Privacy Policy

Last updated 4 October 2026

The short version. ClariTip carries advertising, served by Google. Google sets cookies and uses your IP address and device information to choose which ads you see, and that is a real thing to know about before you use this app — section 3 says exactly what it involves and how to turn the personalised part off.

ClariTip itself still collects nothing about you. No account, no analytics of any kind, no cookie of our own, no IP address anywhere in our database. We do not see who you are, what you searched, or which businesses you looked at. The only time we hold anything is when you choose to send it: if you report a problem with a claim, we keep your message, your email address and any file you attach for as long as it takes to settle it.

No advertiser can change what a business's page says. Nobody can pay to raise a confidence score, soften a wage figure, or have a claim removed. That is a term of use, not a promise in passing — see the Terms of Use, section 7.

This policy explains what ClariTip collects, what Google's advertising collects, and which is which. Most of it is checkable: open your browser's network tab and you can see every request this app makes and who it goes to. The part you cannot check from outside is what Google does with what it receives, so that section links to Google's own account of it rather than paraphrasing.

1. What ClariTip itself does not do

This section is about us. The advertising is separate and section 3 covers it on its own, because the two are genuinely different and running them together would let us take credit for restraint that only applies to half the page.

No account is required to use any part of ClariTip.
No analytics of our own. There is no Google Analytics, no product analytics SDK, no tracking pixel, no session recorder, and no event logging of what you look at. We could not tell you which businesses are popular, because we do not measure it.
No cookie of our own. ClariTip sets none, for any purpose. Google's advertising cookies are not ours and are described in section 3.
No IP address in our database. The ClariTip schema has no column for one, anywhere. This was a design decision and it still holds — but Google's ad requests do see your IP address, as every web request does.
No profile of you built by us. We do not have the pieces to build one from.
We do not sell anything about you, and we receive nothing about you from Google — no audience data, no demographics, no report on who visited. What comes back to us is a number: how many ads were shown and what they earned.

One consequence worth stating plainly. Because Google's advertising uses cookies and device information to choose personalised ads, California law and several other state laws treat that as sharing personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising, even though no money changes hands for data and none of it reaches us. You can switch it off: see section 3.

2. What is stored on your device

One entry in your browser's local storage, holding three values: the state you chose, the region your device's connection appeared to be in when we guessed, and the time we saved it. It exists so the app does not ask you the same question every time you open it.

It stays on your device. It is not sent to us, and it is not readable by anyone else. You can clear it at any time by clearing site data for ClariTip in your browser settings, or by deleting the installed app — the only consequence is that ClariTip will ask you for your state again.

3. Advertising

ClariTip carries advertising supplied by Google. This is how ClariTip is paid for. It is also the part of ClariTip that collects the most about you, and almost none of it is collected by us, so it is worth reading rather than skimming.

Two different Google services, because they are not the same thing. In a web browser the ads come from AdSense. In the app from an app store they come from AdMob. Google runs both, and what they collect differs in one way that matters to you: a browser is identified by cookies, and a phone app is identified by an advertising ID your device gives it. The difference is in how you turn it off, which is covered below.

What Google does

In a browser: cookies. Google, and companies it works with, set cookies in your browser to choose which ads to show you and to count how often they were shown.
In the app: an advertising ID. Your phone gives apps a resettable advertising identifier — Apple and Google each have their own. Google reads it for the same purposes. It is not your name, and it is not tied to your ClariTip use in any record we hold, but it is stable until you reset it, so it can connect what you do in this app to what you do in others.
Your IP address. Every request a browser or an app makes reveals it, and Google's ad requests are no exception. Google uses it for, among other things, working out roughly where you are and whether an ad was seen by a real person.
Personalisation. Unless you turn it off, the ads you see may be chosen using what Google knows about your previous use of ClariTip and of other apps and sites.

Google describes this in full, and it is worth reading once: how Google uses information from sites or apps that use its services.

What comes back to us

A number. How many ads were shown, and what they earned. We receive nothing about any individual — no audience data, no demographics, no list of who visited. We cannot tell from the advertising which businesses you looked at, and we do not want to.

Turning personalisation off

In every case below, ads still appear. What stops is their being chosen from what you have done before.

Anywhere: Google's ad settings turn off personalised ads across everything Google serves, ClariTip included.
On your phone, for every app at once. On iPhone, Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking, and Settings → Privacy & Security → Apple Advertising. On Android, Settings → Privacy → Ads, where you can also delete the advertising ID outright.
On iPhone, we have to ask you first. Apple requires an app to get your permission before it may use your advertising ID to track you across other companies' apps and sites. If you say no, that is the end of it — the ads become non-personalised and nothing we or Google do can override your answer.
In the EU, the UK and Switzerland, a consent prompt appears before any advertising cookie is set or any advertising ID is read. Declining means non-personalised ads. You can change your answer at any time from the link in ClariTip's footer.
In California and other states with similar laws, that same link is how you exercise the right to opt out of sharing for cross-context behavioural advertising.

What advertising does not touch

No advertiser can change what a business's page says. Nobody can pay to raise a confidence score, soften a wage figure, remove a claim, or have their own page look kinder. Advertising and the claims database do not meet, and the Terms of Use say so in section 7 rather than leaving it as an assurance in a privacy policy.

Ads are labelled, and they sit outside the evidence: never inside the box that lists what we found, and never above a confidence score. One thing we cannot promise is which advertiser appears on which page. Google decides that, and a business we publish a wage claim about could in principle buy an ad that lands beside it. If you ever see that, it means Google's auction put it there — not that anything was arranged.

4. How the state guess works

When you first open ClariTip, it asks our own server which region the request appears to be coming from. Our hosting provider already knows this — it is how the request reached us — so we read it from the connection itself rather than sending anything about you to an IP-lookup service. The answer comes back marked not to be cached and is never written down on our side.

It is a guess, and we treat it as one: the app shows you what it guessed and asks you to confirm or change it. Your confirmed choice is what the app uses.

5. What happens when you search

A search sends the text you typed to our database so it can return matching public rows. We do not store searches, associate them with a person or a device, or use them to build anything.

To be complete about it: our hosting and database providers keep short-term operational logs, as every web service does, and those logs can include the IP address a request came from. That is infrastructure, not a ClariTip feature — we do not query those logs to learn about users, and nothing from them ever enters the ClariTip database.

6. Other services your browser contacts

Netlify hosts the app and serves the page.
Supabase hosts the database the app reads from, and the private storage that an attached document goes into. The app connects with a public key that can read only the published views, and can write only two things: a report you submit, and a file you attach to it.

Google serves the advertising, which is section 3 and is by some distance the largest of the three in terms of what it collects.

That is the whole list, and it is worth noting what is not on it. The typefaces are served from this site rather than from Google Fonts, so a page load does not announce itself to Google before the first word appears. There is no analytics provider, no tag manager, no A/B testing service, no session recorder and no social widget. ClariTip links out to the US Department of Labor for wage law, but only when you choose to follow a link.

7. If you report a problem, or write to us

If you tell us a claim is wrong — through the report form in the app, or by writing to us — we keep what you sent and your email address so we can investigate and reply. Three things about that:

Your identity is not published with what you tell us. When a report becomes a published claim, the claim carries its source and its confidence; it does not carry you. The link from a published claim back to the person who reported it is held in fields that the app's public access cannot read at all — enforced both by database row-level security and by column-level permissions, not by our remembering to hide it.
A document you attach is never published and never shown to anyone else. The report form asks for evidence, and that can be a file — a pay scale, a photograph of something posted at work. It goes into private storage that the app can write to and cannot read back: there is no link to it, it cannot be listed, and no visitor can reach it. We open it, check the claim against it, and delete it when the dispute is settled. The written outcome is the record; the document is not. That matters because a pay scale usually carries other people's names as well as yours.
We keep the rest only as long as it is doing work — through the investigation and for a reasonable period afterwards so we can show why a claim was changed. Ask us to delete your correspondence and we will, unless we need it for a dispute that is still live.

8. Children

ClariTip is not directed at children under 13, is not designed for them, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. It is an app about wage law and what restaurants pay their staff; we would be surprised to find a child using it.

Two specifics, because advertising makes this less simple than it used to be. The app is not tagged as child-directed to Google, because it is not; that means Google treats it as a general-audience service. And nothing about reading the app asks anyone for personal information — the only way to give us any is to report a problem with a claim, which asks for an email address so we can reply. If you believe a child has sent us something, or has been shown advertising here, write to us and we will deal with it.

9. Your rights

Depending on where you live — California, Colorado, Virginia, the EU, the UK, and a growing list of others — you have rights to know what personal information a company holds about you, to have it deleted, to correct it, and not to be discriminated against for asking. You are welcome to exercise them by writing to hello@claritip.app.

We will answer honestly, and if you have only ever read ClariTip the honest answer is that we hold nothing about you: without an account, without cookies, and without an IP address on file, there is no record to produce.

If you have reported a problem with a claim, or written to us, we hold that — your message, your email address, and any file you attached. Attachments are deleted when the dispute is settled, as described in section 7. Ask us to delete the rest and we will, unless we still need it for a dispute that is live; in that case we will tell you so, and delete it when it closes.

The right that does the most work here is the advertising one. Because personalised advertising counts as sharing your information under California law and several others, you can opt out of it, and the control is in the app's footer rather than at the end of a request by email. Turning it off does not remove the ads; it stops them being chosen from what Google knows about you. Section 3 has the detail.

10. Security

The app reads the database through a public key that is limited by row-level security and column permissions to the published views. The only things it can write are a problem report and a file attached to one; it cannot read either of them back, and neither can anyone else's copy of the app. Keys that can do more are held on the server side and never appear in the app. All traffic is over HTTPS.

11. Changes to this policy

If we change what ClariTip collects, we will update this page and change the date at the top, and we will say so in the app rather than leaving you to notice.

12. Contact

hello@claritip.app