Privacy

What happens to your photo

When you photograph a label, the image is uploaded to private storage for one purpose: reading the ingredient list off it. As soon as the label is read successfully, the photo is deleted — what we keep is the extracted text of the ingredient list, never the photo itself. If a photo can’t be read, we hold it for up to seven days so we can find out what went wrong, and a daily job deletes it after that. Pasting an ingredient list as text never touches storage at all. Scanning a barcode reads the number directly from the code. The decoding happens in your browser, against the live camera preview — no picture is taken, saved, or uploaded, and only the number itself reaches us, to look the product up. None of this changes for supplements: a Supplement Facts panel is read, deleted, and kept only as text in exactly the same way as a personal-care label. Same deletion, same kept text, same rules.

Accounts and saved scans

Sign-in is a magic link: enter your email, click the link we send, and you’re in — no password for you to reuse or for us to lose. Your account stores your email address, your watch list, and your saved scans. A saved scan is the ingredient text we read off the label, any Supplement Facts figures from the panel, which product it matched, what kind of label it was, whether it succeeded, and when — never the photo. Deleting your account removes all of it — saved scans, watch list, and your email from our records. To delete your account or anything in it, email teacher@ingredientrollcall.app and it’s done. There is no delete button in the app yet, so email is the way — we would rather say that than have you hunt for one.

Cookies and analytics

We set one anonymous session cookie, used for rate limiting — it lets us count scans without knowing who you are. Analytics are Vercel Analytics only: aggregate page and visit counts, no third-party SDKs, no advertising pixels, no fingerprinting. There’s no consent banner gymnastics here because there’s nothing following you around.

Where barcode data comes from

When you scan a barcode we don’t already know, we look it up in Open Beauty Facts, a free, community-maintained product database, to fetch the ingredient list and product name. That data is made available under the Open Database Licence (ODbL). We send the barcode number to their public API; we don’t send them anything about you.

For a supplement barcode we don’t recognise, we look instead in the Dietary Supplement Label Database (DSLD), a public database from the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Dietary Supplements. Same as above: we send only the barcode number, and nothing about you.

Contact

Privacy questions or requests — or help with anything else: teacher@ingredientrollcall.app. A person reads every message and answers plainly.