Privacy Policy

Effective date: August 5, 2026 · Ajitama, LLC (Maine, USA)

Ajitama is a social ramen journal: you check in bowls of ramen, rate them, and discover new shops. This policy explains what we collect, why, and what we will never do with it. It's written to be read, not skimmed past.

The short version

• We never sell your data. Not to advertisers, not to "partners," not in aggregate. Ever.
• There are no ads and no ad tracking in Ajitama.
• Location is used for verification only — proving a check-in happened at a real shop — never for advertising or profiling.
• Guest mode sends nothing. Until you create an account, your journal lives only on your device.
• You can delete your account and journal from inside the app, any time.

What we collect

Account. An email address and a username, via our authentication provider. Your username is your public name inside the app.

Your journal. Check-ins: the dish, your rating, optional notes, sensory detail (sliders, toppings, flavors), and optional photos. This is the point of the app — you're choosing to record it.

Location, at check-in. When you check in or add a shop, the app uses your device's GPS (with your permission) to verify the visit and place the shop on the map. We store the verification result with the check-in. We do not track your location in the background, build movement profiles, or use location for anything except verification and distance-based discovery.

Device signals for integrity. Timestamps, and coarse signals used by our anti-cheat systems (for example, whether a series of check-ins would require impossible travel). These exist to keep ratings honest — fake ratings are the one thing this community cannot survive.

Push token. If you allow notifications, your device's push token, used only to deliver notifications you signed up for (friend requests and the like).

Crash reports. If the app crashes, a crash report (device model, OS version, stack trace) may be sent to our error-reporting service so we can fix it. Crash reports are not used for advertising or profiling.

What other users can see

Ajitama is social by design. Other signed-in users can see your username, rank, and public activity: your ratings as part of community aggregates, your place on leaderboards, pioneer credit for dishes you logged first, and your profile as shared with friends you've connected with. Your email address is never visible to other users. Community numbers (shop ratings, "best ajitama" boards) are aggregates — they show the community's verdict, not your individual rows.

What we do with it

• Run the app: your journal, your progression, your friends.
• Compute community aggregates: rankings, discovery, recommendations. These are calculated from real check-ins only — we never seed, buy, or manufacture ratings.
• Verify and protect: GPS verification, rate limits, and anti-cheat sweeps that keep the rankings honest.
• Notify you: only things you opted into.

What we will never do

• Sell or rent your personal data.
• Show you ads or share data with ad networks.
• Use your location for anything but verification and discovery.
• Blend paid placement into rankings (paid placement, where it ever exists, is unmistakably marked and never touches the math).

Service providers

We use a small number of infrastructure providers to run Ajitama, each receiving only what's needed to do its job:

• Supabase — our database and authentication (account data, journal, aggregates).
• Expo — app delivery and push-notification relay (push tokens).
• Sentry — crash reporting (crash reports only).
• OpenStreetMap Nominatim — when you type a city or address into search, that text is sent to OSM's geocoding service to find coordinates.

These providers process data on our behalf; none of them may sell it or use it for their own advertising.

Your content

You own what you submit — your reviews, ratings, notes, and photos remain yours. By submitting, you grant Ajitama, LLC a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, display, reproduce, aggregate, and build derived data from it (this is what lets community ratings, rankings, and recommendations exist and remain stable over time). The full terms live in our Terms of Service.

Retention and deletion

Your data stays as long as your account does. Deleting your account — available inside the app, Settings → Delete account — permanently removes your account and journal from our servers. Community aggregates are recomputed without your check-ins; anonymous derived statistics that no longer identify you may persist. Shops and dishes you added remain (they describe real places, and the community relies on them), but they are no longer connected to you.

Guest mode

Using Ajitama without an account keeps everything on your device. Nothing is sent to our servers — no account, no analytics, nothing. If you later create an account, you choose whether to sync your local journal.

Security

Every table in our database is protected by row-level security; nothing is publicly readable. Access from the app is scoped to your own session, and we run automated security sweeps against our own infrastructure. No system is perfect, but honest data handling is a founding principle here, not a compliance checkbox.

Children

Ajitama is not directed at children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect data from them. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, contact us and we'll delete it.

Changes

If this policy changes, we'll update the effective date above and note material changes in the app. We will never quietly weaken the "what we will never do" section.

Contact

Ajitama, LLC · Maine, USA
Email: admin@ramenleague.com