What changed, and when
Until recently this page said NOSE had no accounts and collected no email addresses. That was true, and it is no longer true: NOSE now offers optional accounts. We said we would tell you plainly rather than quietly widening the wording, so here is the change in one paragraph.
If you never create an account, nothing about your use of NOSE has changed. The matcher is free, unlimited, and still runs entirely in your browser. Your palate is still stored only on your device, and we still never receive it.
If you create an account, we store your email address and, if you turn on sync, a copy of the palate you choose to sync. Sessions use a cookie. Those three things were not true before. Everything below spells out what that means.
Without an account
Jars you save are written to your browser's local storage. The terpene values, the names you give jars, and the profiles themselves are never uploaded. Clearing your browser data deletes them permanently — we hold no copy and cannot restore them.
You can export your palate to a JSON file, import one back, or delete everything from the matcher at any time. No email address, no cookie, and nothing that links one visit to another.
What an account stores
Named specifically rather than summarised:
- Your email address.
- A hashed version of your password. We never see or store the password itself, and we cannot recover it — only reset it.
- The date the account was created.
- Your subscription status.
- The date and time you confirmed you are 21 or over. This is your own attestation, recorded as you gave it. It is not verification, and we do not describe it as verification anywhere.
We do not ask for your name, address, phone number, date of birth, or anything about what you buy or consume.
Palate sync, if you turn it on
Your saved jars live in this browser. Two buttons in the matcher let you save a copy to your account and load it back on another device. Nothing moves unless you press one: there is no automatic syncing, and a copy exists on our side only if you put it there. Loading replaces what is in the browser you are using, so it will ask before it does that.
This is a real reversal of the promise we made before accounts existed, and it deserves stating flatly: a synced palate is a record, held by us, of cannabis products associated with your email address. Consider whether you want that before enabling it. The matcher works exactly the same without sync, and the export button still moves a palate between devices by hand.
Synced palates are stored separately from your account credentials, and the company that handles our logins never receives them.
Who else receives your data
Logins are handled by a third-party authentication company based in the United States. They receive your email address and your hashed password, because that is what verifying a login requires. They do not receive your palate, your jars, or your match results. We will name the company on request — write to us at the address below.
The site is served by Netlify, which keeps standard server logs including IP addresses for security and abuse prevention. That applies to any website you visit and is outside our control; see Netlify's own privacy documentation for their retention practices.
Nobody else. No advertisers, no analytics vendors, no data brokers.
Cookies and sessions
Before accounts, NOSE set no cookies at all. It now sets exactly one, and only after you log in.
The cookie is named nose_session. It contains a random string and nothing else — no email address, no name, no readable information of any kind. That random string points at a session record on our side holding your user id and an expiry date. The cookie cannot be read by JavaScript, is only sent over HTTPS, and is not sent when another site links to us.
It lasts fourteen days, and expires sooner if you log out. Logging out destroys the session on our side as well, so the cookie cannot be reused. There is no tracking cookie, no advertising cookie, and no cookie at all until you sign in.
Match feedback stays anonymous — including after accounts
When you press “Matched” or “Didn't match” on a result, we receive: the similarity score, its confidence band, how many jars were in your palate, which built-in sample jars were involved, and a timestamp.
Jars you created yourself are reported as the single word custom. Names you typed never leave your browser.
These votes carry no account identifier, and we made a deliberate decision to keep it that way. Your session cookie is not read when a vote is sent. Signing in does not attach your identity to anything you rate. We could have linked them and chose not to: testing whether a shared aroma shape predicts shared enjoyment does not require knowing who voted.
Because these votes are anonymous, they may inform aggregate research or published findings about how well the matching method works. Nothing in them identifies you or can be traced back to you.
Error reports — automatic
If the site's JavaScript fails, your browser sends us the error message, the script and line it came from, which page you were on, your browser's user-agent string, and a timestamp. It is capped at three reports per page load.
This contains no palate data and nothing you typed. Like match feedback, it carries no account identifier — an error report from a signed-in user looks the same as one from anybody else. Error reports are deleted after 90 days.
Camera, files, and lab links
QR scanning runs entirely in your browser. The camera stream is never transmitted or recorded, and the camera stops when you leave the tab. Permission is only requested when you choose to scan.
Report files you upload are checked for type and size locally. In this version they are not sent anywhere. Pasted lab links are validated against a list of known laboratory domains before anything is done with them.
Deleting your account
There is a delete button in your account settings. It is not a request queue and not a deactivation flag. Pressing it, in this order:
- erases your synced palate;
- destroys every active session, on every device;
- deletes your account and email address from our authentication provider.
If any step fails, you are told so rather than shown a success message, and we finish it manually.
Two things survive deletion, and both are things that were never attached to you: anonymous match-feedback votes, and anonymous error reports. There is no identifier in either one, so there is nothing in them to erase. Netlify's server logs are outside our control and follow their retention schedule.
Deleting your account does not touch the palate stored in your own browser. That is yours, and it stays until you clear it.
How long we keep things
- Account and synced palate: until you delete the account. Deletion is immediate, not scheduled.
- Sessions: fourteen days, or until you log out.
- Error reports: 90 days, then automatically purged.
- Match feedback: kept indefinitely. It is anonymous, and the whole point of collecting it is to see whether the method holds up over time.
If there is a breach
If your email address or account information is exposed in a security incident, we will notify you and the relevant authorities as required by law. Florida law sets specific obligations here and we intend to meet them.
We will say what happened and what was exposed, rather than issuing something vague.
What we still do not do
This list is shorter than it used to be. It used to begin with “no cookies” and end with “no accounts.” Both of those lines are gone, and pretending otherwise would be worse than losing them.
- No advertising, and no selling of your personal information.
- No analytics suites, session recording, or fingerprinting.
- No account required to use the matcher — it is free and unlimited either way.
- No third-party scripts running in your browser. Logins are handled entirely by our own server, so no outside code loads on this site. The Content Security Policy blocks it at the browser level, not merely by policy.
- No claims about effects — and so no health data collected or inferred.