Privacy

Nowish is a booking and guest system that restaurants, bars, breweries and cafés use to run their floor. It is operated by Bite of Health Pvt Ltd, Haryana, India.

When you book a table, join a waiting list, ask for an offer or enquire about a party, you are dealing with the restaurant, not with Nowish. The restaurant decides what to ask you for and what to do with it. In the language of India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, the restaurant is the Data Fiduciary for your information and Nowish is the Data Processor acting on its instructions.

In practice that means: we store and process your details so the restaurant can serve you, and we do what they tell us with it. We do not decide on our own to use your information for something else.

There is one exception. Accounts belonging to a restaurant's own staff — the owner, managers and waiters who sign in to Nowish — are ours to administer, and for those we are the Data Fiduciary. This page is about guests; staff accounts are covered by the restaurant's agreement with us.

Only what the thing you are doing needs. Each of these happens because you asked for it.

Booking a table

Your name, your mobile number, the date, the time and how many people. A note if you add one — a high chair, a window seat, an allergy. The restaurant sees all of it; it is how they know who is coming.

A party or private hire

The same, plus who to ask for, how many guests you expect, what the occasion is if you say, and the package you asked about. If the restaurant later agrees a price with you, that figure, any advance you pay and its reference are recorded against the booking so both sides can see what is paid and what is still due.

Checking in with the QR code at the door

Your name, your mobile number and how many of you there are, so the floor can put you on the waiting list and tell you where you are in the queue. Scanning the code does not reveal where you are standing — we do not collect your location anywhere in Nowish.

Asking for tonight's offer

Your mobile number, verified by a one-time password sent to it. The one-time password exists so that an offer is sent to the person holding the phone and not to a number somebody typed in. We record that the number was verified and when. We do not keep the code itself after it has been used.

“My visits”

If you sign in with your mobile number, you can see your own bookings and offers at that restaurant, and what you consented to. This is a view of information already held for the bookings you made — signing in does not cause anything new to be collected.

What is never asked for

• Your location, at any point, on any screen.
• Your card or bank details. Nowish does not take payments from guests; a party advance is paid to the restaurant directly and we record only the amount and a reference you or they give us.
• Any government identifier — no Aadhaar, PAN, passport or driving licence.
• Your age or date of birth, unless you volunteer an occasion.

Some restaurants let Nowish answer their phone. If you ring one of them, your call may be answered by an automated assistant rather than a person. It says so at the start of the call. You can ask to be put through to the restaurant at any time, and if the assistant cannot help, the call is passed to a person to ring you back.

The call may be recorded

The service that answers the call records it, in the way a restaurant recording its own phone line would. Nowish does not store that recording. We do not keep it, we do not download it, and it is not reachable from any Nowish screen.

What we keep from the call

Only what is needed to act on it. After a call ends we read back what the assistant understood and store:

• Your name and the number you rang from, or one you gave.
• What you asked for — a table or a party — with the day, the time and how many people.
• Any note you gave, and a short written summary of the call in a sentence or two.
• How long the call lasted, when it happened, and whether it produced a booking or something a person needs to look at.

We do not keep the transcript — the line-by-line record of what you and the assistant said. The assistant's own service has it; Nowish deliberately never copies it in, because the booking details are what the restaurant needs and the conversation is yours.

If the assistant was unsure about anything — a day it could not place, a number it did not catch — the words you used are shown to staff so they can ring you and ask. That is the only part of what you said that is stored in your own words.

Two features send text to an AI service to read it. In both cases the rule is the same: it is given the smallest amount of text that lets it do the job, and no more.

Reading a booking a restaurant received elsewhere

Restaurants take bookings through delivery and listing apps as well as their own line. Staff can paste that confirmation, or drop a screenshot of it, and Nowish reads out the name, the number, the day, the time and the party size so they do not have to retype them. A member of staff checks the result before it becomes a booking.

What is sent is the text or image the member of staff supplied. Nothing is added to it from your record with the restaurant, and nothing about other guests is included.

The menu guide

Guests can ask Nowish to suggest a meal — for four people, two vegetarian, medium spice, a budget. What is sent is the restaurant's menu and the preferences you just typed. Your name, your number and your booking history are not sent, because choosing dishes does not need them.

What AI is never used for

• Deciding whether you get an offer, or what it is worth.
• Scoring, ranking or profiling you as a guest.
• Training a public model. The text sent for the two features above is sent to have a job done and is not contributed to anybody's training data.

Giving a restaurant your number so they can hold a table is not agreement to hear from them afterwards. Nowish keeps those two things apart on purpose.

• About your booking. A confirmation, a change, a reminder, the offer you asked for, the code you need at the table. These are sent because you asked for the thing they are about.
• Marketing. News, promotions and invitations are sent only if you tick the box for them. The box is never pre-ticked.

When you do agree, we store the exact words you were shown alongside the date and time you agreed — not a reference to a label that might be reworded later. A record of consent that can quietly change its own meaning is a record of nothing.

You can withdraw it at any time, and it must be as easy to withdraw as it was to give: reply STOP to a marketing message, turn it off under “My visits”, or write to hello@nowish.in. Withdrawing stops the marketing. It does not cancel your bookings or stop messages about them.

The restaurant

Its owner, its managers and the staff on shift, each according to their role — a waiter sees what they need to seat you and settle your bill, not the restaurant's commercial figures. Every change is recorded against the person who made it.

Companies that run things for us

Nowish is built on services operated by other companies: somewhere to host the application, somewhere to store the data, something to send a one-time password, something to answer the phone, something to read the text described in section 4. They act on our instructions and may not use what they hold for their own purposes.

We name the categories rather than the companies, because the list changes and a page naming last year's suppliers is less honest than one describing what they do. If you want the current list, write to hello@nowish.in and we will tell you.

Some of these services run outside India. Where they do, the information is transferred only to countries India has not restricted, and only under terms that hold the provider to this policy.

Nobody else

We do not sell your information. We do not rent it, trade it, or hand it to advertisers or data brokers. We do not use it to target advertising to you anywhere, and the pages a guest uses carry no advertising or tracking scripts. We will disclose information where the law requires it — a court order, a lawful request from an authority — and we will tell the restaurant unless we are forbidden to.

• Everything travels encrypted, and is stored encrypted.
• A guest's full phone number is shown only to somebody signed in as the restaurant's own staff. Elsewhere it is shortened to its last four digits.
• Access follows the job: owner, manager and staff each see a different amount, enforced on the server rather than hidden in the screen.
• Changes that matter — a price agreed, an advance recorded, a booking moved — are written to an audit trail with who did it and when.
• One restaurant's data is never readable by another. Each restaurant's records are separated at the database, not by a filter in the application.

No system is perfectly secure. If something happens to your information that is likely to harm you, we will tell the restaurant and the Data Protection Board of India as the Act requires, and the restaurant will tell you.

Your booking records stay with the restaurant for as long as it keeps its account with Nowish, because they are the restaurant's record of its own trade — who came, what was agreed, what was paid. We delete them when the restaurant closes its account, or sooner if it asks us to, and we delete your records at your own request as described in section 9.

Some things are kept for shorter, by design:

• One-time passwords are valid for minutes and are not stored once used.
• Sign-in sessions expire on their own and can be ended by signing out.
• Call recordings and transcripts are never stored by Nowish at all — see section 3.
• The demonstration restaurant is wiped every night. Anything you enter there is gone by morning; it is not a real restaurant and should not be given real details.

Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 you may ask the restaurant, at any time, to:

• Tell you what it holds about you, and who it has been shared with.
• Correct or complete it if it is wrong or out of date — a misspelled name, an old number.
• Erase it, where it is no longer needed for what it was given for and no law requires it to be kept.
• Withdraw your consent for anything you consented to, as easily as you gave it.
• Nominate somebody to exercise these rights on your behalf if you die or cannot act for yourself.
• Complain — to the restaurant, to us, and to the Data Protection Board of India if we have not dealt with you properly.

Because the restaurant decides what happens to your information, ask the restaurant first. If you cannot reach them, or they do not answer, write to us at hello@nowish.in and we will either act on it or put you in touch with somebody who can.

The Act also asks something of you: the information you give should be accurate, and a complaint should be a real one. Giving somebody else's number to hold a table is not fair on them or on the restaurant.

For anything about this page, about what is held about you, or about something that has gone wrong:

• Grievance contact: hello@nowish.in
• Operated by: Bite of Health Pvt Ltd, Haryana, India

Tell us the restaurant, the mobile number you used, and roughly when. We answer every grievance, and we aim to do it within 30 days — the period the Act allows. If you are not satisfied with how we deal with it, you may complain to the Data Protection Board of India.

When what Nowish does changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top changes too. If a change materially affects how your information is used, the restaurant will be told so it can tell you, and where the change needs your consent, you will be asked for it rather than assumed to have given it.