Privacy

No account needed

You can browse, search, and use every part of CocktailHQ without creating an account or signing in. We don't ask for your name, email address, or any other identifying information just to use the site.

Analytics are anonymous

We collect a small set of anonymous usage events — things like which cocktail was viewed, whether a search returned results, or whether a calculator was used — so we can understand what's useful and what isn't. These events are not tied to your identity. We don't store your name, your IP address, or any other raw personal data alongside them. The goal is to collect insights, not identities.

If you type something into search, that term is sanitised before it's ever recorded: it's lowercased, trimmed, length-limited, and stripped of anything that looks like an email address or a long number, before it is used in any aggregate, anonymous statistic.

Even though these events carry no identifier, we still ask first: no analytics event is sent until you choose “Allow analytics” on the banner shown on your first visit, and you can change that choice at any time from the “Cookie preferences” link in the footer. See our Cookies page for the full breakdown.

What's stored on your device

CocktailHQ uses your browser's local storage — not tracking cookies — to remember a small set of things entirely on your own device: whether you've acknowledged the age-gate message, any cocktails you've favourited, ingredients you've marked as being in your home bar or excluded, your preferred measurement unit and alcohol-free preference, your most recent cocktail comparisons, and your last party plan. None of this is sent to us, tied to an identity, or synced across your devices — it lives only in the browser you're using, and you can clear all of it at any time from the “Clear all local CocktailHQ data” button on the Favourites page.

Access cookies

CocktailHQ is a public site — you don't need an account or a password to read any of it, and no access cookie is set for ordinary visits. The only cookie of this kind is one used by our own internal tooling, which is not reachable from the public site; it only confirms an operator was let in, isn't linked to your identity and carries no personal data.

If you tell us your email

If you choose to fill in the “build your collection” interest form, we store the email address and the features you ticked so we can gauge real interest in future account functionality and, eventually, let you know when it ships. This is the one place on CocktailHQ today where we do hold something that identifies you, and it's always something you typed in yourself — never collected silently. We don't share it with advertisers, and we don't share it with sibling HEKNO-family products either (see how we draw that boundary in general on our About page). It's used only to plan and build CocktailHQ's own future features.

We don't sell your data

We don't sell personal data. The only personal data we hold at all is an email address you choose to give us through the interest form above — nothing collected passively, and nothing sold or shared with third parties. If that ever changes as the product grows, this page will say so plainly and in advance, not quietly.

Advertising

CocktailHQ has the underlying architecture in place to show Google-served ads in future, but no approved advertising account exists yet, so it stays switched off: no ad script loads, no ad space is reserved, and no advertising cookies are set anywhere on the site today. If that changes, this page will be updated first, alongside details of what a live ad script would itself collect.

Questions

If you have a question about privacy on CocktailHQ, you can reach out via the Contact page.