Privacy policy

The short version: PureScan has no accounts and no tracking. Your scan history and preferences stay on your phone. To look up a product we send its barcode (and nothing about you) to Open Food Facts. If you have a label photo read, or use Ask PureScan, the photo or your question goes to our server and to Google’s Gemini API, and we don’t store it.

Who we are

PureScan (“we”, “us”) makes the PureScan app for iPhone. PureScan is run by Liam Oliver, who is the data controller for the personal data described in this policy. Postal address: 1216 Litmus Building, Nottingham, NG1 3NZ, United Kingdom. For anything about your privacy, email privacy@purescan.io.

What the app does with data

• Barcodes and searches. When you scan a barcode or search for a product, the app sends that barcode or search text to Open Food Facts (openfoodfacts.org), a non-profit open database, to get the product’s details. We don’t attach any personal information or identifier to these requests. Open Food Facts’ own privacy policy applies to their servers: world.openfoodfacts.org/privacy
• Scan history and preferences (allergens, diet, watch list) are stored only on your device. We never receive them. Deleting the app, or using “Clear scan history”, deletes them.
• Widgets. The Recent scans widget shows the names and scores of your latest scans on your Home Screen. That data comes from your on-device scan history and stays on your device.
• Label photos. If a product’s ingredients or nutrition are missing or look wrong, you can photograph its label. The first time, the app asks whether the photo may be read by AI. If you agree, the photo goes to our server and to Google’s Gemini API (as our processor, on the terms described under Ask PureScan below), which reads the printed ingredients and nutrition. PureScan doesn’t keep the photo. What was read from the label is saved against the product’s barcode so the next person to scan it gets it straight away; it contains nothing about you. If you decline, an ingredients photo is read on your device and isn’t uploaded.
• Sharing label photos with Open Food Facts (optional, off by default). If you turn this on, your label photos are also uploaded to Open Food Facts, where they become public under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence and help fix the product for everyone. They’re sent from PureScan’s account with a random identifier for your device, never your name or any account of yours.
• Proving requests come from the app. To stop our AI label reading being misused, the app uses Apple’s App Attest: your iPhone creates a key that proves requests come from the genuine PureScan app. We store only that key’s public part, filed under a one-way hash, and a counter, for up to a year after it’s last used. It can’t be linked to your Apple ID and says nothing else about you. Label photo reads are also counted per device and per hashed IP address to enforce daily limits.
• Camera. Used only to read barcodes and labels while the scanner is open.
• Ask PureScan (Premium). When you ask a question, the app sends your question, the earlier messages in that conversation and the details of the product on screen (such as its name, ingredients, nutrition and score) to our server at purescan.io. Our server passes them to Google’s Gemini API, which acts as our processor, to generate the answer and sends the answer back to the app. PureScan doesn’t store your questions or the answers and doesn’t log their content. Under the Gemini API terms for paid services, Google doesn’t use them to improve its products and logs them only for a limited time to detect and prevent misuse; see also Google’s privacy policy.
• Fair-use limits for Ask PureScan. To confirm you’re a subscriber, the app sends Apple’s signed record of your Premium subscription with each question. We check it and keep only a one-way hash of its transaction ID, for up to 24 hours, to count questions against the daily limit. Your IP address is used transiently to prevent abuse: we keep only a one-way hash of it, for up to an hour. These counters are held by our hosting providers (Vercel and Upstash) and contain nothing else about you.
• Purchases. Subscriptions are handled by Apple. We never see your payment details; we only learn from Apple whether a subscription is active.
• No analytics, advertising or tracking. The app contains no third-party analytics or advertising SDKs and doesn’t track you across apps or websites.

This website

purescan.io is hosted by Vercel, which processes standard server logs (such as IP address and browser type) to run and secure the site. We don’t use advertising cookies.

Your rights

Under UK GDPR you can ask us what personal data we hold about you, and to correct or delete it. Because the app keeps your data on your device and we don’t store label photos or Ask PureScan conversations, in practice we hold none beyond the hashes and App Attest key described above; if you email us, we’ll keep that correspondence only as long as needed to reply. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk).

Children

PureScan is not directed at children under 13.

Changes

If this policy changes we’ll update the date above and, for significant changes, mention it in the app’s release notes.