Foocat Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2026-10-25

Foocat is an app that helps you scan barcodes on cat food, calculate the carbohydrate content, and keep a glucose log for your cat. This privacy policy describes what data the app handles, why, how long it is kept, and the rights you have.

Who is responsible

Foocat is made by Fredrik Bryngelsson in Sweden, who is the controller of the personal data described here (“we” and “us” in this policy). You can reach us at foocatcontact@gmail.com.

In short

You can use Foocat without an account. The app then knows you only by a random device ID, and your glucose log never leaves your phone.
An account is optional. If you sign in with Apple or Google, we store your email address, your name and an identifier from Apple or Google, and your favorites, scan history and glucose log are saved to your account.
If you share a cat, the people you share it with see your name and the cat’s whole log. They never see your email address.
No advertising, no ad-tracking, and we sell no data. The app sends technical diagnostics, such as crash reports, so we can fix problems.
You can delete your account at any time, in the app or without it.

Using Foocat without an account

When the app starts for the first time, a random device ID (a UUID) is created. It contains no personal information. Without an account, it is all that ties the products, photos and ratings you submit, and your favorites, to your phone.

The following data may be sent to our servers when you use the app’s features:

Barcodes (EAN) you scan or type in, to look up a product.
Recognized text from the packaging — when you analyze the nutrition content on a package, the text is read directly on your device, and it is primarily only that recognized text (not the photo) that is sent to our servers. See the packaging-analysis section below.
Product and nutrition details of the scans you save (name, brand, protein, fat, fibre, moisture, ash, and similar values from the packaging).
Product photos you take for a scan you save. These are stored on our servers and may be shown to other users of the app alongside the product. How we may use them is set out in the terms of use.
Favorites — the barcodes of the products you mark as favorites.
Ratings you give a product (a number from 1–10).
Your random device ID and timestamps for the above.
If you sign in: your account details and everything saved to your account, as described under “Your account” below.

All traffic to our servers is encrypted via HTTPS. To stop the service from being overloaded or abused, our server also uses the IP address you connect from to limit how many requests can be made in an hour. It is kept only in the server’s memory, and is not stored or logged.

Your account

An account is optional. Without one, the app works as described in the rest of this policy, and nothing is linked to your name or email address.

Signing in

You sign in with Sign in with Apple or Sign in with Google; Foocat has no passwords of its own. When you create an account, we store:

An identifier for your Apple or Google account, so we recognize you the next time you sign in.
Your email address. If you sign in with Apple and choose to hide your email, we receive a forwarding address from Apple instead of your real one.
Your name: the name on your Google account, or the name you choose to share the first time you sign in with Apple. The people you share a cat with see it (see “Sharing a cat”).
With Apple only, a token that lets us end Foocat’s connection to your Apple ID when you delete your account or remove Apple as a way to sign in.
When the account was created and when you last signed in.
A session for each phone you are signed in on: the phone’s device ID, when the session started and when it was last used, and a scrambled (hashed) copy of the code that keeps you signed in. A session ends when you sign out, and otherwise 180 days after it was last used.

An account can have both an Apple and a Google sign-in. We join them only when you add one while signed in with the other, never by matching email addresses. We use your email address to find your account when you write to us, for example to delete it, and to reply to you. We never use your name or email address for advertising.

Because a session holds your phone’s device ID, signing in links that ID to your account. From then on we can tell which account the products, photos and ratings that phone has submitted belong to, including earlier ones. Other users never see who submitted what.

What is saved to your account

While you are signed in, the following is saved to your account on our servers:

Your favorites.
Your scan history — the products you have saved, including ones you imported from a web link, with their nutrition values.
Your cats and their glucose log: your cats’ names and the readings, meals, insulin doses, weights and day notes you log, with their times and notes.

This happens automatically, from the moment you sign in. What is already on your phone is moved to your account, and after that, changes you make keep being saved there. That way your data survives a lost or replaced phone, and appears on any other phone where you sign in to the same account. Something you delete on one phone is deleted from your account and your other phones too; only a marker stays in the account (for a scan or a favorite, the product’s barcode), so that your other phones know to delete it as well.

Not saved to your account: the photos you take for your scans and the PDF reports you make from the glucose log. They stay only on the phone where you made them.

Signing out

Signing out removes your account’s data from that phone: your favorites, scan history and glucose log. They stay in your account and come back when you sign in again.

You can share a cat with other people who have a Foocat account, for example someone you look after the cat with. The cat’s owner creates an invite: a code that works once and expires after two days. Whoever uses the code joins the cat. Everyone in a shared cat:

sees the cat’s whole log, including everything logged before they joined, and can add, change and delete entries in it, and
sees the name of everyone else in the cat, and who is the owner.

Nobody in a shared cat sees anyone else’s email address. Everything logged for a shared cat, day notes included, is visible to all its members.

The owner can remove members, and anyone except the last member can leave. When someone leaves, the cat disappears from their phones, and what they logged stays with the cat. If the owner leaves or deletes their account, the member who joined first becomes the owner. When the owner deletes the cat, it is deleted, log and all, for everyone.

Invite links look like foocat.app/join#…, with the code after the # sign. Your browser never sends that part of a link to our website, and our server stores only a scrambled (hashed) copy of the code.

Data stored on your device

The app keeps the following on your device:

Your scan history — the products you have saved, with their nutrition values.
Your favorites list.
Photos you have taken, in the app’s private storage.
Your glucose log, if you turn it on: your cats’ names and the readings, meals, insulin doses, weights and day notes you log, with their times and notes. A meal keeps the name, brand and analytical constituents of the food you picked, and a link to its picture.
Reports you make from the glucose log, as PDF files.

Some of this is also sent to our servers, as listed above. When you save a scan, its product details and any product photo you took are sent to us so they can be added to the shared catalog. Adding or removing a favorite is synced to our servers as well. If you are signed in, your favorites, scan history and glucose log are also saved to your account, as described under “Your account”.

You can delete your scan history and photos in the app at any time. Without an account, that removes them from your device only; if you are signed in, the deleted scans are removed from your account too. Either way, product details and photos you have already submitted stay in the shared catalog, as described in the terms of use. Removing a favorite removes it from our servers too.

If you are not signed in, the glucose log is never sent to our servers. It stays on your device, and like the app’s other data it is included in your phone’s own backups (Google’s backup on Android, iCloud or a computer backup on iOS). Deleting a reading, meal, dose, weight, note or cat in the app removes it from your device, and from your account if you are signed in.

Reports are never sent to us, whether you are signed in or not: they are made on your device. A report only leaves your phone when you share it yourself, for example by email to your vet, and the copy you send is then subject to that service’s terms. Deleting a report, or the cat it is about, removes the file from your device; copies you have already sent are not affected.

How packaging analysis works

When you photograph the analytical constituents on a package, the text is normally read directly on your device (using Google ML Kit on Android and Apple’s text recognition on iOS). Only the recognized text — a few kilobytes — is then sent to our server, which uses an external AI service to interpret the nutrition values. The text is processed transiently and is not stored.

Only if on-device recognition fails is the photo itself sent to our server for analysis. Such photos are processed transiently and discarded immediately after analysis — they are not stored. (This applies to packaging analysis; product photos you choose to upload are stored as described in the list above.)

The app also offers an optional on-device analysis (using Gemini Nano on Android and Apple Intelligence on iOS) that can step in when the network is unreachable. It sends nothing at all, and can be turned off in the app’s settings.

Permissions

Camera — to scan barcodes and photograph packaging. Barcode scanning happens locally on your device.
Internet and network state — to communicate with our servers.

Foocat does not request access to your location, contacts, microphone, or any hardware identifier.

Diagnostics and crash reporting

To find crashes and fix features that are broken or slow, the app sends technical diagnostics about its own behavior. This data describes the app and the device — never the contents of your packaging photos, your recognized values, your scan history, your glucose log, or your name and email address.

Our diagnostics service (Android and iOS) receives:

Crash reports — where in the code the app crashed, and the error message.
App activity — app launches, how long a session lasts, and which screens and features were used.
Requests to our servers — the address called, the status code, the response time, and the response size. Not the contents.
Log lines the app writes about its own state, such as App started.
Device and app details — device model and manufacturer, OS version, app version, and mobile carrier name.
Timings for the optional on-device analysis (Android only) — how long text recognition and the on-device model took, how many characters were recognized, and whether the analysis succeeded or fell back to the server. No text and no images.
Your random device ID, so a crash can be tied to the rest of the diagnostics from the same install.

Like any web service, the diagnostics service also sees the IP address your device connects from. The address is translated into an approximate location — country and region — and then discarded; the address itself is not stored. The location is therefore derived from the connection: the app never requests access to, and never reads, your device’s position. No advertising identifier is collected.

Our server also forwards its own logs to the diagnostics service. Those logs may contain your random device ID together with the barcodes and addresses requested and, if you have an account, its random account ID. They never contain your email address or name.

Third-party services

We use service providers that process data on our behalf, under data processing agreements:

Hosting: Runs our server and its databases, including account data, in the EU (the Netherlands).
Network: Handles encryption (TLS) and caching of product images in transit between the app and our servers, and serves this website.
Backups: Nightly encrypted backups of the databases, including account data, are stored with a storage provider in Western Europe, and an encrypted copy is kept on a computer we manage ourselves.
AI service: Used on our server to interpret recognized text from the packaging (or, as a fallback, a photo of the packaging) as described above, and to read the brand and product name from your product photo when you add a product. The input is processed transiently and is not stored. The AI service also checks product photos you upload before they are shown to other users. It never receives your account details or your glucose log.
Diagnostics service: Receives crash reports, diagnostics from the app, and forwarded log lines from both the app and our server, as described above. Processed in the EU.
Google ML Kit / Apple text recognition: Barcode and text recognition happen locally on your device. No image data is sent to Google or Apple for this.

If you sign in, Apple or Google confirms who you are. They do this as controllers in their own right, under their own privacy policies, and share with us only what is listed under “Signing in”.

We use no advertising, ad-tracking, or cross-app tracking tools, we sell no data, and we send no push notifications. The diagnostics above are used solely to run and improve Foocat.

Where your data is stored

Our server, its databases (including the data saved to accounts) and their backups are stored in Europe, and diagnostics are processed in the EU. Some of our service providers are based in the US, and the AI service may process data outside the EU. Such transfers are covered by the providers’ data processing agreements, which use the EU’s standard contractual clauses.

Who else gets your data

We do not sell or rent your data. It reaches only:

the service providers described above,
Apple or Google, when you sign in with them,
the people you share a cat with, as described under “Sharing a cat”, and
every user of the app, for the products and photos you submit to the shared catalog.

Beyond that, we share it with no one, other than where required by law.

Why we process your data

The GDPR lets us process your data on these grounds:

To provide the service you use (Article 6(1)(b), a contract): looking up and analyzing products, saving your scans, favorites, ratings and the products you submit, and, if you create an account, keeping it, saving your data to it and sharing the cats you choose to share.
Our legitimate interest (Article 6(1)(f)) in keeping Foocat working, secure and recoverable: diagnostics and crash reports, server logs, limits that stop abuse, and backups. This data is technical, tied to random IDs rather than to your name, and never used for advertising or profiling. You can object to it (see “Your rights”).
Legal obligations (Article 6(1)(c)), when the law requires us to keep or hand over data.

You don’t have to give us any personal data: Foocat works without an account. To create an account you need to sign in with Apple or Google, which gives us at least the identifier described above. Without it, we can’t keep an account for you.

How long we keep data

On your phone: until you delete it in the app, sign out (for your account’s data), or uninstall the app.
Your account and what’s saved to it: until you delete it, or delete the account.
Sessions: until you sign out, or 180 days after the session was last used.
Without an account: submitted products and photos, ratings, and favorites saved while you are not signed in are kept tied to your anonymous device ID, for as long as they are needed for the service.
Diagnostics: for as long as the diagnostics service’s retention period for our plan allows, after which they are deleted automatically.
Backups: up to a year — daily backups for 30 days, and one per month after that. Data removed from the service can therefore remain in an encrypted backup for up to a year. Backups are only used to restore the service after a failure.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account at any time, in the app under Profile → Account → Delete account, or by email as described on our account-deletion page. Deleting it:

deletes your account: your name, email address, sign-in identifiers and sessions. Every phone signed in to the account is signed out. If you signed in with Apple, we also ask Apple to end Foocat’s connection to your Apple ID.
deletes everything saved to it: your favorites, scan history, and the cats only you are a member of, with their whole log.
hands over the cats you share: a shared cat stays with its other members, with its whole log, including what you logged. If you were its owner, the member who joined first becomes the owner.

Deleting in the app also removes the account’s data from that phone. Contributions to the shared catalog stay, as described in the terms of use, but the link between them and your account is deleted. Server log lines that mention your account’s random ID are deleted when the diagnostics service’s retention period ends, and deleted data can remain in our encrypted backups for up to a year, until those backups expire.

Your rights

Under the GDPR, you have the right to:

access the personal data we have about you and get a copy of it,
have data that is wrong corrected,
have your data erased,
restrict how we process it,
get the data you have given us in a machine-readable format, to take it elsewhere (data portability), and
object to processing based on our legitimate interest.

To use any of these, email foocatcontact@gmail.com. If you have an account, write from the email address your account uses (shown in the app under Profile → Account), so we know the request comes from you. For a copy of your account data, we send you everything saved to it as a JSON file. Without an account, we can only find your data through your device ID, which the app shows in its settings. We answer within 30 days.

If you think we handle your data wrongly, you can complain to the Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection (Integritetsskyddsmyndigheten, IMY) at imy.se, or to the data protection authority where you live.

Children

You must be at least 13 years old to create an account. Foocat is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect data about children under 13.

Changes to this policy

We may update this privacy policy. The latest version is always available on this page, with the date of the most recent change at the top.

Contact

If you have questions about this privacy policy, contact:

Fredrik Bryngelsson, Sweden
Email: foocatcontact@gmail.com