Privacy & terms

Last updated 23 August 2026.

Local Recall is a free public tool. It has no accounts, no advertising, and no tracking, and it does not sell or share any information. This page describes what that means in practice; it is written to match what the site actually does.

What is stored

• Your choices — the state, stores, keywords and allergies you set, and light or dark mode — are saved only in your own browser, on your own device. They are never sent to a server unless you turn on notifications, which is described below, and clearing your browser data removes them.
• There are no accounts and no login, so nothing is tied to your name or email.
• There is no advertising and no third-party tracking on this site. Nothing here is sold or shared, and no outside company is given anything about you. There is basic usage counting, which exists only to improve the product and is described below.

Location

If you use “Use my location”, your browser asks your permission and sends your coordinates once, through this site, to a U.S. government mapping service that returns the state. The coordinates are rounded to about a kilometre before they leave, are used only to work out the state, and are never stored. You can always pick a place from the menu instead and skip this entirely.

Usage counting

To know whether this tool is any use and where it falls short, the site keeps simple counts: how many times a page was opened, how many people ran a check and whether it answered yes or no, and how many saved a food or an allergy. That is it — counts, kept to improve the product. There are no cookies, no accounts, no advertising identifiers, and no analytics company involved. Your IP address, your browser and your device are not recorded, and nothing is stored that could link two actions together as being yours, so no picture of any individual person exists or can be built. Searches are counted only when what you typed matches a real recall. If it matches nothing, what you typed never leaves your device at all — so ordinary food and brand words get counted, and anything unusual you type is never sent anywhere.

Voice search

If you tap the microphone, your browser turns your speech into text. On some browsers (Chrome) the browser maker processes the audio on its servers; on others (Safari) it stays on the device. This site never receives, stores, or logs audio — only the text that lands in the search box, which follows the search rules above.

Notifications

Notifications are off unless you turn them on, and turning them on is the only thing on this site that sends anything about you to a server. If you do, this is what is kept: an address your browser generates so notifications can reach this device, the two keys that encrypt them, the words and allergies you asked to be told about, and the state you chose. There is no email address, no name, and no identifier that survives you clearing your browser data. It is stored so the twice-a-day check knows what to tell you about, it is never shared or sold, and pressing “Turn off” deletes it. Every device is separate; turning it on here does not turn it on anywhere else.

Product photographs

Photographs of recalled packaging are shown from fda.gov and fsis.usda.gov directly, rather than copied onto this site, so that what you see is the agency’s own image and not a version this site could have altered. That means your browser requests those pictures from the government sites, exactly as it would if you opened the notice yourself, and they can see your IP address in doing so. No other outside site is contacted for any reason.

Using the information

The recall information here comes from the FDA and USDA and is shown word-for-word from their official notices, with a link to each one. It is provided as-is, with no warranty of accuracy or completeness, and it can be incomplete or out of date — always read the official notice, and for anything urgent check the FDA and USDA sites directly. This site is not affiliated with any government agency and is not a substitute for professional or medical advice.

Questions: gryphongraham@gmail.com

Independent — not affiliated with the FDA or USDA.