Privacy policy
Last updated: 3 August 2026
Matcha Scout is a small Montréal café and restaurant guide built from text messages. This page describes exactly what it collects and what it does with it.
What we collect
- Your phone number, when you text us.
- The text of your message — the note you write about a place, or the question you ask.
- Photos you send as picture messages.
How your phone number is stored
We do not keep your phone number as a number. It is converted into a salted, keyed hash (HMAC-SHA256) which cannot be reversed back into the number, and that hash is what our records are keyed on.
The number itself is held in two narrow cases, and deleted in both:
- While we are replying to you — the few seconds between receiving your message and sending our answer.
- If you have a note waiting to be published, until it publishes — normally within about two hours of your last message — so that we can send you the one text telling you it is live. It is deleted in the same operation that publishes the note. If you text STOP it is deleted immediately, along with anything of yours not yet published.
Your carrier and our messaging provider (Twilio) necessarily see and retain your number under their own policies. This section is about our records.
What becomes public, and when
The note you write about a place, and the photo you send, are shown to other people using the service — that is the whole point of it. They are published without your name or number attached. Please don't include anything personal in a note.
Nothing is published immediately. What you send is held as a private draft and published about an hour after your last message, so you have time to change or remove it. You can also ask for it to go live straight away.
Automated processing
Replies are written by Anthropic's Claude, reached either directly or through OpenRouter, which routes the request on our behalf. Your message text and any photo you send are included in that request, along with the recent history of your conversation with us, so it can follow what you are referring to. It decides what to reply and which of our own functions to call — saving a note, searching, publishing. It does not rewrite your note: what gets published is your wording, stored verbatim.
We don't use your messages to train anything, and our providers process them on our behalf under their own terms rather than for their own purposes.
Retention
- Phone numbers: not retained as numbers (see above); the hash persists.
- Notes and photos: retained indefinitely as part of the guide once published.
- Unpublished drafts: deleted if you text STOP.
- Your conversation with the assistant: retained so it can follow context across messages, and so we can fix failures.
- Message records: retained so we can spot and fix failures.
What we never do
- We do not sell or rent your information.
- We do not share it for anyone's marketing.
- We do not send you marketing messages. We reply to what you send, nothing more.
Opting out
Reply STOP to any message and we stop immediately. ARRÊT works in French. Reply HELP or AIDE for help. Message & data rates may apply.
Removing something
To have a note or photo you sent taken down, text us and say so, or email the address below. Because numbers are stored only as hashes, please send the request from the same phone number you used originally so we can match it.
Contact
Email: sunisgreat1@gmail.com