Tawlify
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Privacy Policy

Last updated: 27 October 2026

Tawlify lets guests order from their table at cafés, restaurants and other venues, and lets those venues run their orders. This policy explains what personal data we handle, why, and what you can do about it. It follows Lebanon's Law No. 81/2018 on Electronic Transactions and Personal Data, and gives everyone the rights the EU's GDPR expects, wherever you use Tawlify.

Who we are

We are Tawlify (“we”). We are the controller of Tawlify guest accounts, this website and our sales contacts. For the orders, tables and staff accounts of a venue, the venue is the controller and we process that data on its behalf as its processor.

For any question or request about your data, write to us on our contact page, which reaches the person responsible for data protection here.

What we collect and why

  • Guest account: your email or phone number and the name staff call you by, plus the second contact you choose to link (a phone number on an email account, or the other way round) so either one signs you in. Used to sign you in with a one-time code and to show staff who an order is for. Legal basis: performing our contract with you.
  • Google sign-in (optional): if you choose “Continue with Google”, Google tells us your email address and the name on your Google account, and nothing else. We never get your Google password and we don't read anything else in your Google account. Legal basis: performing our contract with you.
  • Orders: the venue, table, items, options, notes, totals, payment status and when each change happened, with who made it. Used to prepare and serve your order, shown in your order history, and counted toward the stamp card at venues that run a loyalty program. Legal basis: performing our contract with you; the venue keeps its sales records to meet its own legal obligations.
  • Ratings and requests: the stars and optional comment you give a completed order, and what you ask staff for from your table (waiter, bill, water, cleaning, your car) with when it was answered. Shown to the venue to improve its service; a low rating's comment is emailed to the venue owner. We don't post your rating anywhere: if you choose to review the venue on Google, that happens on Google under its own terms. Legal basis: the venue's legitimate interest in its service quality.
  • Venue staff: work email, a password hash and their role. Used to sign in to the order board and to record who changed an order. The venue owner's email also gets our welcome, invoice, receipt and billing reminder emails, and we keep notes of our calls with them. Legal basis: performing our contract with the venue.
  • Pilot and call requests: name, business, city, email, WhatsApp number and notes you send us from the website or when booking a call. Used to contact you about Tawlify. Legal basis: steps taken at your request before a contract.
  • Support chat: your name, email and the messages you send with “Chat with us” on our website or venue admin, plus the page you started on. Used to answer you, by chat or by email if you've left. Legal basis: steps taken at your request before a contract, or our contract with the venue.
  • Country: so the website can speak about your country rather than ours, we read the country our hosting provider or network reports for your connection, or work it out from your browser's time zone. The lookup uses DB-IP's free IP-to-Country Lite database (IP geolocation by DB-IP, CC BY 4.0). It tells us a country, never a precise location, and we keep it only in a cookie on your device. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in showing you relevant wording.
  • Security data: your IP address and failed sign-in or code attempts, kept briefly in memory to stop abuse. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in keeping the service secure.
  • Usage analytics, only if you accept them: pages visited (without the link's secret parameters), device and browser type, rough location and actions such as placing an order. We never send your name, contact or order notes to analytics. Legal basis: your consent.

We don't sell personal data, we don't use it for advertising, and nothing you do on Tawlify feeds an automated decision about you.

Cookies

All of ours are first-party. Only the analytics ones need your consent; the rest are what makes signing in, ordering and your own settings work.

  • Signing in (signed, so they can't be edited): your guest account (90 days), your seat at a table (3 hours), venue staff screens (12 hours), our own platform dashboard (12 hours), and a short-lived one during Google sign-in. The live demo keeps its own copies so it never touches a real session.
  • Your settings: the language you picked and the country we worked out (a year each), the currency you chose on a menu, a venue's auto-print choice, and flags that remember you've seen a product tour.
  • Support chat: one signed cookie that keeps your chat (90 days, only once you write to us), plus small flags for whether a chat exists, the last reply you read and whether we've greeted you.
  • Abuse limits: one random device id used to count wrong daily-code attempts.
  • Analytics (only with consent): Google Analytics cookies (_ga, _ga_*), kept up to 2 years, plus one cookie recording your answer to the banner. Google signals and ad personalisation are turned off.

You can accept or reject analytics in the banner, and change your mind any time with “Cookie settings” at the bottom of our website. Rejecting deletes the analytics cookies.

Who we share it with

  • The venue you order from sees your name and that order. Venues don't see your contact details or your orders at other venues.
  • Service providers who process data for us under contract: Fly.io (hosting and database), Tigris (menu photos), Resend (our emails, including sign-in codes), Meta (sign-in codes on WhatsApp), Telegram (where our team reads and answers support chats), Google (Analytics, only with consent; and “Continue with Google” if you use it), Cal.com (booking calls), Stripe (venues paying their Tawlify subscription by card; card details go to Stripe, never to us) and OpenAI (reading the PDF menus venues choose to import, and answering questions guests type into “Ask about the menu”, sent with the venue's menu but without your name or contact).
  • A venue's own systems, where it asked us to connect one: its orders, including the name on them, are sent to the kitchen printer or system it nominated.
  • Public authorities, only when the law requires it.

International transfers

Our servers are in the European Union (Frankfurt), and some providers, such as Google, process data in the United States and other countries. Where data leaves the EU we rely on the European Commission's standard contractual clauses or an adequacy decision, and we only use providers that offer those safeguards.

How long we keep it

  • Guest accounts: until you delete them. A deleted account can be restored by signing in within 30 days; after that your contact, name and rating comments are erased, and past orders stay with the venue as anonymous sales records (with their star ratings).
  • Sign-in codes: 10 minutes. Security counters: minutes, in memory only.
  • Venue and staff data: while the venue uses Tawlify, then as the venue instructs.
  • Pilot and call requests, and support chats: up to 2 years after our last contact, or sooner if you ask.
  • Demo cafés: the café made for your visit to Tawlify's live demo, and everything ordered in it, is deleted when the demo expires.
  • Analytics: 14 months in Google Analytics.

Your rights

You can, free of charge:

  • confirm whether we process your data and get a copy of it;
  • correct incomplete, inaccurate or outdated data;
  • have unnecessary or excessive data anonymised, blocked or deleted;
  • take your data to another service (portability);
  • delete data processed with your consent, and withdraw that consent;
  • object to processing we base on a legitimate interest;
  • know who we share your data with, and what happens if you don't consent.

Guests can do most of this themselves on your profile: change your name, download your data, or delete your account. For anything else, write to us on our contact page and we'll reply within 30 days. Requests about a venue's orders or staff accounts go to that venue, and we'll help it answer. If our answer doesn't satisfy you, you can complain to Lebanon's Ministry of Economy and Trade, or, if you are in the EU or the UK, to your local data protection authority.

Security

Connections are encrypted (HTTPS), sessions are signed cookies, passwords are hashed, sign-in codes are stored only as hashes, and every venue sees only its own data. If a breach could put you at risk, we'll tell you and the authorities the law requires us to notify.

Children

Tawlify accounts are for people 18 or older. Children can order with an adult at the table.

Changes

We'll update the date above when this policy changes, and tell signed-in guests and venues about important changes before they apply.