Trust & safety

Allergies and dietary needs

• Allergies you list are hard filters. They are never relaxed, traded off, or overridden, even when they leave few options.
• Forkd tags dishes by their classic preparation. Real kitchens improvise. Always confirm allergens with the restaurant or cook. Forkd cannot guarantee any prepared food is allergen-free.
• Dietary identities (vegetarian, vegan, pescatarian, halal, kosher) are respected as filters. We don't infer them; you set them.

Nutrition and health

• Forkd recommends meals; it does not give medical or nutrition advice.
• We deliberately avoid calorie counts, streak pressure, and anything that rewards restriction. Food here is joy, not a scoreboard.

Privacy in groups

• Private vetoes stay private. They're used as filters server-side and never displayed to the group.
• Group members see only your name and mood, never your diet, allergies, or vetoes.
• Location is a neighborhood name the host types, used only to find restaurants (a search like "Korean restaurant in East Village" goes to Google, nothing about who you are). Forkd never collects precise location.

How the engine works (AI disclosure)

Forkd's decisions come from a deterministic, auditable scoring engine, hard constraint filtering, per-person preference scoring, and a group aggregation that protects the least happy person at the table. No large language model generates your result, and no recommendation is paid placement. If we ever introduce either, it will be labeled in the product, on this page, and in the result itself.

Community expectations

• Session links are for your group. Don't spam them, scrape them, or use Forkd to harass anyone.
• Names in a session are visible to that session. Use a name your friends recognize; don't impersonate.
• We cap session sizes and validate every submission server-side to keep abuse boring and unprofitable.

Your data, your table

• Solo mode runs entirely in your browser, those answers never reach our servers.
• Group check-ins are stored only to compute the session's result, keyed by an unguessable link.
• We don't sell personal data, and we especially will never sell dietary, religious, or health-adjacent preferences.
• Want a session deleted or your waitlist email removed? Email jai.gupta@berkeley.edu and it's done.