Privacy

Classified Cask is a place to record what you drink, keep a cellar and a wishlist, and run or join a spirits club. This notice explains what we do with your personal data when you use it, and what you can ask us to do about that.

The controller — the party responsible in law for your data — is Paul Williams, trading as Classified Cask. This notice covers the Classified Cask app and website. It does not cover other people’s sites you reach by following a link from here; once you leave, their own privacy policy applies.

We have written it in plain English on purpose. Where a legal term is unavoidable it is explained where it appears rather than in a glossary at the end.

Almost everything here is something you typed or tapped. We do not buy data about you, and we do not track you across other websites.

Your account

• Email address — used to sign you in and to send you account emails (password resets, confirmation).
• Password — stored only as a one-way hash by our authentication provider. Nobody at Classified Cask can read it, including us.
• Date of birth — asked once, at sign-up, to confirm you are 18 or over. It is never shown on your profile and never shared with clubs, brands or venues. You cannot change it yourself once set — ask us if you mistyped it.

Your profile

Display name, bio, avatar photo, any social links and expertise areas you add. This is the part other members can see. It is optional — an account works with none of it filled in.

What you record

• Drinks and tasting notes — what you drank, when, your rating, flavour tags and free text. Each note has its own visibility setting.
• Your cellar and wishlists — bottles you own or want, including what you paid if you enter it.
• Sightings — a bottle you spotted somewhere, the place, and — if you attach one — a map location. This is stored with your account and shown according to the visibility you choose on the sighting.
• Club and event activity — which clubs you belong to, your role in them, meeting and event RSVPs, votes, swap proposals, comments and kudos.
• Photos — bottle, club and event photos you upload, and your avatar.

Drinking-tracking data

If — and only if — you switch it on in Settings, we count the drinks you log against a target you set. Information about how much alcohol you drink is health data, which the law treats as a special category needing your explicit consent. That is why it is off by default, why nothing about it appears on your profile or to your clubs, and why turning it off in Settings is enough to stop it.

Location

• “Near me” buttons — your browser asks your permission, and the coordinates are put in the page address to filter that one list. We do not save them to your account. Like any web address they will appear in our hosting provider’s request logs.
• Locations you attach — coordinates you deliberately attach to a sighting are stored with it, because that is the point of the feature.

Moderation records

Reports you make about content, cases raised about content you posted, and any appeal you file. Moderators’ identities are not shown to you, and yours is not shown to the person you reported.

Measurement

We record when a sponsor card is shown to you, when you click one, when you hide one, and when you click through to a retailer’s catalogue listing. These records include your user id. They are counted, not profiled: every member sees the same sponsor cards, and nothing you do changes which ones you are shown.

Technical data

Our hosting and database providers keep ordinary server logs — IP address, browser, the page requested, the time — for a short period, for security and debugging. We also keep an audit record when one member looks up another by email address to send an invitation, so that facility cannot be used quietly to test whether an address has an account.

Data protection law asks us to have a specific reason for each use, and to tell you which one. Ours are:

• Running your account and the app — Your account, profile, notes, cellar, wishlists, clubs and events exist because you asked us to keep them. Lawful basis: performance of a contract — the terms you accept by using Classified Cask.
• Confirming you are 18 or over — We hold your date of birth to keep alcohol content away from under-18s and to stay within the UK advertising codes that apply to alcohol. Lawful basis: legitimate interests — ours in operating lawfully and responsibly, and the wider public interest in not marketing alcohol to children. This is not optional: without an answer you cannot use the app.
• Drinking tracking — Lawful basis: your consent, and for the health-data element your explicit consent, given by switching it on. You can withdraw it at any time in Settings, and withdrawing it does not affect anything else about your account.
• Your device location — Used only when you press a “near me” button and your browser asks you. Lawful basis: your consent, which you can withdraw in your browser or phone settings.
• Keeping the app safe and civil — Moderation, reports, appeals, banned-term checks and automated screening of uploaded images. Lawful basis: legitimate interests in members not being shown abusive or illegal content, weighed against the modest privacy impact of keeping a record of what was reported and what we did about it.
• Security and keeping the service working — Server logs, rate limits and the email-lookup audit. Lawful basis: legitimate interests in preventing abuse and diagnosing faults.
• Counting sponsor and retailer clicks — So a sponsor can be told how their card performed and so we can tell whether a catalogue listing is useful. Lawful basis: legitimate interests in a sustainable app. Sponsors are given counts, never your identity, and the cards you see are not chosen based on anything about you.
• Meeting our own legal duties — Responding to a valid legal request, or keeping a record we are required to keep. Lawful basis: legal obligation.

Where our basis is legitimate interests you have the right to object — see your rights. Where it is consent you can withdraw it, and we will stop.

What we do not do

We do not sell your data. We do not share it with advertisers to target you. We do not build a profile of you to decide what you are shown. No decision with a legal or similarly significant effect on you is made by software alone: uploaded images are screened automatically, but any moderation action that follows is taken by a person and can be appealed to a human.

Classified Cask uses no advertising cookies, no analytics cookies and no third-party trackers of any kind. There is nothing here for a cookie banner to ask you about. What we do store is either the app remembering you are signed in, or the app remembering something you did — and all of it stays on your device except the sign-in cookies:

• Sign-in cookies — set by our authentication provider so you stay signed in between pages. Without them you would have to sign in on every click. Signing out clears them.
• Your light or dark theme choice — saved only when you actually use the theme switch, so the app does not flash the wrong colours next time. Never sent to us.
• Your recent searches — the last few things you typed into search, kept on your device so the search box can offer them back to you. They are not sent to us as a list and we do not build a search history for your account.
• Install prompt state — whether you have installed the app, how many times we have offered, and when you last said “not now” — so we stop asking.
• Dismissed help text — which of the app’s explanatory panels you have closed, so a tip you have read does not keep reappearing.
• Your note-entry preference — whether you last used the quick or the detailed tasting-note form, so it opens the way you left it.
• Notes written offline — if you write a tasting note with no signal, it is held on your device until it can be sent, then removed. Until then it exists only on your phone.
• Offline cache — if you install Classified Cask as an app, it keeps copies of pages you have visited so they still open without a signal.

Everything in that list except the sign-in cookies is removed by clearing site data in your browser, or by uninstalling the app.

Maps are the one place a third party sees you here: the map tiles come from OpenStreetMap, so loading a map tells their servers your IP address and roughly which area you are looking at. Pages without a map make no such request.

Other members

Your profile is visible to other signed-in members. Each tasting note carries its own visibility setting, and you choose the default in Settings. Anything you post inside a club is visible to that club’s members. Your date of birth and your drinking-tracking data are never visible to anyone but you.

Brands

A brand can see tasting notes about its own bottles — but only notes you have set to public, and only the text, rating, flavour tags and date. No name, no profile link, no way back to you. Brands also see aggregate figures, such as how many notes were written in a month and the average rating.

Private notes and the community picture

A note set to private is hidden from other members and from brands: nobody sees its text, its rating or that it is yours. When you save a note as private, the form tells you that its flavour tags still count, with no name attached, towards the app’s community picture of a bottle and its comparison with the official tasting notes. Only the tags are counted, as totals; the note itself is never shared. Notes you made private before this was introduced are not counted. Notes made in event mode are private; event mode asks you once whether their tags may count, and you can change the answer in Settings. You can make a note public, or a club note, to stop its tags counting as private, or delete the note.

Companies that run parts of the service

These process data on our instructions, under contract, and cannot use it for their own purposes:

• Supabase — our database, sign-in and file storage. Holds essentially everything described above.
• Vercel — hosting. Sees the requests your browser makes and keeps short-lived server logs.
• Google Cloud Vision — when you photograph a shelf or a bottle to identify it, and when you upload any photo, the image is sent to Google’s image API — to read the labels, and to screen it for content we will not host. A scan photo you do not go on to submit is not stored by us.
• Stripe — payments, if you pay for Supporter. Stripe takes your card details and billing address on its own page; we never see your card number. We keep a record of each payment (the amount, the dates it covers and Stripe’s reference for it) for as long as the tax rules require, even if you delete your account. Stripe is also a controller for some of this data, for fraud prevention and its own legal duties.
• OpenStreetMap — map tiles and address lookup. Sees your IP address, and the place name you typed when you search for one.

Retailers you click through to

When you follow a link to a shop you leave Classified Cask and that shop’s own privacy policy takes over. Where a link earns us a commission we say so beside the link itself, and the shop may be told the visit came from us. We are not told what you looked at or what you bought.

Anyone else

Only where the law requires it, or to establish or defend a legal claim. We will not hand over your data for anything else, and we do not sell it.

Where

The database and uploaded files are held in London. The servers that build your pages run in London too. Our suppliers are US-headquartered companies, so some data — support access, logs, and images sent for recognition — can be seen outside the UK. Where that happens it is covered by the transfer terms in our contract with each supplier (the UK’s International Data Transfer Agreement or the equivalent addendum to the EU standard clauses).

How long

• Your account — kept until you delete it or ask us to. Deleting it removes your name, email, photo, profile and date of birth straight away, and signs you out for good.
• Deleted content — removed straight away, but our database backups are kept for 30 days, so a copy can survive in a backup for up to a month before it rolls off.
• Moderation records — kept for 12 months after a case is closed, so an appeal can be reviewed and so a repeated pattern can be recognised.
• Server logs — short-lived, on our suppliers’ standard schedules.
• Your date of birth — kept for as long as the account exists, and removed when you delete it. Deleting it while the account is open would only mean asking you again.

What you added stays when you delete your account — tasting notes, bottles, sightings, photos of bottles, catalogue entries, and what you contributed to clubs, such as meetings and votes — shown as “Former member”, with your name, email and photo gone from it. Clubs and the catalogue are shared, and taking your part out would take apart records other people built with you. Anything only you could see stays that way. If you want something removed completely, delete it before you go, or ask us.

These are yours by law, they are free to use, and using them will never count against your account. We will answer within one month.

• See what we hold — ask for a copy of your personal data.
• Correct it — most of it you can edit yourself in Settings. Your date of birth is the exception — it can only be answered once, so ask us if you mistyped it.
• Take it with you — Settings will export your tasting notes, your sightings and your cellar as spreadsheet files, and your wishlist and collections export from their own pages — right now, without asking anyone. For anything else, ask.
• Delete it — delete your account yourself in Settings, or ask us to. Your name, email, photo, profile and date of birth go straight away and nobody can sign in to the account again. What you added stays, shown as “Former member” (see section 6). If you want any of that removed as well, delete it first or ask us.
• Object, or ask us to pause — where we rely on legitimate interests you can object, and you can ask us to restrict what we do with your data while a disagreement is sorted out.
• Withdraw consent — turn drinking tracking off in Settings, or revoke location permission in your browser. Neither affects anything we did before you withdrew.

To use any of these, email paul.williams1978@gmail.com. There is no form to fill in and you do not have to give a reason.

Classified Cask is for adults. You are asked your date of birth before an account is created, and if you are under 18 no account is made at all. We do not knowingly hold data about anyone under 18. If you believe we do, tell us and we will delete it.

If we change what we do with your data, we change this page first and update the date at the top. If a change matters to you — a new purpose, a new company handling your data — we will tell you in the app rather than leaving you to notice.

This version: 5 November 2026.

The controller of your personal data is Paul Williams, trading as Classified Cask, of Woodbridge, IP12 4LY. You can ask us anything about this notice, or make any of the requests in section 7, by emailing paul.williams1978@gmail.com. Please say what you are asking for — we will reply within one month, and we will tell you sooner if we need anything from you to identify your account.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, please tell us first — we would rather put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK’s data protection regulator, at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint or on 0303 123 1113. Complaining to them does not stop you asking us as well, and you do not have to come to us first.