IngredientCheck — Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2026-06-04 · Contact: sev2737@gmail.com

IngredientCheck is designed to need as little of your information as possible. The short version: no account, no login, no analytics, no advertising, and nothing leaves your device that identifies you.

1. What we collect

We collect nothing. There is no user account, no email sign-up, no personal-information form, no behavioral analytics, and no advertising SDKs in this app.

2. What stays on your device

• Scan history — barcode, product name, image URL, date, and per-status ingredient counts for each product you scan. Stored in iOS UserDefaults under the app's sandbox. Included in encrypted iPhone backups; not synced to other devices.
• Product thumbnails — small images for products you've scanned, cached to the iOS Caches directory so the home screen doesn't need to re-fetch them. iOS may purge these automatically if storage runs low. Not included in iCloud backups.
• Ingredient classification database — the JSON we use to color-code ingredients is fetched anonymously from our open GitHub repo and cached on-device.

3. What we fetch from the internet

The app makes two kinds of anonymous network requests:

• Open Food Facts (world.openfoodfacts.net) — when you scan a barcode, we look up the product. We send only the barcode; we don't send identifiers, location, advertising IDs, or anything else that could identify you.
• Our public data repository (raw.githubusercontent.com/sfc38/ingredient-checker-data) — on launch we fetch the latest ingredient classification JSON. Same anonymous request semantics.

Both endpoints are HTTPS. We do not log, store, or analyze the requests on our side because we don't run a server.

4. Camera

The app uses the camera only for barcode scanning, via Apple's VisionKit framework. Camera frames are processed on-device and never transmitted anywhere. You can revoke camera permission at any time in iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Camera → IngredientCheck.

5. Children

The app does not target children specifically and does not collect any information from anyone, so there is no special children's data category to disclose.

6. Third parties

No third-party analytics, no third-party advertising, no third-party crash reporters. The only third-party services the app communicates with are Open Food Facts and GitHub (for the ingredient database), and those communications are anonymous as described above.

7. Your rights

You can clear all on-device data at any time:

• Clear scan history: in the app, Home → Recent scans → See all → Clear.
• Delete the app: removes the local scan history, the cached database, and the cached thumbnails. Apple's standard app-deletion process applies.

There is no server-side data to request, export, or delete because we don't run a server.

8. Changes to this policy

Material changes to this policy will be reflected in the "Last updated" date at the top, and in any app update that requires re-acknowledgement will be called out in the App Store release notes.

9. Contact

Questions or concerns? Email sev2737@gmail.com.