them on. Glug asks once, after you like, comment on or follow someone, and you can turn them on or off at any time in Profile → Settings → Notifications.

A notification shows the person's name and the wine on your log, as its producer and name, for example “Sadhana liked your Frog's Leap Cabernet Sauvignon”. It never shows comment text, your notes, prices or anything else from your log.

To deliver them, Glug stores a push token for your phone, issued by Firebase Cloud Messaging, a Google service, together with your user id, whether the phone is an iPhone or an Android phone, whether notifications are switched on for that phone, and when the phone last checked in with Glug. Google (Firebase Cloud Messaging) and, for iPhones, Apple (Apple Push Notification service) carry each notification to your phone. Google acts as our processor under the Firebase Data Processing and Security Terms. They receive your phone's token, the notification text (a name and a wine) and the ids Glug needs to open the right screen when you tap it, never your phone number, email address or logs. An undelivered notification is held for at most 24 hours. Firebase also keeps an installation identifier for the app on your phone.

You control notifications with the switch in Profile → Settings → Notifications and in your phone's own settings. Turning the switch off stops notifications to that phone at once: the phone discards its token and Glug marks the stored token as off. Signing out of a phone deletes that phone's token from Glug. A phone that has not opened Glug in 270 days stops receiving notifications. When you delete your account in the app, every token is deleted and the phone you use asks Firebase to delete its installation identifier, which Google removes within 180 days. We do not use notifications for marketing.

Restaurants and your city

When you scan a wine list, you can add the restaurant you are at. It is always optional. You find it by typing its name, and you can change it later or remove it by tapping the × on the restaurant card. Your recent scans then show the restaurant's name, and if you log a wine from that scan, the log is filled in with the restaurant, which you can remove by tapping the × on the Where row in the log form.

You can also set your city in Profile → Settings → Location → Your city, so that restaurants near it come first when you search. Until you set one, or after you choose Use New York (default) there, Glug uses New York. Glug uses your city only for that.

Glug never reads your phone's location (GPS). What you type in the restaurant or city search is sent through our server to Google Maps Platform (Places API) to find matches. Google also receives a random session token, which groups the searches for one pick, and the center of your city, or of New York until you set one. Google does not receive your name, phone number or account from Glug. We do not store what you type, only the place you pick.

Your city is private to you. It never appears on your profile, in the feed or anywhere else other Glug users can see. The restaurant on a scan is private to you as well, unless you share the scan's top picks: the restaurant's name is then shown with the shared picks (see Share links below). The restaurant on a log is different: its name and neighborhood show on the log to everyone who can see the log. That is anyone signed in to Glug if your profile is public, and the people you accept if it is private. A log with sharing off is seen only by you. The address and map coordinates stay on the scan and are never shown to other Glug users or on glug-wine.com. If you remove the restaurant from a log, it is removed everywhere that log is shown.

Tapping a restaurant on a log opens it in Google Maps, outside Glug. The link holds only the restaurant's name, neighborhood and place id. Google's own privacy policy applies from there.

Within Glug, our team may count how many scans were made at each restaurant across all users, to understand where Glug is used. Those counts do not name you. We may share totals like these with restaurants, never in a way that identifies you.

Keeping Glug respectful

Comments that contain offensive words are blocked before they are posted. You can report any profile, log or comment. Reports go to the Glug team, and the person you report is not told who reported them. We review reports within 24 hours and remove content, and suspend or delete accounts, that break our Terms of Use. You can also block anyone. A block removes follows and follow requests between you and hides each of you from the other in Glug. The person you block is not told.

AI processing

Glug uses Anthropic's Claude API to read the wine lists and bottle labels you photograph. When you scan, your photo is sent to Anthropic's API to identify the wines on it; your name, phone number and taste profile are not included in these requests. Your recommendations are generated by Glug's own matching system.

We do not use your data to train AI models. Data sent to Anthropic is processed under Anthropic's API terms — see Anthropic's privacy policy.

Third-party services

Glug uses the following third-party services, each with their own privacy policy:

We do not sell your data to any third party and do not share it with advertisers.

Data retention

We retain your account data for as long as your account is active. After you delete your account we also keep one anonymous line, described below: the week you joined, the week you deleted it and whether you used an iPhone or an Android phone. Photos you scan are stored in private storage and are not automatically deleted while your account is active; deleting a menu scan from your scan history also deletes its photos, and all of your scanned photos are deleted when you delete your account. Your profile photo is not private: it is stored with Supabase and served from a link that anyone who has it can open. It is deleted when you remove or replace it, or when you delete your account. Your taste profile and ratings are stored as long as your account exists. Glug also keeps a history of your taste sentence: each version and when it changed, including earlier versions rebuilt from your past ratings. Only Glug's admins can see the full history. When your sentence changes after you log a public wine, people who can see your profile may see the new sentence in their Feed. The history is deleted when you delete your account. Reports you send are deleted when you delete your account. A report someone else sends about you or your content is kept as a record of moderation after that content or your account is deleted. It keeps no copy of what was reported, only the reason and any note the reporter wrote. Push tokens are kept while a phone stays signed in with notifications on: a token is deleted when you sign out of that phone, when the phone replaces it with a new one, and when you delete your account. A token you switched off stays stored, marked off, until you sign out of that phone or delete your account. A restaurant on a scan is kept with that scan: it is deleted when you remove it from the scan, when you delete the scan, or when you delete your account. When you share a scan's top picks, the copy Glug keeps of the picks and the restaurant's name is separate too: it is deleted when you delete the scan or your account, and removing the restaurant from the scan does not remove its name from that copy. The restaurant saved with a log is a separate copy: it is deleted when you remove it from the log, when you delete the log, or when you delete your account, and deleting the scan does not remove it from the log. Your city is kept until you choose Use New York (default) in Profile → Settings → Location → Your city, which deletes it, or delete your account.

Your rights

You can, at any time:

To delete your account, go to Profile → Settings → Delete account within the app. This immediately and permanently removes your account and its personal data, including your profile, logs, preferences, scan history, scanned photos, profile photo, follows and follow requests, likes, comments (including those on other people's logs), blocks, notifications, push tokens, the restaurants on your scans and logs, the picks and restaurant names you shared by link, your city and the reports you sent. You can also email us to request deletion directly. Our Delete your account page explains exactly what is deleted, what is kept, and how to delete single logs, scans, comments or your profile photo instead. We keep one anonymous line for each deleted account, with the week you joined, the week you deleted it and whether you used an iPhone or an Android phone, so we can count how many people leave. It has no name, phone number or account id.

Age

Glug is an alcohol-related app intended for users aged 21 and over in the United States, or the legal drinking age in your country. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone below the legal drinking age. If you believe an underage user has created an account, contact us at privacy@glug-wine.com and we will delete it promptly.

Changes to this policy

We are in early development. Our data practices may evolve as the app grows. We will update this policy and notify users of any material changes before they take effect. The date at the top of this page reflects the most recent update.

Contact

Questions, requests, or concerns: privacy@glug-wine.com