Privacy Policy

Effective date: 4 October 2026

This Privacy Policy explains what information Instacalorie ("we", "us") collects when you use the Instacalorie app and website (the "Service"), how we use it, and the choices you have. We collect only what we need to run the Service, and we never sell your personal information.

1. Information we collect

• Account information. When you sign in with Apple we receive your name and, if you choose to share it, your email address.
• Meal photos and nutrition data. The photos you take of your meals and nutrition labels, any note you add to a scan, and the data our systems derive from them: the food identified and its estimated calories, protein, fat, carbohydrates, and related values. Photos and derived data are stored with your account to build your nutrition history.
• Barcodes. The barcode number of a product you scan, used to look up its nutrition facts.
• Profile and goals. Information you choose to provide, such as sex, birthday, height, weight, body type, activity level, unit preferences, and your nutrition and weight goals.
• Apple Health. With your permission, the calories you burn, your resting energy and your steps, as daily totals read from Apple Health on your phone and stored with your account, so your days can show what you ate against what you burned. Read only: the app never writes to Health. You can turn this off at any time in Account or in the Health app. Health data is never used for advertising or marketing and is never shared with third parties.
• Location. With your permission, the city and country where a meal photo is taken, used to understand the context of the dish (for example, the cuisine or place it comes from). The exact position never leaves the phone.
• Weight log. The weights you record over time in the app.
• Intelligence questions. The questions you ask Intelligence, the chat that answers from your own data, and the answers it gives. They are processed to reply to you and are not stored, as explained in section 3.
• Usage counts. How many Intelligence questions you asked each day and how much processing they took. These are numbers only and contain nothing of what was asked or answered.
• Messages to us. What you write through "Contact us" in the app, together with your account email, username, user id, app version and device model, so we can answer and look into the problem. The message is emailed to us and is not stored on our servers.
• Subscription status. If you subscribe to Premium, Apple sends the app a signed record of the purchase and we keep what it says: the subscription identifiers Apple assigns, the plan, when it was bought, when the current period ends, whether it is the free trial, whether it will renew, and whether it was refunded. We never see your payment details, your Apple Account or your card number. Apple handles the payment.
• Device and usage information. Basic technical data such as app version, device model, language, timezone, and diagnostic events, used to keep the Service working and fix problems.

2. How we use your information

• To analyze your meal photos and produce nutritional estimates.
• To build your daily, weekly, and monthly nutrition and weight history.
• To personalize estimates and recommendations using your profile, goals, and activity.
• To suggest daily goals when you ask for a suggestion.
• To answer the questions you ask Intelligence about your own meals, goals, and weight.
• To know whether your account has an active Premium subscription and unlock the paid features.
• To show what you burned next to what you ate, when you connected Apple Health.
• To apply daily usage limits and understand what the Service costs to run.
• To operate, secure, debug, and improve the Service.
• To respond when you contact us.

3. AI processing

Three features rely on artificial-intelligence models. The models are operated by OpenAI, a third-party provider that processes the information on our behalf. Each feature sends only what it needs:

• Meal and label scans. The photos you take for the scan and the note you add to it. For a meal photo, when you have allowed location access, the city and country you are in as well, so local dishes and portion sizes are recognized. Never your exact position.
• Barcode scans. The product's name, ingredient list, and nutrition facts as the product database lists them, to estimate its glycemic index and quality scores, and any nutrition values the database has no entry for. Nothing about you goes with it.
• Goal suggestions. What you write about your aim, together with your sex, age, height, weight, activity level, body type, unit preference, and the weight goal you already have.
• Intelligence. Your question and the earlier messages of the same conversation, the same profile details, your timezone, your goals, and the meals, nutrition totals, and weight entries needed to answer. Meal photos are not sent.

We do not send your name, email address, Apple account, or any account identifier with these requests. Text you type yourself, such as a meal name or a note, is sent as you wrote it. The provider is not allowed to use this information to train its models or for advertising. It may keep requests for up to 30 days to detect abuse, or longer if the law requires it, and then deletes them.

The barcode itself is looked up in Open Food Facts, an open product database. Only the barcode number is sent there, and nothing about you goes with it.

Intelligence conversations are not stored. We do not save your questions or the answers on our servers, and the app does not save them on your device. The conversation is gone when you close the screen. We keep only the usage counts described in section 1. The app asks for your agreement before your first question. If you prefer not to share this information you can simply not use Intelligence, and the rest of the Service works without it.

Estimates, suggestions, and answers produced by these systems can be wrong. They are not medical advice.

4. Sharing

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with third parties for their own marketing. We share information only with service providers that help us run the Service, when required by law, or to protect our rights and users.

The service providers are:

• OpenAI. Analysis of meal and label photos, goal suggestions, and Intelligence, as described in section 3.
• Cloudflare. Storage of your meal photos.
• Open Food Facts. Barcode lookups. It receives the barcode number only.
• Google. Delivery of the messages you send us through "Contact us", as email through Gmail.
• Apple. Sign in with Apple, and the Premium subscription: Apple processes the payment, manages the trial, renewals, cancellations and refunds, and hands us the signed purchase record described in section 1.
• ImageKit. Serves the picture on the sign-in screen. Like any web server it sees the IP address of the phone that loads it, and nothing else about you.
• Hetzner Online GmbH. The servers and the database that run the Service, in Germany.

Some of these providers process information in the United States or in other countries outside the one you live in.

5. Permissions and your choices

Camera, Apple Health, photo library and location access all require your explicit permission and can be revoked at any time in your device settings. The related features stop working when a permission is revoked. The rest of the Service remains usable. Providing profile details and goals is optional.

6. Storage, security, and retention

Your information is stored on secured servers and transmitted using encryption. We keep your information for as long as your account exists. When you delete your account, your photos, nutrition history, goals, usage counts, subscription records, and personal information are removed from our active systems, with residual copies deleted from backups on a regular schedule. Intelligence conversations are never stored, so there is nothing of them to delete.

7. Deleting your account

You can delete your account and all associated data at any time from the app: Account, then "Delete account and all data". You can also email us at the address below.

8. Children

The Service is not directed at children under 13 (or the equivalent minimum age in your country), and we do not knowingly collect their information. If you believe a child has provided us personal information, contact us and we will delete it.

9. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, export, or delete your personal information, and to object to or restrict certain processing. You can exercise most of these directly in the app, or by contacting us.

10. Changes to this Policy

We may update this Policy from time to time. Material changes will be announced in the app or on this page, and the effective date above will be updated.

11. Contact

Privacy questions or requests: instacalorieapp@gmail.com