Forkcast — Pitbull Interactive LLC
Last updated: June 10, 2026
This privacy policy describes how Pitbull Interactive LLC (“we,” “our,” or “us”) collects, uses, and protects information through the Forkcast app (the “App”) for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. Forkcast is an AI-powered weekly meal planning app that helps you save recipes, plan meals, generate grocery lists, share recipes with friends, and chat with cooking groups. By using Forkcast, you agree to the collection and use of information as described in this policy.
Forkcast is also available on Apple TV as a limited companion viewer for browsing the recipes and meal plan from your iCloud account on the big screen. The Apple TV app does not include most of the features described below — it has no analytics or crash reporting and does not include the AI Meal Planner, recipe-photo scanning, Personal Feed, Cooking Circles, the in-app browser, or Reminders export — and is covered by its own Forkcast for Apple TV Privacy Policy. The remainder of this policy describes the iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps.
The short version. Forkcast does not have user accounts. We never ask for your name, email, phone number, or password. We do not run ads, we do not sell data, and we do not track you across other apps or websites. Your messages in Cooking Circles are end-to-end encrypted — we cannot read them. Most of what we collect is the recipe and meal-planning content you create in the app, which is stored so it syncs across your devices.
Forkcast is “authless” — there is no login screen, no password, and no Sign in with Apple. We do not collect an email address, real name, or phone number. Instead, your devices identify themselves to our servers using one of two opaque identifiers:
local-3F2A…) created on your device the first time you open the App. This UUID is stored in iCloud Key-Value Storage so the same identity persists across your devices.Every request to our servers is signed cryptographically (HMAC-SHA256) by the App. The identifier above travels in the request header so our servers can return your data and write your changes to the right place. We do not use third-party authentication providers such as AWS Cognito, Firebase Auth, or Sign in with Apple.
Recipes you save — whether parsed from a webpage, scanned from a photo, imported via the Share Extension, or added manually — are stored on our servers and synced via iCloud to your other devices. Stored fields include: title, source URL, source name, description, ingredients, instructions, servings, prep/cook/total time, image (URL or uploaded photo), categories/tags, your notes, favorite status, your rating, nutrition data, and any per-step timers detected from the instructions.
Weekly meal plans you create manually or that the AI Meal Planner generates for you are stored on our servers, including which recipe is assigned to which day and meal slot, the plan’s status (generating / generated / finalized), and which meals you have accepted or rejected during triage. We also retain a small amount of AI-Planner state needed to schedule future plans: your chosen plan day, plan time, timezone, whether the planner is enabled, and the timestamp of the last generated plan.
Preferences you configure in the App are stored on our servers so we can generate plans you want to eat. These include: dietary restrictions (e.g. vegetarian, gluten-free, kosher), whether each restriction is a hard requirement or a soft preference, cuisine affinities, ingredients to omit, household size, weekly budget tier, meal slots to plan (breakfast / lunch / dinner), quick-prep limits, bulk-cooking preference, plan delivery day and time, your timezone, and your customized list of approved recipe websites.
Items on your grocery list — auto-generated from planned recipes or added manually, including their aisle grouping and checked-off state — are stored on our servers and synced across your devices.
If you photograph a printed recipe (cookbook page, recipe card, magazine), the photo is sent to our servers and processed by Anthropic’s Claude vision model to extract structured recipe data. The photo is retained in Amazon S3 alongside the resulting recipe so it can be displayed in your library, and is deleted when you delete the recipe.
Settings such as the first day of your week, meal-naming style, default search engine (Google, DuckDuckGo, Brave, or Bing), and appearance (light / dark / system) are stored on your device and synced via iCloud Key-Value Storage so they match on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. They are not sent to our servers.
If you grant notification permission, your Apple Push Notification service (APNs) device token is stored on our servers so we can notify you when an asynchronous task completes — for example, when a new AI meal plan is ready, or when a photo you scanned has finished parsing.
Personal Feed is optional and off by default. When you turn it on, the following are stored on our servers: the username you choose (lowercase, 3–24 characters), your display name, and — if you provide them — a city/state, country, and a profile photo you upload. For each recipe you explicitly publish to your feed we store a recipe card (title, image, source URL, source name, short summary), the optional message you wrote, and the number of likes the post receives. We also store the list of feeds you subscribe to. See Section 5 for details.
Cooking Circles is optional and off by default. When you create or join a Circle, we store on our servers: the Circle’s metadata (name, owner, member list, created date), the username and display name of each member, each member’s registered device public keys, end-to-end-encrypted message ciphertexts and nonces, message reactions, member-joined / -removed events, typing indicators, and read-receipts. Message content is end-to-end encrypted on your device before it leaves; we do not have the keys to decrypt it. See Section 4 for details.
When you paste a URL into a Cooking Circles message, the App asks our server to fetch a preview of that link (title, description, thumbnail, and whether it appears to be a recipe). The preview is embedded inside the end-to-end-encrypted message; we do not retain a record of which URLs you previewed.
Your subscription / premium-unlock state is tracked locally and validated through Apple StoreKit. We do not receive payment-card information; Apple handles all transactions.
If you tap the location button on the Personal Feed profile screen, the App requests “when-in-use” location permission and uses your current coordinates only to look up your city and state, which are then filled into the text fields. The coordinates themselves are not stored or sent to our servers; only the resulting city/state text is saved (and only if you keep it in your profile). The App does not run any background location collection.
We record which screens you view (planner, library, browser, feeds, circles, settings), when you save or generate recipes, when you accept or reject AI suggestions, when you export to Reminders, and when you trigger paywall and subscription events. These events are pseudonymous (tied to the same opaque identifier described in Section 1) and help us understand how the app is used so we can improve it. Analytics events do not include the content of your recipes, messages, or grocery items.
We use Firebase Crashlytics to automatically collect crash and error reports, including device model, operating system version, app version, stack traces, and general device state at the time of the crash. Crash reports do not contain personally identifiable information or the content of your recipes, messages, or plans.
Cooking Circles lets small groups (families, roommates, friends) chat about meals, share recipes, and plan together in real time. Cooking Circles is opt-in: you only have a Circle if you create one or accept an invitation.
End-to-end encryption. Every message you send in a Circle is encrypted on your device using a symmetric group key before it is sent to our servers. The group key is itself wrapped (encrypted) per member device using each member’s public key, and the wrapped copies are stored on our servers. Only your devices — and the devices of other Circle members — ever hold the unwrapped group key. As a result, Pitbull Interactive cannot read the contents of your Cooking Circles messages, link previews embedded in them, or any photos shared inside them.
What our servers can see for a Cooking Circle:
What our servers cannot see: the plaintext of any message, the URL or page contents of an embedded link preview, the contents of any photo shared inside a Circle.
Invitations. Invites are short tokens shared out-of-band (e.g. iMessage, AirDrop). We do not have access to your contacts and do not send invitations on your behalf.
Leaving or deleting a Circle. You can leave a Circle at any time, or, if you are the owner, delete it. When you leave, your wrapped key copies are removed from our servers; when an owner deletes a Circle, all of its server-side data (encrypted messages, member list, wrapped keys) is removed.
Personal Feed lets you share recipes from your Forkcast library with people who follow your feed by username. Personal Feed is off by default. You can turn it on, disable it, or delete your feed at any time from the App’s profile screen.
What is shared with subscribers when you use Personal Feed:
What is not shared via Personal Feed: no other user data leaves your account through this feature. Specifically, the following are never shared with subscribers or other users:
How discovery works. A feed is reachable only via its username link — there is no public directory of users, and Forkcast does not surface your feed to strangers. Subscribers can like posts; the author sees the total like count on each post.
Turning it off / deleting your feed. Disabling Personal Feed from your profile stops new posts. Deleting your profile from the App removes your Personal Feed profile, all of your posts, subscriptions, likes, registered device keys for Cooking Circles, and the profile photo from our servers.
Forkcast uses Anthropic’s Claude API on the server side for four jobs. In every case, the request is sent from our backend (not directly from your device) and is governed by Anthropic’s commercial API terms, which prohibit training on customer data.
| When | What we send to Claude |
|---|---|
| Generating a weekly AI meal plan | Your meal-planning preferences (diet, cuisines, omitted ingredients, household size, budget tier, meal slots, quick-prep limits) and the list of approved recipe websites. No personal identifiers are sent. |
| “What can I make with these leftovers?” | The ingredients you typed, the target meal (breakfast / lunch / dinner), and — only if you opted in to use your preferences — your dietary restrictions and omitted ingredients. |
| Parsing a photographed recipe | The recipe photo you took (sent as image bytes; see Section 2). |
| Validating a custom recipe website you added | The homepage HTML/text of the site you entered, so Claude can confirm it is a recipe site before adding it to your approved list. |
Photo scanning is invoked only when you take or pick a photo to scan from inside the App or the Share Extension. The App does not enumerate, search, or read your photo library otherwise.
On iOS and macOS, Forkcast can export your weekly grocery list to the Reminders app via Apple’s EventKit. This integration is opt-in: you grant Reminders access only the first time you export, and the App requests “full access” only because Apple’s newer Reminders model requires it to write to a list.
Forkcast includes a simple in-app browser for finding recipes on the web. The default search engine is configurable: Google, DuckDuckGo, Brave, or Bing. Searches and web page visits in the in-app browser are made directly between your device and the third party you have selected; we do not log or proxy your in-app web browsing.
Separately, when generating an AI meal plan or finding the URL for a specific recipe on an approved site, our backend may issue Brave Search API queries on your behalf. These server-side searches do not include any personal identifier — only the recipe title and target domain.
Forkcast uses the following third-party services, each with their own privacy policies:
| Service | Purpose | Privacy Policy |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic (Claude API) | AI meal planning, leftovers suggestions, recipe-photo parsing, custom-site validation | anthropic.com/legal/privacy |
| Amazon Web Services | Backend hosting (API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, S3) and recipe / profile image storage | aws.amazon.com/privacy |
| Apple iCloud / CloudKit | Opaque user identifier for sync, cross-device storage of recipes / plans / preferences in your private CloudKit database, iCloud Key-Value Storage for settings | apple.com/legal/privacy |
| Apple Push Notification service | Delivering push notifications | apple.com/legal/privacy |
| Apple StoreKit | Subscription purchases and validation | apple.com/legal/privacy |
| Brave Search | Server-side recipe URL discovery (and optional default search engine in the in-app browser) | search.brave.com/help/privacy-policy |
| Edamam | Server-side nutrition lookup for parsed recipes (calories, protein, carbs, fat) | edamam.com/page/privacy |
| Mixpanel | Pseudonymous product analytics | mixpanel.com/legal/privacy-policy |
| Firebase Crashlytics (Google) | Crash and error reporting | firebase.google.com/support/privacy |
Forkcast is rated 4+ in the App Store and does not knowingly collect personal information from children under the age of 13. The App does not ask for any personal information at sign-up (there is no sign-up). If you believe a child under 13 has provided personal information through the App — for example, a username or profile photo in Personal Feed — please contact us and we will delete it promptly.
Forkcast is hosted in the United States. If you use the App from outside the United States, you consent to the transfer and processing of your information in the United States, where data protection laws may differ from those in your jurisdiction. Residents of the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, and California may have additional rights under applicable laws (such as the GDPR, UK GDPR, or CCPA), including the right to access, correct, or delete information about them; you can exercise these rights by emailing us as described in Section 13.
We may update this privacy policy from time to time. Material changes will be reflected by updating the “Last updated” date at the top of this page and, where appropriate, by an in-app notice. Continued use of the App after changes constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.
If you have questions about this privacy policy or your data, contact us at:
Pitbull Interactive LLC
Email: info@pitbullint.com