Legal

Privacy Policy

Effective 11 September 2026

Who we are

Onka is a restaurant reservation service in Cebu City, Philippines, operated by Onka Reservations ("Onka," "we," "us"). It connects diners with restaurants and helps those restaurants manage their tables. This policy explains what personal data we collect, why, and how it's handled, in line with the Philippine Data Privacy Act of 2012 (Republic Act 10173).

What we collect

When you book a table: name, email address, phone number, party size, date/time, and any notes you add (e.g. dietary needs, occasion). If you join a waitlist, the same fields apply.

When you create an account: your account is managed by our authentication provider, Clerk. We receive your Clerk user ID and the profile fields Clerk shares (typically email and name), not your password.

If you add details to your profile: your address, where you like to dine, your birthday and anniversary (month and day only), dietary needs, and any standing requests. These are optional, and help restaurants prepare for your visit.

If you run a restaurant on Onka: the business details you provide when setting up your venue (name, address, contact info, menu/offerings) and the reservation data your guests submit at your venue.

Records restaurants keep: a restaurant can keep its own record of guests who have booked with it, including tags and private notes about your visits and preferences.

Messages: anything you and a restaurant send each other through a booking's chat.

Reviews: your rating, what you write, and your name, which is shown publicly as your first name and last initial.

Automatically: basic technical data (IP address, request timing) used only to keep the booking flow reliable, for example by throttling abusive request patterns on public booking endpoints.

Why we collect it

  • To create and confirm your reservation, and to let the restaurant prepare for you.
  • To send booking confirmations, reminders, and status updates by email (and, where enabled, SMS).
  • To let a restaurant operate its own bookings, waitlist, and floor plan.
  • To keep the service secure and prevent abuse of public booking endpoints.
  • To diagnose and fix errors when something breaks.

Our legal basis. Most of this processing is necessary to carry out the reservation you asked us to make. Under the Data Privacy Act, that is processing for the performance of a contract with you. Keeping the service secure, preventing abuse, and fixing errors rest on our legitimate interests as an operator, balanced against your privacy. Where we rely on your consent, such as for optional SMS updates, you can withdraw it at any time.

Who we share it with

The restaurant you book at. A reservation only makes sense if the venue can see who's coming. We do not sell this data or share it with any other restaurant.

Service providers that run parts of the product on our behalf, bound to use your data only to provide that service:

  • Clerk: accounts and sign-in.
  • Vercel: hosting, and storage for photos uploaded by restaurants.
  • Neon: the managed database where bookings and venue records are stored.
  • Resend: booking confirmations and other transactional email.
  • Ably: the realtime connection that keeps a restaurant's booking screens in sync.
  • Upstash: short-lived counters used to rate-limit public booking endpoints.
  • Google: the maps in restaurant search and venue setup, which receive your IP address when they load.
  • An SMS delivery provider, where a venue has SMS notifications enabled, processing your number for that message only.
  • An error-monitoring provider, where enabled, receiving limited technical details about a crash. Guest contact fields are stripped before that happens.

We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it for third-party advertising.

We may also disclose data where the law requires it, such as under a lawful order from a government authority or court, or to establish or defend a legal claim.

Where your data is stored

Onka runs on infrastructure hosted outside the Philippines. Our application servers are in the United States, reached through a global network that includes Singapore, and our database and several of the providers listed above are also hosted abroad. This means your personal data is transferred abroad and processed there.

When that happens, we remain accountable for your data under the Data Privacy Act. We use established providers that offer contractual data-protection commitments and handle personal data only on our instructions.

How long we keep it

Booking records are kept for as long as your account or the venue's account is active, so you and the restaurant can see booking history. If you close your account or ask us to delete your data, we delete or anonymise it on request, except where we're required to keep certain records for legal, tax, or accounting reasons.

Some data has a shorter life by design: rate-limiting counters expire within minutes, and a table hold that doesn't become a booking stops holding the table on its own. The contact details entered with it are kept like any other booking record, and are covered by the same deletion rights.

You can ask us to delete your data at any time. See "Your rights" below.

Your rights

Under the Data Privacy Act, you can ask us to:

  • Confirm what personal data we hold about you and give you a copy of it.
  • Correct data that's inaccurate or out of date.
  • Delete your data, subject to the retention note above.
  • Object to or restrict certain processing.

To exercise any of these, email hello@onkaph.com. If you're not satisfied with our response, you may lodge a complaint with the National Privacy Commission (privacy.gov.ph).

Security

We use industry-standard measures to protect your data: encrypted connections (HTTPS/TLS) everywhere, access controls scoped so a restaurant only ever sees its own bookings, and no plaintext secrets in our codebase. No method of transmission or storage is perfectly secure, but we treat your data as something to protect, not a byproduct.

Cookies

We use the cookies our authentication provider (Clerk) sets to keep you signed in, and we store a few preferences in your browser, such as your notification settings, so they stay put between visits. We don't use advertising or third-party tracking cookies.

Children

Onka is not directed at children under 18, and we don't knowingly collect their data.

Changes to this policy

If we make material changes, we'll update the effective date above. Continued use of Onka after a change means you accept the updated policy.

Contact

Questions about this policy or your data: hello@onkaph.com