Privacy Policy

Short version

• You can read every tea, brand, city guide and article without an account or an email address.
• We store what you give us to sign in, save teas, review, or get the newsletter, plus the security logs that protect those features.
• We do not sell your data, and the site has no ad networks or affiliate trackers.
• You can delete your account, and everything attached to it, from Settings.

Signing in

Magic Link (email)

You type your email address and we send a sign-in link. We store the email address, a one-time token, the IP address and browser string that requested it, and when it was used. The link works once and expires after 15 minutes.

Google Sign-In

If you choose Google, Google confirms who you are and passes us your email address, name, profile picture URL and Google account ID. We do not get your Google password or anything else from your Google account.

Staying signed in

After sign-in your browser holds a short-lived access token (15 minutes) and a refresh token (7 days) in local storage. On our server we keep only a hash of the refresh token, with the IP address and browser string it was issued to. We record the date of your last sign-in and last visit while signed in.

Your account and portfolio

• Profile: email address, and optionally a display name, username, bio and profile picture URL.
• Tea log: teas you mark as tried or want to try, your 1–5 star ratings, tasting notes and dates.
• Tea rooms: venues you mark as visited or favorite.
• Badges: which badges you have earned and when.

Profiles are private by default. If you turn on a public profile in Settings, anyone with the link can see your username, display name, picture, bio, badges, portfolio counts and recent tea logs. Your email address is never shown.

Reviews

A review of a tea or a tea room stores the star rating, title, text, date, the account that wrote it, and which accounts marked it helpful. Reviews are public and show your display name or username.

Newsletter

When you subscribe we store your email address, the signup date, where on the site you signed up, and, when you gave them, your quiz result, the reader type you picked and the city you were viewing. We use those to choose what to send you, including a short welcome series, and we track how far through it you are.

Links in our emails pass through our server so we can count clicks. Each click records your email address, the issue, the link, the time, your IP address and browser string. Every email has an unsubscribe link; we record when and how you unsubscribed so we never mail you again.

If you pick a reader type in the signup flow without finishing, we log that choice with a random session ID, IP address and browser string, but no email address.

Price watch

If you ask to be told when a tea's price changes, we store your email address, the tea or price page you asked about, the IP address and the time.

Contact form

Your name, email address, subject and message are sent to our inbox by email so we can reply.

Quiz and taste matching

Quiz answers are scored to show you a result and are not saved to your account. If you describe the taste you want in your own words, that text (up to 1,000 characters) is sent to an AI language model to pick matching teas from our catalog. It is not attached to your account. Leave out personal details.

Error reports

When a page crashes or a request fails, your browser sends us the page address, the error message and technical trace, and your browser string, so we can fix the bug.

Analytics, ads and affiliate links

My Tea Explorer currently runs no advertising and no affiliate program. Links to tea brands, sellers and tea rooms are plain links. No third-party analytics or session-recording script is loaded on the site today.

The site's code can load an analytics service if we configure one. If we add analytics, ads or affiliate links, we will name the provider here, say what it collects and how to opt out, and change the effective date before that service goes live.

Who processes your data

• Resend delivers our email: sign-in links, newsletters and contact-form messages. It receives the recipient address and the message.
• Google handles Google Sign-In if you choose it.
• An AI model provider receives the free-text taste description, and nothing else, when you use that feature.
• Our hosting provider runs the servers and database that store everything above.

Tea sellers and tea rooms we link to run their own sites under their own privacy policies. We send them nothing about you.

What your browser stores

We use local storage, not ad cookies. It holds your sign-in tokens, whether you subscribed and the address you used, which sign-up prompts you dismissed, whether you took the quiz, which city guides you have opened, and filter settings. Clearing site data in your browser removes all of it and signs you out.

How long we keep it

• Account, tea log, tea room marks, badges and reviews: until you delete your account.
• Sign-in links: unusable after 15 minutes.
• Refresh tokens: expire after 7 days.
• Newsletter record: kept after you unsubscribe, marked inactive, so the address is not mailed again.

Deleting and changing your data

• Edit your display name, username, bio and profile visibility in Settings.
• Delete your account in Settings. That permanently removes your profile, tea log, tea room marks, badges, reviews, the helpful votes on them, and your sign-in tokens.
• Stop the newsletter with the unsubscribe link in any issue. It is separate from your account.
• For anything else, such as a copy of your data or removal of a newsletter or price-watch record, email hello@myteaexplorer.com.

Security

There are no passwords to leak. Traffic is encrypted with HTTPS, refresh tokens are stored hashed, and sign-in links are single-use. No system is perfectly secure, so share only what the feature needs.

Children

Accounts are for people 13 and older. If a child under 13 has given us personal information, email us and we will delete it.

Images on the site

Some illustrations are AI-generated and show tea, teaware or rooms in general, not a specific product, brand or venue.

Changes and contact

When this policy changes we update the effective date at the top. Questions: hello@myteaexplorer.com or the contact form.