Privacy policy
Version 2026-11-14. Last updated 14 November 2026.
This explains what Own Dine does with personal information. We have tried to write it so that it can actually be read.
One word first. Where this policy says “restaurant” it means any food business that uses Own Dine — a takeaway, a restaurant, a café etc. We say it the short way below only to keep the page readable.
Start here — which part applies to you
Own Dine does two different jobs, and your information is handled differently depending on which one brought you here.
- You ordered food or booked a table from a restaurant that uses Own Dine. Your information belongs to them, and they decide what happens to it. We store it and look after it on their instructions. Read section 2.
- You run a restaurant that uses Own Dine, or work in one — we hold your information ourselves. Read section 3.
- You are thinking about using Own Dine, or we got in touch with you. Read section 4.
- You just looked at our website — almost nothing happens. Read section 5.
1. Who we are
Own Dine Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales, company number 17493501, whose registered office is Office 10465, 321-323 High Road, Chadwell Heath, Essex RM6 6AX.
We are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office, registration number ZC276517.
If you want to ask us anything about this policy or about your information, email hello@owndine.com.
2. If you ordered food or booked a table
The restaurant you ordered from is responsible for your information. In data protection language they are the “controller” and we are their “processor”. Your details are stored on our system, which is how the ordering and the order screen work. We only ever handle them to run that restaurant’s ordering, and only as they tell us to. We never use them for anything of our own.
This is deliberate and it is the point of Own Dine. Your details belong to the restaurant you chose to order from, and the decisions about how your information is used are theirs. They are not ours to use.
What we hold for them
- Your name, phone number and email address.
- Your delivery address, if you asked for delivery.
- What you ordered, when, and what you paid.
- Anything you typed in a note on your order, including an allergy.
- If your order contained alcohol, the fact that you confirmed you are 18 or over, and when.
- Whether you said yes or no to hearing from that restaurant by email, and the exact words you were shown when you were asked.
Things we do not do and will not
- We never email you on our own behalf. We will not tell you about Own Dine, about offers, or about other restaurants. If you hear from a restaurant you ordered from, it is from them and not Own Dine.
- We never sell or share your details.
- We never use your information to train artificial intelligence.
- We keep each restaurant’s customers separate. If you order from two restaurants that both use Own Dine, they are two unconnected records. Neither can see the other.
- We never see your card details. They go straight from you to the payment company, inside their own secure window. Your money goes to the restaurant, not to us.
If you want your information changed or deleted, ask the restaurant. The decision is theirs, and we do what they ask. The owner has a button in Own Dine that erases a customer’s details — they look you up by the email address or phone number you ordered with, and it is done straight away. If you ask us directly we will not act on it ourselves: we will tell you to contact them and let them know you asked.
Allergies and health
If you tell a restaurant about an allergy in a note on your order, we pass it to them and print it on the ticket in their kitchen, where it is marked so that it cannot be missed.
The allergen information for what you ordered is also printed on the label on your bag, so it is with the food when it reaches you — not only on a screen you saw before you paid.
We do not ask you for health information and there is no box for it.
3. If you run a restaurant that uses Own Dine
Here we are responsible for your information ourselves.
| What | Details |
|---|---|
| About your business | Its name, address, phone number, the kind of food you sell, your opening hours, your delivery areas, and your menu and prices. |
| About you and your staff | Name, email address, the role you have in the Hub, and a scrambled version of your password or staff PIN — we never hold either in a readable form. |
| How the account is used | When people sign in, and a record of actions that matter — a refund, a price change, access given or taken away. This record cannot be altered or deleted, including by us. That is on purpose. |
| Billing | Your plan, your order and booking volumes, invoices and payments. |
| Support | Emails and messages between us, and notes about problems we have helped with. |
Why we are allowed to hold it. To provide the service you have signed up for (performing our contract with you); to run our business properly, including billing, security and keeping records of what happened (our legitimate interests); and to meet legal duties, such as keeping tax records.
The record of who did what is worth a word. It exists to protect you as much as us. If two people who work in the same restaurant disagree about who changed a price, or if you disagree with us about what we did, there is an answer that nobody can quietly edit.
4. If you are thinking about using Own Dine, or we contacted you
If you got in touch with us — through our website or by email — we keep what you sent and our replies, so we can answer you and follow up. Our basis is our legitimate interest in responding to someone who contacted us.
If we got in touch with you about your restaurant, we hold your business’s name and contact details, where we got them, and a note of what was said. Our basis is our legitimate interest in offering a product we think is relevant to your business. You can tell us to stop at any time and we will, and we will keep a note of the fact that you asked so that we do not contact you again.
Where we got your details. From publicly available sources — your own website, your listing on an ordering platform, the Food Standards Agency register, Companies House — or because we visited your restaurant and you gave them to us.
5. Our website, cookies and your browser
There is no cookie banner on Own Dine, because there is nothing to ask you about.
- No analytics. We do not use Google Analytics or anything like it.
- No tracking or advertising cookies. None, from us or from anybody else.
- No social media buttons or embedded videos that would report your visit elsewhere.
- Our typefaces are on our own server, not loaded from Google. Loading fonts from someone else’s server would send them your IP address, and we would rather it did not.
What we do use, and why we are allowed to without asking you:
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| A sign-in cookie | Only if you have an Own Dine account and sign in. It keeps you signed in and nothing else. It cannot be read by scripts on the page. |
| Your basket | Kept in your own browser, not on our server, and only for the restaurant you are ordering from. It never leaves your device until you place the order. |
| Your favourite shops | Only if you tap the heart next to a shop. The list is kept in your own browser, not on our server, and holds just each shop’s name and web address. To show when each one is open, your browser asks us about those shops; we answer and keep nothing. Tap the heart again, or clear your browser’s site data, to remove them. |
| Stripe’s fraud-prevention cookies | Only on a checkout page where you can pay by card. Stripe, who take card payments for
the restaurant, set their own cookies (named __stripe_mid and
__stripe_sid) so they can spot stolen cards being tried and stop fraud. They
are not used for advertising. One lasts 30 minutes, the other a year. Stripe explain them
in their cookie policy. |
All four are “strictly necessary” — the law lets us use them without asking, because without them the thing you asked for would not work. A shopping basket is the textbook example; keeping a card payment you chose to make safe from fraud is another.
Our server keeps ordinary technical logs of requests made to it, which include IP addresses and the web addresses requested, so that we can keep the service secure and working. We keep them for 90 days and we do not use them to build any picture of you.
One thing worth telling you plainly: when you search for food near you, the postcode you type goes into the web address of the results page. That means it appears in those technical logs, and in your own browser history. We do not store it anywhere else — it is not saved to your record or to any restaurant’s.
6. Who else sees your information
We keep the number of companies involved as small as we reasonably can. These are the ones that handle information for us:
| Who | What for |
|---|---|
| Contabo GmbH (Germany) | Hosting the server Own Dine runs on and taking their own backups of it. |
| Our email providers | Sending order confirmations, password resets and our own emails to you. |
| Stripe | Taking card payments for the restaurant and collecting our own subscription from restaurants. Card details go to them, never to us. |
| The company behind our menu importer | Reading a menu a restaurant uploads and turning it into Hub entries. This handles menus, not customers. |
| Microsoft (Azure), in the UK | Storing the nightly encrypted copy of our system, in two UK data centres. It is encrypted before it leaves our server, and Microsoft cannot read it. |
We will also share information if the law requires it, or to establish or defend a legal claim.
We do not sell your information, and we never will.
7. How long we keep things
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| A diner’s name, address, phone number and email | Removed 24 months after their last order. This happens automatically, every night. It is a fixed policy and a restaurant cannot switch it off or extend it. |
| The rest of an order — the dishes, the dates and the money | 6 years, for tax. After the 24 months it no longer says who ate it: an order still reads “2 × Chicken Korma, large, £19.80”. |
| An allergy note, or anything typed into an order | Removed with the name, at 24 months. This includes the allergy declaration, because it is the most sensitive thing on the order. |
| Copies of the emails we sent you about your order | Removed at 24 months. |
| A restaurant’s account, menu and settings | 6 years after they leave, for tax and in case of a dispute. |
| Invoices and payment records | 6 years, for tax. |
| A record that a restaurant accepted our terms | Kept. It is a contract record, and the email on it is the evidence of who agreed. |
| The record of who did what in the Hub | For as long as the restaurant has an account, and 6 years afterwards. We do not promise to delete it: it is written so that it cannot be altered or removed, which is the whole point of it. |
| Support emails | 3 years. |
| Technical server logs | 90 days. |
| Encrypted backups | Up to a year — daily copies for 30 days, monthly copies for 365. Deleting something does not reach a backup already taken, so erased details survive in them until they age out. |
How the 24-month clear-out works, because it is unusual and we would rather explain it than hide it. It does not delete your order. It removes the person from it. The dishes, the dates and the money stay, so the restaurant can still give HMRC a complete sales history — and your name, address, phone number, email, notes and allergy declaration go. It runs every night, by itself.
8. Where your information is held
Own Dine runs on a server, in a data centre in Germany run by our hosting company, Contabo GmbH.
Germany is in the European Economic Area. Sending personal data from the UK to the EEA is permitted under the UK’s adequacy rules, so nothing extra is needed for it — but you are entitled to know where your information actually is, which is why we say so.
Where a company that handles information for us is outside the UK and the EEA, we rely on the standard contract terms the UK government approves for the purpose.
9. Your rights
You have the right to:
- ask what we hold about you, and get a copy;
- have it corrected if it is wrong;
- have it deleted, in some circumstances;
- ask us to limit what we do with it, or object to it;
- get it in a portable form, in some circumstances;
- withdraw consent, where we relied on your consent.
These are free. We will answer a request about information we hold as a controller — your restaurant account, billing, support — within one month.
If you ordered food from a restaurant, exercise these rights with the restaurant, not with us. They hold your information; we only look after it for them, and the one-month deadline is theirs. Tell us and we will point you to them and let them know.
10. If you are unhappy
Tell us first, at hello@owndine.com, and we will try to put it right.
You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK’s data protection regulator, at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint or on 0303 123 1113. You do not have to come to us first.
If your complaint is about a restaurant’s use of your information — what they emailed you, or a deletion they refused — it is them you complain about, and the ICO will want to know that. We will tell you who they are if you are not sure.
11. Changes to this policy
This policy is version 2026-11-14. Every version carries its date, so you can always tell which one you are reading.
If we change it, we publish a new version with a new date. If a change matters to you we will tell you — by email, if you have an account with us. We keep the previous versions.