Privacy Policy
This policy covers the MealSnap iOS app and the mealsnap.app website, including share.mealsnap.app.
The short version
MealSnap is a photo food diary. To do its job it has to hold some genuinely personal things: pictures of your meals, sometimes pictures of you, what you weigh, how hungry you were. We take that seriously.
- Signing in asks Apple for nothing. No name, no email address, no contacts, no calendar.
- Your meal photos and their context are sent to OpenAI to be described and estimated. They are never used to train AI models, by us or by them.
- There are no ads, no ad networks and no tracking SDKs in the app.
- We do not sell your data. Not to anyone, not in any form, not ever.
- You can delete your account from inside the app, and we tell you below exactly what that does today.
The rest of this page is the detail. It is written to be read, not to be survived.
1. Who we are
MealSnap is built and run by Petr Rusanov, an independent developer based in the Netherlands. For data protection law, that is your data controller.
| Controller | Petr Rusanov (trading as MealSnap) |
| Address | [TO CONFIRM: registered business address, Netherlands] |
| support@mealsnap.app |
There is no support department. You are emailing the person who wrote the app.
Because we are established in the EU, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) applies to everything described here, wherever in the world you use MealSnap. If you are in the UK, the UK GDPR gives you the same rights. If you are in California or another US state with a privacy law, see Section 15.
2. What we collect, and why
We only hold what the app needs to work. Here is the whole list.
Your account
Signing in uses Sign in with Apple with no scopes requested. That is the smallest thing Apple lets an app ask for. We do not receive your name, your Apple ID, your real email address, or your relay email address. What we receive and store is the anonymous, app-specific identifier Apple generates for you. It identifies your diary and nothing else. It cannot be used to find you anywhere outside MealSnap.
Your diary
Everything you log, because a diary that does not keep what you write is not a diary:
- Meals, including your photos, the meal type, descriptions, calorie ranges and tags
- Drinks, activities and measurements (height, body mass, waist, wrist, hips, body fat)
- Body shot photos, if you choose to take them
- Hunger before a meal and fullness after it
- Day ratings
- The dates and times of your entries
- AI-generated descriptions, tags, calorie estimates and the weekly and monthly review texts written about your diary
- Share links you have created
Your camera stores metadata inside photo files, including the time and sometimes the place a photo was taken. The app reads the timestamp on your device to date your entry automatically, and that is all it reads. Every photo is re-encoded before upload, which strips the metadata: no location and no other camera metadata reaches our servers. MealSnap does not collect your location at all, and the app never asks for location permission.
Your subscription
If you buy MealSnap Pro, the purchase happens in the App Store. We never see your card, your billing address or your Apple ID. We use RevenueCat to tell us whether a subscription is active, which means RevenueCat receives the App Store receipt data tied to an anonymous app user ID.
If you email us
We get your email address and whatever you write. We keep the thread so we can follow up and remember the context if you write again.
The website
mealsnap.app uses Cloudflare Web Analytics. It is cookieless, it sets nothing on your device, and it does not follow you to other sites. It tells us how many people visited a page and roughly where in the world they were. It cannot tell us who you are.
The app itself contains no analytics SDK, no attribution SDK and no advertising SDK. Separately, if you have turned on "Share with App Developers" in your iPhone's Analytics settings, Apple may give us aggregated, anonymous crash and usage statistics. That is Apple's mechanism, it is off unless you turned it on, and we cannot identify anyone from it.
The legal bases, briefly
| What | Why | GDPR lawful basis |
|---|---|---|
| Account identifier | To have an account at all and sync it across your devices | Contract (Art 6(1)(b)) |
| Diary entries and photos | To be the diary you asked for | Contract (Art 6(1)(b)) |
| Health-related entries (weight, measurements, body shots, hunger and fullness, food intake) | Same, plus these can count as health data in the EU | Contract, plus your explicit consent (Art 9(2)(a)) - see Section 3 |
| AI descriptions, estimates and reviews | Core features of the app | Contract (Art 6(1)(b)) |
| Subscription status | To unlock what you paid for | Contract (Art 6(1)(b)) |
| Support email | To answer you | Contract and our legitimate interest in supporting users (Art 6(1)(b), 6(1)(f)) |
| Website analytics, abuse prevention, rate limiting, keeping the service standing up | Running a service that works and is not abused | Legitimate interests (Art 6(1)(f)) |
| Disclosures the law requires | Responding to a valid court order or binding legal request | Legal obligation (Art 6(1)(c)) |
3. The sensitive parts
Some of what a food diary holds is, under EU law, data concerning health: your weight and body measurements, body shot photos, hunger and fullness, and a detailed record of what you eat.
We treat it that way. We only ever have it because you chose to type it in or photograph it, after reading this policy. By entering it you are giving your explicit consent for us to store and process it for the purposes described here. You can withdraw that consent at any time by deleting the entry, or by deleting your account, and nothing else in the app stops working if you do. Withdrawing does not undo processing that already happened.
We never use this data to infer anything about you beyond the diary itself, and we never share it for anyone else's purposes.
4. AI: what leaves the app, and what happens to it
When the app analyses a meal, your meal photos and the context of that entry are sent to OpenAI's API. The same happens, with the entries in the period, when a weekly or monthly review is generated. What comes back is the description, the tags, the calorie range, and the review text.
What we can tell you honestly:
- Your photos and your data are never used to train AI models. Not by us, not by our provider. This is contractual, not a hope.
- We send what the feature needs, not your whole diary. Your account identifier is not part of the prompt.
- We are not going to claim the provider keeps nothing. Under OpenAI's standard API terms, inputs can be retained for a limited period for abuse monitoring and then deleted. That is normal for API providers, and it is the honest state of things rather than a marketing line.
There is no on-device-only mode for this feature. If you would rather no photo left your phone, you can use MealSnap as a manual diary: type your own descriptions, skip the estimates, and nothing goes to OpenAI. The diary is fully usable that way.
The app also does some on-device image work (matching a new photo against your own past meals for Visual Intelligence). That runs on your iPhone and nothing is uploaded for it.
5. Where your data lives
- Diary data is stored in a MongoDB database.
- Photos are stored in Amazon S3.
- The website and share pages run on Cloudflare.
- Hosting region: Amsterdam, the Netherlands (EU). The database, the photo storage and the app backend all run there, so your data stays in the EU.
Your data is also stored on your own iPhone, and syncs across your devices through your account.
6. Who else touches your data
We use a small number of companies to run MealSnap. They process data on our instructions, under contracts that require them to protect it. We do not have any other kind of data sharing, and there is no partner, broker, or advertiser in this list.
| Who | What they do | What they get |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Web Services (S3) | Stores your photos | Your photos |
| MongoDB | Stores your diary | Your entries and account record |
| OpenAI | Generates descriptions, tags, calorie ranges and reviews | Meal photos and entry context, when a feature runs |
| RevenueCat | Tells the app whether your subscription is active | App Store receipt data tied to an anonymous app user ID |
| Cloudflare | Serves the website and share pages, and provides cookieless analytics | Standard request data, IP address at the network layer |
| Our email provider | Carries support email | Whatever is in your email to us |
Two companies are not our processors, because they act on their own account:
- Apple provides Sign in with Apple and is the seller of every subscription. Apple's own privacy policy governs what Apple does with your purchase and Apple ID data. We never see your payment details.
- Anyone you send a share link to sees what you shared. That is you sharing, not us.
We also disclose data if the law genuinely requires it: a valid court order or a binding legal request. We would push back on anything overbroad, and we will tell you unless we are legally prohibited from doing so.
If MealSnap were ever sold or handed over to someone else to run, your data would go with the service, this policy's promises would bind the new operator, and we would tell you in the app before it happened, with enough time to export your diary and delete your account if you would rather leave.
7. Share links and PDF export
Share links are optional and Pro-only.
- Creating one uploads a date range, not the entries. The server hands back a long, random, unguessable link.
- Anyone who has that link can open share.mealsnap.app and see that stretch of your diary, including the photos in it. There is no password and no sign-in. Treat the link like the contents itself: send it to your coach, not to a public forum.
- Links expire seven days after they are created.
PDF export builds a file for you. It is yours, on your device, and we do not receive a copy or know where you send it.
8. What we do not do
Absolute statements, meant absolutely:
- We do not sell your data, and we never have.
- We do not share it for advertising, profiling or "partner offers".
- There are no ad networks, no ad SDKs and no tracking SDKs in the app.
- We do not track you across other apps or websites, and we do not ask for the App Tracking Transparency permission because we have nothing to ask for.
- We do not collect your location. The app never asks for location permission, and photo metadata that could reveal a location is stripped before upload.
- Your photos and diary are not used to train AI models.
- We do not read your diary for fun. Access to production data is limited to what is needed to keep the service running or to answer a support request you sent us.
9. How long we keep things, and what deleting does
While your account exists, we keep your diary. A food diary that quietly deleted last year would be useless, and only you know when an entry has stopped being worth keeping. Delete any entry at any time and it goes.
When you delete your account (Settings, in the app), we delete your entries, your share links, your AI reviews, and your user record from our database. That is immediate and it is not a soft delete.
Being straight about photos: the image files in our S3 storage are not yet removed by that same automated process. They are orphaned by it, meaning nothing links them to you or to any account any more, but the files themselves still exist. We are building automatic photo deletion; until it ships, email support@mealsnap.app after deleting your account and we will remove your photo files by hand. We would rather write this awkward paragraph than a smooth sentence that is not true yet.
Support email threads are kept while they are useful and then deleted. Backups, where our providers keep them, roll over on their own cycle and are overwritten. Anonymous, aggregated website statistics are not tied to you and are kept indefinitely.
10. Security
Everything between the app and our servers travels over TLS. Access to production systems is limited to the developer and protected by strong authentication. Share links use long random identifiers rather than guessable IDs.
No service can promise perfect security, and anyone who does is selling something. If a breach happens that puts your rights at risk, we will notify the Dutch Data Protection Authority within 72 hours as the law requires, and we will tell you directly and plainly if you are affected.
11. Sending data outside the EU
Some of our providers are based in the United States, so your data is transferred there. Where a provider is certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, that certification covers the transfer. Where it is not, we rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses in our contract with them. If you want to know which mechanism applies to a specific provider, email us and we will tell you.
12. Your rights
Under the GDPR you have the right to:
- Access the personal data we hold about you, and get a copy
- Correct anything inaccurate
- Erase your data ("right to be forgotten")
- Export your data in a portable, machine-readable form
- Restrict or object to processing based on legitimate interests
- Withdraw consent for the health-related data described in Section 3, at any time
- Complain to a supervisory authority
How to actually use them
Most of it is faster in the app than by email:
- See your data: it is your diary. Open the app.
- Correct it: edit the entry. AI-written text is editable too, and once you have edited a field the app never overwrites it.
- Delete it: delete individual entries, or delete your whole account from Settings.
- Anything else, including a full export or a copy of the data we hold: email support@mealsnap.app. We will answer within one month. The law lets us extend that by two further months for complex requests; at our size we do not expect to need it, but if we ever did, we would tell you within the first month.
We do not charge for any of this, and we will not ask you a lot of questions to make it harder. Because sign-in is anonymous, we may need you to make the request from inside the app or prove control of the account so that we do not hand your diary to somebody else.
Complaints. If you think we have handled your data badly, please tell us first, we would like the chance to fix it. You also have the right to complain to your national data protection authority. Ours is the Dutch Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl); you can complain to the authority where you live instead.
13. Children
MealSnap is not designed for or directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect data from them. You need to be at least 16 to use MealSnap.
An app about food, weight and body images is not a good place for a child, and that is a judgement about the subject matter, not only about the law. If you believe a child has been using MealSnap, email support@mealsnap.app and we will delete the account and its data.
14. Automated decisions
We do not make any decision about you that has a legal or similarly significant effect, and there is no profiling in that sense. The AI in MealSnap describes your food and writes observations about a period you logged. It does not score you, rank you or decide anything about you.
15. If you are in the US
We give everyone the same treatment described above, which covers most of what state privacy laws require. Specifically: we do not sell personal information, we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, and we do not use it for targeted advertising. There is nothing to opt out of, because we never started. If you want access to or deletion of your data, use the same route as everyone else: the app, or support@mealsnap.app. We do not discriminate against anyone for exercising a privacy right.
16. Changes to this policy
If we change what we do with your data, we will change this page, move the "last updated" date, and, for anything that actually matters to you, tell you in the app before it takes effect. We will not quietly widen what we collect and hope nobody rereads the page.
17. Contact
support@mealsnap.app
Privacy questions, requests, complaints, or a sentence in here that reads like nonsense: the same address, and the same person answers all of them.