Privacy Policy

Cigar A.I. · Effective July 14, 2026 · Operated by The Cigar Connoisseur Society, Delaware

Revised July 2026 — added Companion Surfaces section.

We wrote this to be read. It says what we collect, what we do with it, what we will never do, and how to reach us. Where privacy law requires specific language, it appears at the end.

Who we are

Cigar A.I. is a private, invitation-only AI cigar sommelier operated by The Cigar Connoisseur Society ("we," "us"). The service is available only to adults 21 and over.

What we collect

• Account information: your email address, member number, invite lineage (which code you joined with), and your settings and consents.
• What you log: cigars you identify or scan, your journal entries and ratings, your humidor contents and acquisition dates, your wishlist, and your palate quiz answers.
• Derived information: your revealed palate profile, computed from your ratings.
• Usage events: actions you take in the app (for example, identifying a cigar, logging a smoke, saving to a wishlist), recorded with timestamps.
• Photos you submit: band photos are processed to identify the cigar and are not stored after identification completes.
• Location, only when you use it: the Lounges feature uses your location or a place you type, solely to run that search. We do not track your location in the background.
• Technical basics: device and browser information, and error diagnostics if something breaks.

What we use it for

• To run the service: identification, your cellar and journal, recommendations, and aging alerts you've opted into.
• To personalize your sommelier: your palate and history shape what it recommends to you.
• To produce anonymized, aggregate industry research — trends in what is smoked, cellared, rated, and wanted across the membership. This research is how Cigar A.I. is funded, alongside membership itself. Its rules are absolute: everything is aggregated and anonymized; no name, email, member number, or any identifier appears in any research output; no published figure ever represents fewer than 25 members; and your journal entries, notes, and individual history are never included as individual records — only as counts and statistics within groups of 25 or more.
• To keep the service safe and working: abuse prevention, debugging, backups.

What we will never do

• We will never sell or share your individual data. No third party receives your identity or your data. The Society's own companion website, described under Companion surfaces, is operated by the same entity and receives only the membership-verification details listed there.
• We will never show you advertising, and we will never give a manufacturer, retailer, or anyone else the ability to advertise to you through the product.
• We will never let a partner pay for placement in the sommelier's recommendations or for "verified" status in our catalog.
• We will never contact-share: no partner ever receives a way to reach you.

Companion surfaces

The Cigar Connoisseur Society operates a companion website at thecigarconnoisseursociety.com. It is operated by the same entity as Cigar A.I. — The Cigar Connoisseur Society — and is not a third party.

When you sign in to the Society website, it verifies your membership through a private interface to Cigar A.I. The only information disclosed through that interface is: whether the email you entered belongs to a member; your member number; the date your membership began; and whether your number is part of the Founder's Reserve. Nothing else crosses — not your journal, your humidor, your palate profile, your tastings, or any record of how you use Cigar A.I.

The Society website holds no database of members. It stores your signed-in session in a cookie on your own device and nothing on its servers. The website maintains its own privacy policy at thecigarconnoisseursociety.com/privacy covering its own operation; where the two policies describe the same interface, this policy governs what Cigar A.I. discloses, and that policy governs what the website does with it.

Who processes data on our behalf

We use a small set of service providers to run Cigar A.I., each receiving only what their function requires: Railway (hosting), Cloudflare (network and backup storage), Anthropic (AI processing of your queries and scans), Resend (email delivery), and Google Places (lounge search — receives only the search location, never your identity). Error diagnostics are handled entirely on our own infrastructure — no third party receives them. These providers process data under their own contractual obligations to us and do not use your data for their own purposes.

Sharing with other members

Nothing you log is visible to any other member today. If we introduce sharing features in the future, they will be off by default, and only information you explicitly choose to share — never your journal — will be shown, only to people you individually approve, revocably.

Retention and deletion

Your data is retained while your account is active. You may delete your account and all associated data at any time from your profile; deletion removes your records from the live service, and backup copies expire on a rolling basis within 7.5 days. Aggregate statistics already published cannot be un-published, but they contain nothing traceable to you.

Your rights

You may access what we hold about you, export your records, correct your information, and delete your account. Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights (including under the California Consumer Privacy Act or similar state laws) — to exercise any of them, email Privacy@TheCigarConnoisseurSociety.com. We do not discriminate against members who exercise privacy rights.

Age

Cigar A.I. is strictly for adults 21 and over. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 21, and we delete any such account on discovery.

Changes

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will tell you by email before it takes effect — not bury it.

Contact

The Cigar Connoisseur Society · Spokane Valley, WA 99206 · Privacy@TheCigarConnoisseurSociety.com