Privacy

UPF Tracker is made by Dead Star Development, a UK company, and is offered in the UK. This page explains what data the app and this website handle, why, and what you can do about it. It is written to be read, not skimmed past.

The short version

• The app needs an account. We hold your name, email address and food log so your log is backed up and syncs between your devices.
• We do not sell your data, show advertising, or put analytics or tracking code in the app.
• Product information comes from Open Food Facts. The barcodes you scan are sent to our catalogue service to look them up.
• If you choose to add a missing product, its pack photos are read by an AI model from Anthropic, and the product is published on Open Food Facts for everyone to use.

This website

If you join the waitlist we store the email address you enter, the date you joined, the country your connection comes from (as reported by Cloudflare, which hosts the site) and the address of the page you joined from. We use the email address only to tell you when the app launches, and the rest only to see where interest comes from. The waitlist is stored by Cloudflare, a US company that hosts this site; the transfer is covered by Cloudflare's data processing terms, which include the UK's International Data Transfer Addendum. You can ask us to remove your address at any time. The site sets no analytics or advertising cookies. Fonts are loaded from Google Fonts, which receives your IP address when the page loads; see Google's privacy policy for how they handle it.

The app

Your account. You must be 16 or over to create one. If we learn that someone younger has created an account, we will delete it and its data. Signing up needs your first name, last name, email address and a password. These are held by Amazon Cognito, and we never see your password. Codes for confirming your email and resetting your password are sent by Amazon's email service. Two-step sign-in is optional; its secret is held by Cognito too.

Your log. What you log is stored on your phone and on our servers, so it syncs and survives a reinstall. For each entry that is the product's barcode, name, brand, NOVA group, Nutri-Score and aisle, the amount, its calories and nutrients, and the time. The products you have looked up (Pantry), your shopping list and your UPF target are synced the same way.

Looking up a product. When you scan a barcode, the app sends it to the UPF Tracker catalogue service to fetch the product's details. Where the catalogue does not yet hold a product, our service looks it up in Open Food Facts itself, so Open Food Facts does not see your IP address or who you are.

Swap feedback. If you mark a suggested swap as not a good one, that is stored with your account to improve suggestions.

Adding a missing product (optional). The photos you take of the pack and the details you type are sent to our catalogue and kept with your contribution. To fill in the form for you, each photo is read by Claude, an AI model from Anthropic in the United States, under Anthropic's commercial terms, which do not allow it to train its models on this data. The transfer to the United States is covered by Anthropic's data processing terms, which include the UK's International Data Transfer Addendum. When you submit, the product and its photos are published on Open Food Facts under its open licences (the Open Database Licence for data, CC BY-SA for photos), so anyone can see and reuse them. They are sent from UPF Tracker's own Open Food Facts account, with a pseudonymous ID so Open Food Facts can moderate contributions; your name and email are not sent. The app asks for your agreement before your first contribution.

Profile photo (optional). If you add one, it is stored on our servers and shown only to you.

Camera and photos. The camera reads barcodes on your phone; no image leaves it. It is also used, only when you choose, to photograph a pack you are adding or a profile photo. The app reads your photo library only when you pick a photo.

On your phone only. Face ID for the app lock is handled by iOS, and we never receive face data. The weekly summary notification is scheduled on your phone. If the app crashes, the details are saved on your phone and, the next time you open it, you can choose to email them to us; nothing is sent automatically.

What we do not collect. We do not collect your location, contacts or advertising identifiers, and the app does not read Apple Health. Your food log is a record of products and amounts. We do not draw any conclusions about your health from it, do not treat it as health data, and use it only to run the app for you.

Where your data is, and who handles it

Your account, log, contributions and profile photo are held by Amazon Web Services in London. Anthropic reads pack photos you choose to contribute, in the United States. Open Food Facts publishes the products you contribute. Apple and Google handle App Store and Google Play downloads and their own crash reporting under their privacy policies. Nobody else receives your data, unless the law requires us to disclose it, for example to respond to a court order.

Security

Data travels encrypted between your phone, this website and our servers, and is stored encrypted at rest by Amazon Web Services. Sign-in is handled by Amazon Cognito with optional two-step verification, and only we can reach the databases. No system is perfectly secure, so we cannot guarantee it, but we take reasonable care and would tell you and the ICO if something went wrong that affected you.

Legal basis and retention

We process your account, log and sync data to provide the service you signed up for (contract). Contributions to Open Food Facts are made with your agreement (consent), as is the waitlist. We rely on our legitimate interests, balanced against yours, for a few things that keep the service working: using swap feedback to improve suggestions, keeping backups, security logging, and seeing which countries waitlist interest comes from. We keep records where the law requires it. Waitlist addresses are deleted once launch notifications have been sent, or when you ask.

Your data is kept until you delete your account. Deleting it from the You screen removes your account, log, profile photo, contributions and swap feedback from our live systems straight away. Copies in our automatic database backups expire within 35 days. Products already published on Open Food Facts stay there, because they are part of a public database; you can ask Open Food Facts to change or remove them.

Your rights

Under UK GDPR you can ask for a copy of your data, ask us to correct or delete it, ask us to restrict what we do with it, object to processing based on our legitimate interests, and withdraw any consent you have given. You also have the right to take your data elsewhere: you can export your log as a CSV file from inside the app. You can delete your account and all synced data from inside the app, or email us and we will do it for you. We may ask you to confirm your identity first, and we answer within a month. If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

Contact

Dead Star Development Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 12990959. Email: privacy@upftracker.com.

If this policy changes we will update the date at the top and, for material changes, tell account holders by email.