Privacy policy

Who we are

Be.Coffee is run by Pixable Limited (“Be.Coffee”, “we”, “us”). We are the controller of the personal information described in this policy, which covers the Be.Coffee app for iPhone and Android, this website (be.coffee) and the café portal (portal.be.coffee).

Questions about privacy, or requests to use any of your rights, go to help@be.coffee.

What we collect

Your account

• Your email address and password. We store passwords only as a salted hash, never as you typed them.
• If you sign in with Apple or Google, the account ID they give us and the name and email address you choose to share. Apple may give us a private relay address instead of your real one.
• Your profile: first and last name, username, and anything else you add, such as a profile photo, home town, a short bio and your Instagram or TikTok handle.

Your preferences

The city and neighbourhood you choose, what matters most to you in a café (such as coffee, craft, food, vibe or hospitality), your coffee preferences (beans, flavours, processes, roasters and brew methods) and your notification settings.

What you add to Be.Coffee

Your rankings: the score you give each café, when you visited, how many times, any note you write and the things you pick as having stood out. Also the comments, replies and likes you leave, the lists and cafés you save, the people you follow, the cafés you subscribe to, your recent searches, and any cafés you suggest or report.

Location

If you allow it, the app uses your phone’s precise location while it’s open, to show where you are on the map and to recommend cafés nearby. That happens on your phone: your exact location isn’t sent to us. The app never uses your location in the background.

What does reach us is the area of the map you’re looking at, what you type into search, and a location name if you set one in your preferences.

Buying beans

When you order beans we keep the order: what you bought, prices, VAT, any discount code, the delivery method and address, and its delivery and payment status. You can save delivery addresses to your account. Payments are taken by Stripe, including Apple Pay and Google Pay. We never see or store your full card number.

How you use the app

• Activity linked to your account, such as the café pages you open, when you tap for directions, which cafés we’ve shown you in For You, and when you see or tap a sponsored café.
• If you turn on notifications, a push token for your device, its platform and your time zone, plus which notifications were delivered and opened.
• Technical records of requests to our servers, such as IP address, device and app version, and the date and time.

If you run a café

When you use the café portal, claim a listing or suggest a new one, we collect your name, role, organisation, business email address and phone number, the café’s website and details, and the evidence you give us to show you run the café. For subscriptions and Power-Ups, Stripe holds your payment details and we keep your billing history. If you sell beans through Be.Coffee we keep your VAT details and delivery prices, and Stripe collects the information it needs to pay you.

How we use it

UK data protection law requires a lawful basis for each use of your information. Ours are:

• To run Be.Coffee for you: your account, the map, rankings, lists, follows, comments, bean orders and delivery, and the emails that go with them, such as sign-in codes and order updates. Basis: performing our contract with you.
• To personalise For You: using your preferences, your neighbourhood, what you’ve ranked and the people you follow to choose cafés to show you. Basis: our legitimate interest in recommending cafés you’ll like.
• To use your location on your phone for the map and nearby recommendations. Basis: your consent, which you give and can take back in your phone’s settings.
• To send push notifications from cafés you subscribe to. Basis: your consent. You can turn them off in the app or your phone’s settings.
• To run sponsored placements: counting how often sponsored cafés are shown and tapped, so we can bill cafés and show them how their placements perform. Basis: our legitimate interest in funding a free app.
• To keep Be.Coffee safe and working: preventing abuse and fraud, moderating content, fixing problems, and understanding how the app is used so we can improve it. Basis: our legitimate interests.
• To meet our legal obligations, such as keeping order and tax records. Basis: legal obligation.

We don’t sell your personal information, we don’t show third-party adverts, and there are no third-party advertising or analytics trackers in the app or on this website.

What other people can see

Be.Coffee is social. People signed in to Be.Coffee can see your profile, which shows:

• your first name and last initial, profile photo, username, home town, neighbourhood, bio, Instagram and TikTok handles, follower numbers and when you joined
• your saved lists
• your rankings, including scores, visit dates and the notes you write

Your rankings also appear in your followers’ feeds, where people can like and comment on them. Comments and replies you leave show your name and photo.

Café owners can see and reply to comments on their café. They see statistics about their listing, such as views, saves and subscriptions, as totals rather than as a list of who did what. When you buy beans, the café gets your name, email address and delivery address so it can send your order.

Your email address, exact location, saved addresses and order history are never shown to other members.

Who we share it with

We use these companies to run Be.Coffee. They only handle your information to provide their service to us:

• Cloudflare: hosting, our database, file storage (including profile photos) and sending email.
• Stripe: payments for bean orders, payouts to cafés and café billing. Stripe receives your email and delivery address with each order.
• Google: the map in the app, place search (we send what you type and the area you’re looking at), working out delivery prices from your address, and Sign in with Google.
• Apple: Sign in with Apple and Apple Pay.
• Expo: delivering push notifications and app updates.

Some café pages show TikTok videos. Thumbnails are loaded from TikTok, and if you play a video it comes from TikTok, which may collect information under its own privacy policy. When you ask for directions, we hand the café’s location to the maps app you choose. We don’t send it yours.

We may also share information if the law requires it, to protect people’s safety or our rights, or with a buyer if Be.Coffee is ever sold or merged. If that happens we’ll tell you first.

International transfers

Several of the companies above are based in, or process data in, the United States and other countries outside the UK. When your information leaves the UK, we rely on the safeguards UK law provides, such as the UK–US data bridge or the UK’s International Data Transfer Addendum to standard contractual clauses.

How long we keep it

• Your account and everything on it: until you delete your account.
• Sign-in sessions: 30 days. Sign-in and reset codes expire after 10 minutes.
• Bean orders: six years after the order, because UK tax law requires us to keep these records.
• Server request logs: a short time, a matter of days, before Cloudflare deletes them automatically.

When you delete your account we delete your profile, rankings and notes, lists, follows, comments, preferences, notifications, saved addresses and sessions. A few records are kept without your name or account attached: sponsored-placement statistics, café claims and listing suggestions (including the business contact details given in them), and messages sent between cafés.

Your choices and rights

• Delete your account at any time in the app, under Settings.
• Edit or remove profile details in the app.
• Turn location or notifications off in the app or in your phone’s settings. The rest of Be.Coffee keeps working.

Under UK data protection law you also have the right to ask for a copy of your information, to have it corrected or deleted, to restrict or object to how we use it, to have it given to you in a portable format, and to withdraw consent you’ve given. Email help@be.coffee and we’ll reply within one month.

If you’re unhappy with how we’ve handled your information, please tell us first. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.

Cookies

This website doesn’t set cookies and doesn’t use analytics or advertising trackers.

The café portal uses only the cookies it needs to work: one that keeps you signed in, one that remembers which café you’re managing (kept for a year), one that holds a password reset in progress (kept for 10 minutes) and one that remembers whether the sidebar is open (kept for 7 days). Its payment and map pages load Stripe and Google Maps, which may set their own cookies.

Keeping it secure

Everything travels over encrypted connections. Passwords are stored as salted hashes, we keep only a hash of each sign-in session, and the app keeps your session in your phone’s secure storage. Access to personal information inside Be.Coffee is limited to the people on our team who need it to run the service, review café claims and handle support.

Children

Be.Coffee isn’t meant for children under 13 and we don’t knowingly collect their information. If you think a child under 13 has an account, email help@be.coffee and we’ll delete it.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, we’ll update the date at the top. If the change is significant, we’ll tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect.