Last updated 7 October 2026
Black Book is a personal journal for recording pints of Guinness and the pubs you drink them in. This policy explains exactly what it stores, who else touches that data, and how to get rid of it. It is written to be read rather than to be survived.
| Data | Why |
|---|---|
| Email address and password | To create and sign you into your account. Passwords are hashed — they are never stored or visible in readable form. |
| Display name | Shown to people you accept as friends, and on any pub you submit for approval. |
| Journal entries | The score you gave a pint, an optional note, an optional photo, which pub, and when. This is the app. |
| Pubs you add | Name, address and map coordinates of any pub you submit, so others can find it too. |
| Friend connections | Who you have sent, accepted, or received a friend request from. |
| Device notification token | Only if you enable notifications. Used to tell your friends when you log a pint you chose to share. |
If you allow it, the app reads your device's location to show pubs near you and to place a pin when you type a pub's address. Your location is not stored or sent to us. It is used on the device and discarded. The only coordinates kept are those of a pub itself, which are not personal to you.
Your entries are private by default. Access is enforced by the database itself, not only by the app, so an entry you have not shared is not readable by another account even in principle.
Photos you attach to an entry, and your profile picture, are stored privately. They are not reachable by a plain web address: the app requests a temporary link each time it needs to show one, and that link is issued only to you and to friends you have accepted, expires after a couple of hours, and cannot be used by anyone else.
Black Book runs on Supabase, hosted in Ireland (eu-west-1). Your data stays in the European Union. A copy is occasionally made into a separate test environment, also run by Supabase in the EU (Frankfurt), so changes can be tested against real data before they reach you. That copy excludes notification tokens, and it is refreshed from the live data — so when you delete your account, it is removed from the test copy at the next refresh. We also keep backups of the live database so it can be recovered if something goes wrong; each backup is deleted after 35 days, so an account you delete is gone from every backup within 35 days.
You can delete your account from inside the app at any time: tap the person icon in the top right, then Delete Account. If you no longer have the app installed, see the deletion page.
Deletion is scheduled rather than instant. Your account is locked immediately and permanently erased 30 days later. Signing back in during those 30 days cancels it and restores everything — this exists so a mistaken tap cannot destroy years of entries.
After 30 days the following are permanently deleted:
The scores themselves are kept, with everything identifying removed. What survives is a pub, a number and a date — nothing tying it to you, and nothing tying those entries to each other. They are no longer personal data, so they are not deleted; they carry on contributing to that pub's average rating, which is the only thing they are ever used for. Where you rated the same pub more than once in a month, only one of those scores is kept.
This is a deliberate trade and worth being plain about. Your journal is what disappears: the notes, the photos, the stamps, the history, and the fact that any of it was ever yours. What is left is the small amount of information that helps the next person find a good pint.
Pubs you added are kept, with your name removed from them. A pub is shared reference information that other people's journals point at; deleting it would damage their records rather than protect yours. Nothing personal to you remains attached to it.
Your journal is kept for as long as your account exists, because that is the point of a journal. There is no automatic expiry. Delete your account and it goes, on the timetable above.
Under the GDPR you may request a copy of your data, correct it, have it erased, object to how it is handled, or ask for it in a portable format. Most of this is available directly in the app; for anything else, email privacy@blackbook.pub.
If you believe your data has been mishandled you can complain to the Irish Data Protection Commission at dataprotection.ie.
Black Book is about alcohol and is not intended for anyone under the legal drinking age in their country. Accounts are not knowingly created for children.
If this policy changes in a way that affects you, the date at the top will change and the app will say so. Continued use after that means you accept the revised policy.