Privacy policy

1. Who is responsible

StyleChef (stylechef.co) is run by Muhammad Shayyan Zaman, based in Pakistan, who decides how your information is used. For anything about privacy, write to support@stylechef.co.

2. What we collect

• Your account: your email address and a password (stored only in scrambled form; we can never read it). If you make a profile: your handle, display name, bio and picture.
• Before you have an account: starting the introduction creates a temporary visitor session — a random identifier holding the department you chose, the looks you picked and any board you imported. If you don't make an account it is deleted after 14 days.
• Your closet: the photos you add, each item's details (type, colour, material, brand, fit), your outfits, when you wore them and how you rated them, your wishlist and saved hunts.
• Your sizes and preferences: sizes, measurements you choose to enter (chest, waist, inseam), the department you shop, price range and other search filters, your display currency.
• Pinterest boards you import: the board's public link, the links to its pins, and small copies of the pin images, kept only so they can be analysed for your taste and shown back to you.
• Your city, if you set one: its name and a position rounded to about a kilometre, used for the weather. We never ask for or store your precise location.
• What you do with other people: posts you make public, likes, follows, and reports.
• Conversations with the style assistant, including photos or links you send it, so you can come back to them. You can delete any conversation.
• How much you use the features that have limits — a count per day or month — and the estimated cost of your assistant use.
• Technical records: our hosting provider keeps short-lived logs of requests (including IP address and browser type) to keep the service running and secure.

We don't collect payment card details — see “Payments” below — and we don't buy information about you from anyone.

3. How your photos are handled

• Closet photos: the background is removed on your own device before the photo is uploaded. The photo is kept with your account and the app shows it only to you, unless you post it. (Images are served from long, unguessable addresses rather than behind a sign-in.)
• Outfit photos you scan: the photo is sent to our AI service to find the pieces in it. What you choose to keep — the outfit photo, the cut-out of each piece — is saved to your account.
• “Shop this outfit”: the photo is read once to find the pieces and is never uploaded to storage or kept. Only the description of the pieces is used.
• Public posts: a photo is public only if you choose to post it. It passes an automatic safety check first; if the check fails or cannot run, the photo is not published.
• Pinterest pins: a pin's own image is never shown by us to other people. Where a pin appears in the feed or a lookbook it is shown by Pinterest's own embed, loaded from Pinterest (see “Cookies” below). Your name appears as a board's curator only if you opt in for that board.

4. Artificial intelligence

We use Google's Gemini models, through Google Cloud (Vertex AI), to:

• read photos you add or scan, and the images on boards you import, to describe the clothes in them;
• put together outfit suggestions and recommendations from your closet details and taste;
• answer your questions in the style assistant;
• draw generic illustrations of garments from a description (colour, material, type) — never from your photo;
• check public photos and profile text for safety before they appear.

For this, the relevant photo or text is sent to Google, which processes it on our behalf under its cloud terms. Those terms say Google will not use it to train or fine-tune its AI models without our permission, and we have not given that permission. Google may hold what we send for up to 24 hours to speed up repeated requests, and may log requests to detect abuse of its service. We do not use your photos or closet to train models of our own.

These features make suggestions; they don't make decisions about you that have legal or similarly serious effects. AI can be wrong, and you can always edit what it filled in.

5. Cookies and similar storage

We use only what the site needs to work. There are no advertising or analytics cookies.

• Sign-in cookies keep you signed in. Without them you would be signed out on every page.
• A cookie that remembers your answer about Pinterest pins (“accepted” or “declined”), for six months. It is set only if you are asked — see below.
• Storage in your browser remembers your light or dark theme, a board import in progress, and a notice you dismissed.
• A security check from Cloudflare (Turnstile) runs when you start or sign in, to tell people from automated programs. Cloudflare receives technical details of your browser and your IP address for that purpose.

Pinterest pins. An original pin in the feed or a lookbook is shown by Pinterest's own embed. Loading it contacts Pinterest, which receives your IP address and may set its own cookies under its privacy policy.

• In the European Union, the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom we ask first. Until you accept, nothing is loaded from Pinterest: you see our own style card, and a pin loads only when you tap “Show pin” on it. If you accept, pins load as you scroll. You can change your answer at any time in Settings.
• Everywhere else pins load as you scroll.

To know whether to ask, we read the country our hosting provider works out from your IP address when a page is requested. We don't store it.

Listing photos are loaded directly from eBay and Etsy, and our own images from our image host, so those services see your IP address when a picture loads, as with any website.

6. Listings

Searches are sent to eBay and Etsy as search words and filters only — never your name or email. When you follow a link to a listing you leave StyleChef for the marketplace, which has its own privacy policy.

The link you follow carries no identifier of ours to the marketplace, and we are not paid when you buy.

A listing link passes through our own server on its way to the marketplace, so that we can count clicks: one more for that day, that marketplace and the part of the app the link was in. The count holds no information about you, and no cookie is used for it.

7. Why we use your information

• To provide the service you asked for (our contract with you): your account, closet, outfits, recommendations, the assistant, alerts you set up.
• With your consent: posting publicly, being credited as a board's curator, and — where we ask — loading pins from Pinterest. You can withdraw any of these at any time.
• Because we have a legitimate interest in keeping the service safe and affordable: safety checks, usage limits, fraud and abuse prevention, the click count, fixing errors.
• To meet legal obligations, such as keeping records of payments.

We send only emails about your account and alerts you asked for. We don't send marketing email without asking first.

8. Who we share it with

We don't sell your information. We share it only with companies that help us run StyleChef, under contracts that limit what they may do with it:

• Supabase — the database and sign-in.
• Cloudinary — storing and delivering images.
• Google Cloud (Vertex AI) — the AI processing described above.
• Vercel — hosting the site.
• Resend — sending email.
• Cloudflare — the security check at sign-in.
• Paddle — payments, when you subscribe (see below).
• Weather and place-name services (MET Norway, Meteostat, NASA, OpenStreetMap's Nominatim) — receive a city or an approximate position, never your identity.

Pinterest is different: it doesn't work for us. When an original pin is loaded (see “Cookies” above), your browser contacts Pinterest directly and Pinterest decides what it does with that.

Other people on StyleChef can see only what you post publicly and your public profile. We may disclose information if the law requires it, or to protect someone's safety or our legal rights.

StyleChef is run from Pakistan, and some of these companies are in other countries, including the United States, so your information is handled outside the country where you live. Where the law requires it, transfers are covered by safeguards such as standard contractual clauses.

9. Payments

Subscriptions are sold by our reseller, Paddle, which is the merchant of record. Paddle collects your payment details and handles tax; we never see your card number. Paddle tells us your email, your country, and the status of your subscription. Paddle's own privacy policy applies to what it holds.

10. How long we keep it

• Your account and what's in it: until you delete it.
• A visitor session that never became an account: 14 days.
• Each day's outfit suggestions: 8 days, unless you save a look.
• Trip plans you didn't save: 30 days.
• Daily usage counts: up to five weeks. Your assistant usage totals stay with your account until you delete it.
• Hosting logs: a short period set by our hosting provider.
• Records of payments: as long as tax law requires.

11. Deleting your account

You can delete your account yourself in Settings → Delete account. This permanently removes your photos from storage first, and then your account with everything attached to it: closet, outfits, wishlist, boards and pins, posts, likes and follows, assistant conversations, trips, preferences and usage records. It takes effect at once and cannot be undone.

What remains after deletion contains nothing that identifies you:

• generic garment illustrations in the shared library (they are drawn from a description such as “navy cotton shirt”, the same for everyone);
• style cards made from public Pinterest pins, with any curator credit removed;
• the anonymous click count;
• copies in our providers' routine backups, which are overwritten on their normal schedule.

If you can't sign in, write to support@stylechef.co from your account's email address and we will delete it for you.

12. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to see the information we hold about you, have it corrected, have it deleted, receive a copy of it, object to or restrict how we use it, and withdraw consent. Most of this you can do yourself in the app; for anything else write to support@stylechef.co and we will answer within 30 days.

You also have the right to complain to the data protection authority where you live.

13. Children

StyleChef is not for anyone under 16. If you believe a child has made an account, write to support@stylechef.co and we will remove it.

14. Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle your information in a way that matters, we tell account holders by email or in the app before the change takes effect, and we update the date at the top of this page.