Privacy

Who we are

WineGenie is a UK research project that publishes wine-merchant catalogues in a form AI assistants can read. Contact: hello@winegenie.com. We are the data controller for anything described here.

Browsing the site

We set no cookies and ask for nothing. Our host, Vercel, records standard server logs for every request, and we use their privacy-friendly analytics, which counts page views without cookies and without building a profile of you. Neither tells us who you are.

Following a buy link

Every "Buy" link goes through our redirect so the merchant can credit the referral. When you follow one we record the time, which wine and merchant, where the click came from, the country your network address resolves to, your browser's user-agent string, the site you came from, and a one-way cryptographic hash of your network address.

That hash is salted with a secret we hold, so it cannot be reversed into an address or matched against a hash made by anyone else. We keep it only to tell one visitor from another and to spot automated abuse. We never store your network address itself.

A random reference travels with you to the merchant so a purchase can be matched back to the click. It identifies the click, not you. What happens once you arrive is governed by that merchant's own privacy policy.

When an AI assistant uses our tools

Our MCP server lets assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT search the catalogue on your behalf. We log the tool called, the arguments it was called with (a wine search, for example), how many results came back, how long it took, the country, the user-agent, and the same kind of salted hash of the network address.

An assistant may send an opaque session identifier so we can see that several searches belong to one conversation. It is a random string chosen by the assistant. We ask assistants not to put personal data in it, and we never ask for your name, your email or your conversation.

We do not receive your chat history. We see only the search the assistant chose to run.

What we never collect

Names, email addresses, postal addresses, payment details, accounts, passwords, raw network addresses, advertising identifiers, cross-site tracking, and anything in the special categories protected by UK data protection law. We do not buy personal data and we do not sell or rent anything to anyone.

Why we are allowed to do this

Our lawful basis is legitimate interests: measuring whether an affiliate referral worked is necessary to run the service and to be paid for it, and the data involved is minimal and not identifying. Because we set no cookies and no similar technologies for tracking, we do not need consent under the UK's electronic privacy rules.

Who else sees it

Vercel hosts the site, and Neon stores our database, both as processors acting on our instructions. Awin, the affiliate network, receives the click reference for merchants on that network so commission can be attributed. Merchants receive the referral itself, as they would from any link. That is the complete list.

How long we keep it

Click and tool-call records are kept for 13 months, which covers the longest affiliate payment cycle plus a margin for disputes, and are then deleted. Aggregate counts that cannot identify anyone may be kept longer for the research this project exists to do.

Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, to correct it, to delete it, or to object to our using it. Write to hello@winegenie.com and we will answer within one month.

In practice we will usually have to tell you that we cannot find you. Because we store only a salted hash and no identifier of yours, we have no way to connect our records to a person, which is the point of collecting them that way. If you can tell us roughly when you clicked and which wine, we will search on that basis.

If you are unhappy with our answer you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

Money, and age

Buy links are affiliate links: if you purchase, the merchant pays us a commission and your price is unchanged. Merchants cannot pay for placement. You must be 18 or over to buy alcohol in the UK, and merchants verify age at checkout.