The short version
- Your scan history, saved meals, daily totals and health goals are stored in a database on your device. We have no server holding them.
- Barcodes are read on your device by the camera. The camera preview is never recorded or uploaded.
- When you photograph a meal for AI recognition, that photo is sent to our server function and on to OpenAI to identify the food. Nothing else about you goes with it.
- Barcodes you scan are looked up in the public Open Food Facts database.
- The free version shows ads from Google AdMob. A Premium subscription removes them.
- Signing in with Google or Apple is optional, and the profile it returns is only saved on your device.
- Purchases are handled entirely by Apple and Google. We never see your payment details.
1. Who we are
Food Score is published by Froggy Eye Ltd, a company registered in the United Kingdom ("we", "us", "our"). This policy explains what happens to data when you use the Food Score mobile app on iOS or Android. It does not cover the App Store or Google Play themselves, which are operated by Apple and Google under their own privacy policies.
Food Score does not create an account on our systems and does not sync your data to us. For most of what the app does we are not a controller of any personal data about you at all. Where we are — the AI recognition request, and any email you send us — the detail is in sections 4 and 12.
2. What Food Score stores, and where
Everything you build up in Food Score is written to a local database and to local app preferences on your phone. It is not uploaded to us, and there is no Food Score cloud account to sync with. That includes:
- Your scan history — the products you scanned, their nutrition values and their health scores
- Meals you create, the food entries inside them, and your daily nutrition summaries
- The health goals you selected during onboarding or in settings
- App settings and preferences, your scan count, and whether you hold a Premium entitlement
- Your name, email and profile picture URL, if you chose to sign in with Google or Apple
Your device's own backup system may include this data. If you use iCloud Backup or Google's Android backup, a copy may be held by Apple or Google under their terms; you can control that in your device settings.
3. Camera, barcodes and photos
Food Score asks for camera access so you can scan a barcode, and for photo library access so you can pick an existing picture of a meal. Both are requested at the moment you first use the feature, and the app keeps working — by search and manual entry — if you decline.
Barcode scanning happens entirely on your device. The camera preview is processed on the phone to read the barcode digits. No frame of that preview is recorded, stored or sent anywhere. What leaves your device is the barcode number itself, which is looked up in Open Food Facts (section 6).
Photos are only sent when you deliberately take or choose one for AI food recognition, described next.
4. AI food recognition
If a food is not in the barcode database, you can photograph it and have it identified. When you do:
- The image is sent from your phone to a Firebase Cloud Function operated by us on Google Cloud.
- That function passes the image to OpenAI (the GPT-4o vision model), which returns the food's likely name, brand, category and nutrition estimate per 100g.
- The result comes back to your phone and is scored there. We do not save the image or the result on our server, and there is no account or identifier attached to the request.
Requests for healthier alternatives work the same way but send only text — the food's name, brand, category and nutrition numbers, and (where you asked for advice about a health goal) the name of that goal. No image is involved.
OpenAI processes these requests under its API data usage policies. Under those terms, content submitted through the API is not used to train its models, and is retained only for a limited period for abuse monitoring. Google Cloud processes the request in transit as our infrastructure provider under the Google Cloud data processing terms.
Please avoid photographing people or documents. Point the camera at food. Anything visible in the frame you send is included in the image that reaches OpenAI.
5. Health goals
During onboarding you can choose health goals — for example reducing sugar or salt — so scores can be presented against them. Those choices are stored in the app's preferences on your device.
They are used locally to score and annotate foods. The only time a goal leaves your device is when you ask for alternatives tailored to it, in which case the goal's name is included in the text request described in section 4. We do not ask for, and the app does not collect, any diagnosis, medical record, weight, or other health information about you.
6. Third-party services that receive data
The app has to talk to a handful of outside services to do its job. Each one receives only what is listed here, plus the technical details any internet request carries, such as your IP address.
| Service | What it receives | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Open Food Facts | The barcode number you scanned, or the words you typed into product search | Looking up the product and its nutrition data in the public food database |
| Firebase Cloud Functions (Google Cloud) — operated by us | Your meal photo, or the food's name and nutrition values plus a health-goal name | Relaying the request to OpenAI without shipping an API key inside the app |
| OpenAI | The same photo or text, forwarded by our function | Identifying the food and suggesting healthier alternatives |
| Google AdMob | Ad requests, including device and advertising identifiers where available — see section 7 | Serving banner and interstitial ads in the free version |
| Google Sign-In / Sign in with Apple | Only used if you choose to sign in — see section 8 | Letting you sign in without creating a new password |
| Apple App Store / Google Play billing | Purchase and subscription information | Processing purchases and restoring entitlements |
These providers process that data under their own privacy policies: Open Food Facts, Google, OpenAI, Apple.
Product images shown in results are loaded from Open Food Facts and cached on your device. If you share a result using your device's share sheet, you are handing that content to the app or person you chose, and what happens to it then is governed by that app or service.
7. Advertising
The free version of Food Score shows banner and interstitial ads supplied by Google AdMob. Holding a Premium subscription — including during a free trial — turns ads off entirely.
AdMob is an advertising network and receives its own data when it serves an ad. This can include your IP address, general device and app information, and, where the platform makes one available, an advertising identifier. How Google uses that data is described in how Google uses information from sites or apps that use its services and in the Google Privacy Policy.
- On iOS, Food Score does not ask for App Tracking Transparency permission, so the IDFA is not available to the ad SDK and ads are not personalised using it.
- On Android, you can reset or delete your advertising ID, and opt out of ad personalisation, in Settings › Google › Ads.
We do not give AdMob your scan history, your meals, your photos or your health goals. We receive no personal data back from AdMob — only aggregate reporting on how many ads were shown.
8. Signing in
Signing in is optional and the app is fully usable without it. If you sign in with Google or Apple, the provider returns a user identifier and — depending on what you allow — your name, email address and profile picture URL. Food Score writes those to the app's local preferences on your device so it can greet you and remember the session.
We do not operate an account server, so that profile is not transmitted to us and there is no record of you on our side. Signing out, or using "delete account" in the app, clears the stored profile from your device and revokes the app's Google access. For Sign in with Apple you can additionally revoke access at any time under Settings › your name › Sign in with Apple.
9. Purchases and subscriptions
Food Score Premium is sold as a monthly or annual auto-renewing subscription. All of it is transacted by the App Store or Google Play using the platform's own in-app purchase system. Your card details, billing address and payment history are handled by Apple or Google and are never sent to us or seen by the app.
The app receives only the store's answer to "is this device entitled to Premium?", which it records locally. Restoring purchases re-asks the store the same question.
10. What we do not do
- We do not use analytics or crash-reporting SDKs. The app includes Firebase solely to call our own Cloud Functions — there is no Firebase Analytics and no Crashlytics.
- We do not run an account server, and we hold no database of users, scans, meals or photos.
- We do not sell, rent or share personal data with data brokers.
- We do not use the advertising identifier for tracking across apps, and we do not ask for App Tracking Transparency permission.
- We do not require an account or an email address to use the app.
11. Retention and deletion
Because your data lives on your device, you control how long it is kept. Delete individual scans or meals inside the app, clear your whole scan history from the History screen, use "Delete Account" in Settings to wipe the app's stored data and sign you out, or remove everything at once by uninstalling Food Score. There is no server-side copy for us to delete, and no request you need to send us.
Note: if your device backups include app data, a copy may persist in your iCloud or Google backup after uninstalling. Clear it through your device's backup settings.
12. Your rights
Under the UK GDPR and equivalent laws you have rights to access, correct, delete, restrict and port your personal data, and to object to certain processing. In practice, for Food Score you exercise all of these directly on your device, because that is where your data is held.
If you contact us by email, we will hold your message and email address for as long as needed to answer you and to keep a record of the exchange. You can ask us to delete it at any time by emailing info@froggyeye.com. If you are in the UK and are unhappy with how we have handled your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office.
13. Children
Food Score is a general-audience nutrition tool and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children. If you believe a child has sent us personal data by email, contact us and we will delete it.
14. Changes to this policy
If we change how Food Score handles data, we will update this page and change the effective date at the top. Material changes will also be noted in the app's release notes. Continuing to use the app after a change means you accept the updated policy.
15. Contact
Froggy Eye Ltd
United Kingdom
Email: info@froggyeye.com