Privacy Policy

Curated is an editorial coffee directory operated by Upper Supplies, LLC. You can read the whole list without an account and without telling us anything about yourself.

If you make an account, we hold your sign-in details, the shops you save, the notes you keep, and whatever you choose to post publicly. Paid membership runs through Stripe, so your card number never reaches us. We do not sell your data, and we don't run advertising or third-party trackers. We do measure how the site is used, and you can opt out of that. You can delete your account, and everything personal in it, from your account page.

Public: your profile page at /u/your-handle, with your avatar, name, bio, specialty, any badges you have earned and the photos of yours we feature. If you hold a paid membership, its chip shows there too. A star rating you write a note on appears on that shop's page with your name and avatar beside it. So do your comments and any photo of yours we approve.

Private: your email address, your saved shops, your check-ins, your planned days, and the record of what you paid and when. Your field notes are read by nobody but you. None of it renders on a public page or feeds a public count.

Password sign-in requires a verified address, so signing up sends you a verification link. Asking for a password reset sends you a reset link. Sending an invite can send the recipient a postcard email, and the invite works by shared link if you would rather it didn't.

Email us and we'll take your address off the newsletter list. Any newsletter we send will carry an unsubscribe link too. We don't add you to any other list.

We keep cookies to a minimum. Signing in sets a session cookie, which is what keeps you signed in from page to page. Google Analytics sets two cookies, _ga and _ga_FR6G11V220, which hold the random id described above and last up to two years. We don't use advertising or cross-site-tracking cookies.

You can turn analytics off for this browser here, and we honor the Global Privacy Control signal your browser can send.

Stripe is our payment processor. Checkout and the billing portal are Stripe's own pages, and your card number, expiry and security code go straight to Stripe. They never pass through Curated and we never store them. What we keep is the record of the purchase itself, so we can grant the membership and answer a question about a charge later.

When you buy a membership we pass the random analytics id from your browser to Stripe alongside the order, and once Stripe confirms the payment we report the amount and the tier back to Google Analytics under that id, so we can see which page brought the sale. Nothing about you or your card travels with it. If you turn analytics off while signed in, we ask Stripe to drop that id from your subscription, so a later renewal has no id to report. That request can fail if Stripe is unreachable at that moment, and then the id stays on the subscription until it goes through. A purchase we already reported to Google keeps the id it was sent with.

Three places ask your browser for your location: the welcome step that centers the map on your city, the locate control on the map, and the start point of a Curated Day. Your browser hands it over only if you allow it, and you can refuse and still use all three.

At the welcome step and on the map it stays in your browser. In a planned day it sets which shops come first. To draw the route we send the shops, and your start point rounded to about a city block, as coordinates, to a public routing server run by the OpenStreetMap community (OSRM), from our servers rather than from your browser. If you save that day so you can invite someone to it, we store the nearest neighborhood rather than your coordinates. A link you share carries the shops and their order, and leaves your start point out unless you tick the box to include it. Opening the route in Google Maps or Apple Maps passes the stops, and your start point when you chose one, to that app, the same as any maps link does.

We share data with the vendors that run the site, and only so they can provide those services. We do not share your information with advertisers or data brokers. The vendors are:

• Vercel. Hosting, page view and performance measurement, and the file storage that holds uploaded photos and avatars.
• Neon. The Postgres database that holds your account and everything written into it.
• Stripe. Payments, the billing portal, and the receipts behind both.
• Resend. Verification, password reset and invite email.
• Cloudflare. The Turnstile check that keeps scripts from posting reviews.
• CARTO and OpenStreetMap. The map tiles, and the lookup that turns an address you type into a location.
• OSRM. The public routing server, run by the OpenStreetMap community, that turns a planned day into a road route. It receives the coordinates of your start point and the shops, not who asked for them.
• Google. Google Analytics receives the browsing records described above under a random id. Google also answers the address suggestions in a Curated Day, and handles sign-in if you choose Google for it.
• Apple. Only if you choose to sign in with Apple.
• Spotify, Instagram and TikTok. A shop page can carry an embedded playlist or clip. Those load from the platform's own servers, so the platform can see that your browser asked for one. A clip loads only once you open it.

We may also disclose data if the law requires it, or to protect the site and the people using it.

Your account data is kept until you delete the account. Your newsletter address is kept until you ask us to remove it. Nominations are kept for as long as they are useful to maintaining the directory.

Expired sign-in records, such as a finished session or a used verification link, are deleted thirty days after they expire.

Google Analytics keeps event-level data for 2 months and user-level data for 14 months. Google Signals and ads personalization are switched off for our property.

Purchase records outlive a deleted account. We keep the amount, the date and the Stripe references for tax and accounting, with the link to you removed. You can ask us at any point what we still hold.

When you delete your account we keep a closed-account record so a subscription that reaches Stripe after the deletion can still be cancelled. It holds your account and sign-in identifiers, a one-way hash of your email address that cannot be turned back into the address, and the Stripe customer and subscription references. The billing email address itself is removed from that record after 90 days.

You can do it yourself, from the profile pane of your account page. It is immediate and it cannot be undone.

Deleting removes your profile, your saved shops, your check-ins, your field notes, your planned days, the invites you sent, your badges and your membership access, along with the sign-in itself; a closed-account record stays behind, and the section above says what it holds and for how long. It also removes your ratings, the notes on them, your comments and the photos you uploaded. If you would rather leave those on the shop pages without your name, there is a box to tick on the delete card. If you pay quarterly, deleting the account cancels the renewal with Stripe as part of the same step.

Two things survive either way. Purchase records are kept for tax and accounting with the link to you removed, and a report someone filed about content, or a record of a decision a curator made, is kept as the account of what happened, with the link to the person removed.