The Specials Menu
Privacy Policy
Last updated
The Specials Menu (“we”, “us”, or “our”) helps people find restaurant specials and happy hours. This policy explains how we handle information when you browse, create an account, contact us, or manage a restaurant listing.
Who to contact
The Specials Menu operates from British Columbia, Canada, and is responsible for the information handled through this service. For privacy questions, requests, or complaints, email our privacy contact at info@thespecialsmenu.com or use our contact form.
Information we collect and why
- Accounts and saved places. We process your email address, authentication information, account identifiers, and the restaurants you save to provide sign-in, account recovery, and favourites across devices. Browsing does not require an account.
- Searches and location. We process the city or area you enter, your search settings, and, if you allow browser location access, your coordinates to find nearby specials and suggest nearby areas. An existing browser permission may be reused when you return. You can search by city instead and revoke location permission in your browser settings. Location searches can include coordinates in the page URL, so browser history and links you share may contain that location.
- Messages and area requests. The contact form sends your name, email address, and message to our team so we can respond. Area requests send the city or area you enter so we can plan coverage; they do not ask for your email address. Please avoid including sensitive information that we do not need.
- Restaurant claims and contributions. We process your account, business details, verification email or phone, evidence links, and notes to review your authority to manage a listing. Listing details, specials, and photos you publish are public. Verification material is used for review and administration, rather than displayed as part of the public listing.
- Change reports. We store the offer reported, the reason, any details you provide, and review information to investigate inaccurate specials. Reports do not require an account. Please leave personal information out of report details.
- Technical and security information. Requests expose information such as IP address, browser information, requested URLs, and timestamps to our hosting infrastructure. We use technical records and error information to operate, secure, and troubleshoot the service. Abuse controls use hashed identifiers derived from IP addresses to limit repeated searches, messages, and reports.
Cookies and measurement
Sign-in uses first-party authentication cookies to keep your session working. Blocking or clearing these cookies may sign you out or prevent account features from working.
When restaurant engagement measurement is enabled, a first-party visit cookie lasts up to 30 minutes and helps avoid counting the same restaurant view repeatedly. We count listing views and changes to saved places. Restaurant dashboards show aggregate counts, not the identities or email addresses of people who view or save a restaurant.
We use Vercel Web Analytics and Speed Insights to understand traffic and site performance. These services process information such as visited URLs, referring pages, browser and device characteristics, approximate region, and loading measurements. Vercel describes their measurement practices in its Web Analytics privacy documentation and Speed Insights privacy documentation.
You can manage cookies and location permissions through your browser. Signing out does not by itself disable site measurement. We do not use your account registration or a contact message to subscribe you to promotional emails.
Service providers and sharing
We use Vercel for hosting and site measurement, a self-hosted Supabase system for accounts, database records, and uploaded images, and Resend to deliver contact messages and area requests. Error reporting may use Sentry when enabled. These services and the infrastructure supporting them process information needed for their functions.
We also use Google Places for restaurant discovery, Firecrawl to gather public restaurant information, and DeepSeek to extract specials from public source content. This extraction workflow processes restaurant sources, rather than account passwords or contact-form messages. Directions and restaurant website links take you to external services with their own privacy practices.
Our use of Google Maps Platform services is subject to the Google Privacy Policy, which is incorporated here by reference for those services.
We do not sell personal information. We may disclose information where required by law or where legally permitted to investigate abuse, protect people or the service, or enforce our terms. Public restaurant contributions can be viewed and copied by other people and search engines.
Service providers may process or store information outside your province or Canada, where it may be subject to local laws and lawful access by authorities.
Retention and protection
Account information and saved places are retained to provide your account. Messages, claim evidence, and reports are retained as needed to respond, review listings, handle disputes, and meet legal obligations. Operational records and backups may remain after an item is removed from the active service.
Restaurant engagement event cleanup targets records older than 90 days, but runs in batches, so deletion may take longer. Current saved places are separate from that event history and remain until you remove them or your account is deleted.
We use access controls and server-side authorization to restrict access to non-public information. No internet service can guarantee complete security. Please do not send passwords or unnecessary identity or financial documents through our forms.
Your choices and requests
You can browse without an account, search without device location, and remove saved places while signed in. To request access to or correction of your personal information, withdraw consent, or request account deletion, contact info@thespecialsmenu.com. These requests are handled by our team; there is no self-service account deletion screen.
We may need to verify your identity before acting on a request. We will explain any applicable legal limits or information we must retain. Withdrawing information needed for a feature may mean we can no longer provide that feature. Deleting your account does not necessarily remove factual public restaurant listings collected from other sources.
If a privacy concern remains unresolved, you can contact the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia or the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, as applicable.
Children’s information
The service is not directed to children under 13. If you believe a child has provided personal information without appropriate parental or guardian involvement, contact us so we can review and address it.
Changes to this policy
We will update the date on this page when this policy changes. For material changes to how we handle personal information, we will provide additional notice and obtain consent where required.