Your shelf is yours.

Proof & Ash is built so that the person who made it cannot see what you own, what you've poured, or what you thought of it.

Effective September 19, 2026 · Applies to the Proof & Ash iPhone app, published by Paul Cobb.

1. What stays on your phone

Everything personal: the bottles on your shelf and the cigars in your humidor, how full a bottle is, what you paid and where, your pours and smokes, your verdicts and confirmed flavors, your notes, any photos you attach, the palate profile the app computes from all of that, the short notes and shelf reads it writes for you, and the first name you type in Settings.

This data is stored in the app's database on your iPhone. If your iPhone is signed in to iCloud, the same data is synced through Apple's CloudKit to your private iCloud database so it follows you to a new phone. Apple's iCloud terms govern that storage. Neither we nor anyone else can read a user's private CloudKit database; that is how Apple designed it.

Deleting the app deletes the local copy. To remove the iCloud copy as well, go to iPhone Settings → your name → iCloud → Manage Account Storage → Proof & Ash → Delete Data.

2. The catalog

The app keeps a local copy of a shared catalog of bourbons and cigars: names, producers, proof, age, style tags and typical flavor descriptions. It refreshes this list from our server (hosted by Supabase in the United States) when the app opens and when you tap Sync in Settings.

That request is anonymous. It sends no account, no device identifier and nothing about your shelf. Like any web server, ours records the requesting IP address and time in short-lived operational logs, which we use only to keep the service running.

3. Camera and photos

When you scan a bottle or a band, the photo is read on your phone using Apple's on-device text recognition and matched against the local catalog. The photo is not uploaded anywhere. If you choose to keep a photo with a bottle, cigar or session, it is stored with your other personal data as described above. If you save a photo to your library, that is your library.

4. Apple Intelligence

On iPhones that support Apple Intelligence, the app uses Apple's on-device language model to turn facts it already has about your bottle or shelf into a couple of sentences. That processing happens entirely on the device. No text is sent to Apple's servers or to ours, and the feature simply isn't offered on phones that don't support it.

5. Sharing

If you share a caption or photo, it goes through the standard iOS share sheet to whatever app you pick. From that point it is governed by that app's policy, not this one. The app never posts anything on its own.

6. The optional maintainer sign-in

Settings contains a Sign in with Apple button. You do not need it to use the app. It exists so the small group of people who maintain the shared catalog can correct product facts for everyone. If you do sign in, Apple sends us a user identifier and the email address you chose to share (which may be Apple's private relay). Our authentication provider stores those to establish whether your account has maintainer rights; they are not used for anything else. To have that account and its data deleted, email us at the address below and we will do it within a few days.

7. What we don't do

No analytics or crash-reporting services of our own.
No advertising, no advertising identifier, no tracking across apps or websites.
No selling, renting or sharing of any data, because we don't hold any.
No third-party AI services in the App Store version of the app.

8. Age

Proof & Ash is a record-keeping tool for adults who are of legal age to buy alcohol and tobacco where they live. It is not directed at children and is rated 17+ on the App Store.

9. Changes

If this policy changes, the new version will be posted here with a new effective date. If a change would ever mean the app starts collecting something, the app itself will tell you before it does.

10. Contact

Paul Cobb · admin@forvex.app