PRIVACY POLICY

Last updated: July 24, 2026

This Privacy Policy explains how Ajhel Amanonce and Jacen Salvador, doing business as mthdstudios (“mthdstudios,” “we,” “us,” or “our”), collect, use, disclose, and protect information when you use Kudo, our mobile application for scanning, reviewing, ranking, and organizing packaged grocery foods (the “Service”).

If you have questions, contact us at support@mthdstudios.com.

1. Information We Collect

Account and profile information

When you create an account, we may receive or collect:

  • Your email address and authentication identifier
  • Your name, if provided by your sign-in provider
  • Your username, display name, profile photo, and profile preferences
  • Information supplied by Apple or Google when you choose their sign-in service

You may use Apple’s private email relay when signing in with Apple.

Content and activity

We collect information you create or generate through Kudo, including:

  • Product ratings, reviews, rankings, and whether you would buy a product again
  • Public or private review visibility choices
  • Favorites, collections, saved products, and products you want to try
  • Product searches, barcode lookups, and recently scanned products
  • Product corrections or submissions, including photos you choose to upload
  • Reports, blocks, and account-deletion feedback
  • Referral or attribution codes you voluntarily enter or open through a Kudo link

Public reviews, usernames, display names, and profile photos may be visible to other Kudo users. Content marked private is not displayed publicly.

Photos and camera

Kudo requests camera access to scan product barcodes and, when you choose, take a profile or product photo. Kudo may also access a photo you select from your photo library. We do not access photos you do not select.

Purchases

Apple processes payments made through the App Store. We do not receive your full payment-card details. We receive purchase and subscription information, such as product purchased, entitlement status, transaction identifiers, and purchase dates, from Apple and RevenueCat so we can provide and restore paid features.

Device, usage, and diagnostic information

We and our service providers may automatically collect:

  • App interactions, screens viewed, feature usage, and approximate event timestamps
  • Device and app identifiers, operating system, app version, language, and device type
  • IP address and general network information
  • Push-notification identifiers and notification engagement
  • Crash reports, performance measurements, logs, and diagnostic information
  • Referral source and campaign information associated with Kudo links

Kudo does not request precise location access and does not use the advertising identifier for cross-app tracking.

2. How We Use Information

We use information to:

  • Create, authenticate, and maintain your account
  • Scan and identify products
  • Provide reviews, rankings, collections, recommendations, and other Kudo features
  • Process and restore subscriptions
  • Send notifications you choose to allow
  • Moderate content, investigate reports, prevent abuse, and protect the Service
  • Provide support and respond to requests
  • Diagnose errors, measure performance, understand feature usage, and improve Kudo
  • Generate AI taste checks, as described in Section 4
  • Comply with legal obligations and enforce our Terms

We do not sell personal information. We do not use Kudo information for third-party targeted advertising.

3. How We Share Information

We share information only as needed to operate Kudo, comply with law, or protect users and the Service.

Service providers

Our providers may process information on our behalf, including:

  • Convex for authentication, application data, and backend infrastructure
  • Cloudflare and compatible object-storage services for hosting and user-uploaded images
  • Apple and Google for account authentication
  • Apple and RevenueCat for purchases and subscription management
  • PostHog for product analytics
  • Sentry for crash reporting, performance monitoring, and diagnostics
  • OneSignal for push notifications
  • Open Food Facts, USDA, and other product-data sources when Kudo looks up packaged-food information
  • OpenRouter, OpenAI, and Parallel to research and generate AI taste checks, as described in Section 4

These providers process information under their own privacy terms and our agreements with them.

Public information

Information you choose to publish—such as your username, display name, profile photo, public reviews, ratings, and rankings—may be visible to other users.

We may disclose information if reasonably necessary to comply with law, respond to lawful requests, enforce our agreements, investigate fraud or abuse, or protect the rights and safety of users, the public, or mthdstudios.

Business transfers

If Kudo or mthdstudios is involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, reorganization, or sale of assets, information may be transferred as part of that transaction, subject to applicable law.

4. AI-Generated Taste Checks

Kudo uses OpenAI’s GPT-5 mini model through OpenRouter, with Parallel web search, to produce “Kudo says” taste checks: short summaries of what people on the public web say about how a product tastes.

What we send. We send only product identifiers—brand, product name, flavor, category, and barcode. We do not send your account information, email address, username, reviews, ratings, photos, scan history, location, or any other personal information to the AI provider. The AI provider cannot identify you from what we send, and the request contains nothing that is personal to you.

How it works. The AI service searches publicly available web sources and returns a short summary, a confidence level, and links to the sources it used. Taste checks are generated per product and cached, so the same result is shared across users rather than generated for you individually.

Accuracy. Taste-check output is machine-generated and may be inaccurate, incomplete, outdated, or mismatched to the exact flavor you scanned. It is not our opinion, not a Kudo community review, and not health, nutrition, or allergy guidance. Always read the product packaging. See our Terms of Service for the full disclaimer.

5. Your Choices

You may:

  • Change camera, photo, and notification permissions in your device settings
  • Choose whether a review is public or private, subject to available plan features
  • Edit supported profile information in Kudo
  • Block other reviewers and report objectionable content
  • Manage or cancel an App Store subscription through your Apple account
  • Delete your Kudo account from Settings → Delete Account

You may also contact support@mthdstudios.com to request access to, correction of, or deletion of your information.

6. Retention and Account Deletion

We retain information while your account is active and as reasonably necessary to provide Kudo, maintain security, resolve disputes, and comply with legal obligations.

When you delete your account, we delete or de-identify account information and associated Kudo content from active systems, except information we must retain for legal, fraud-prevention, security, payment-record, or dispute-resolution purposes. Limited copies may remain temporarily in encrypted backups until those backups are overwritten.

Deleting your Kudo account does not cancel an App Store subscription. You must manage or cancel the subscription through Apple.

7. Security

We use reasonable administrative, technical, and organizational safeguards designed to protect information. No method of storage or transmission is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

8. Children

Kudo is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has provided personal information, contact us so we can investigate and delete it as appropriate.

9. International Processing

Kudo and its providers may process information in the United States and other countries. Those countries may have data-protection laws different from those where you live.

10. State and Regional Privacy Rights

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to request access, correction, deletion, or a copy of your personal information, or to object to or restrict certain processing. We will respond to verified requests as required by applicable law. We will not discriminate against you for exercising applicable privacy rights.

Submit a request by emailing support@mthdstudios.com.

11. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy to reflect changes to Kudo, our practices, or applicable law. We will update the date above and provide additional notice when legally required.

12. Contact

mthdstudios, California, United States

support@mthdstudios.com