Privacy
Last updated July 5, 2026
Fork In The Road helps groups decide where to eat. It collects the minimum it needs to do that, and nothing it collects is ever sold or used for advertising.
If you vote as a guest
Guests vote from a fork link with no account. We store the display name you type, your rankings, and timestamps. That is the whole list: no email, no phone, no location, no tracking profile. A signed cookie remembers your device so you can change your vote before the fork closes. If you later create an account you can claim those votes; until then they belong to a name and nothing else.
If you have an account
Accounts are handled by Clerk, our sign-in provider. We keep your email, your username, and a display name. Passwords never touch our servers: Clerk stores them hashed. On top of that we store what the product is for: your saved places and lists, your crews, your forks, and your decision history. History is what powers the weighted wheel, so past picks count against themselves.
Location
When you spin near me, your browser asks you before sharing your location, and we use it once to find restaurants around you. Search areas are cached by approximate neighborhood so we call Google less, and that cache is not tied to you. We never store your precise location on your profile and we never track where you are.
Notifications
If you allow push notifications we store the subscription your browser gives us, and we use it for one thing: telling you where the group is going when a fork closes. The same result may reach your email. Both stop the moment you revoke permission or opt out.
Cookies and local storage
We use Clerk's session cookies to keep you signed in and one signed cookie to recognize guest voters. Your theme choice and whether you dismissed the install prompt live in your browser and never leave it. There are no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. Traffic analytics come from Vercel Analytics, which is cookieless and anonymous.
Who else sees data
Five services run the product: Clerk (sign-in), MongoDB Atlas (the database), Google Places (restaurant search), Resend (result emails), and Vercel (hosting and anonymous analytics). Each gets only what its job requires. Nobody gets data for advertising, and nothing is sold, rented, or shared beyond that list.
Retention
Decision history sticks around because the product runs on it. Housekeeping data does not: server error records and search-cache markers delete themselves within 30 days, and rate-limit counters (which briefly hold IP addresses) expire within minutes.
Removing your data
Ask, and it goes. Open an issue on the project's GitHub repository or contact the maintainer there, and your account and its data will be deleted. Guest votes carry no identity, so there is nothing to trace back to you once a fork closes.