Privacy Policy

Gluten Free Scanner is operated by Food Barcode Scanner Ltd ("we"), a company registered in England and Wales with company number 14560869, whose registered office is at 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ. Food Barcode Scanner Ltd is the controller of the personal data described in this policy and is registered with the UK Information Commissioner's Office under registration reference ZC221611.

This policy explains what we collect when you use the app and the glutenfreescanner.app website, why, and the choices you have. You can contact us about anything in this policy, including to exercise any of your rights, at support@glutenfreescanner.app or by writing to us at the address above. We aim to respond within one month.

The Short Version

You do not create an account. The app identifies your device with a random device identifier, not your name or email. When you scan a barcode we look the product up and record the scan so your Scan History works. If you add a missing product you send us photos of the packaging, which are read by AI to extract the product name and the ingredients. Product results and the explanations shown with them are generated by automated AI analysis of the product information we hold. We do not sell your data, and the app shows no third-party adverts.

What We Collect

• A device identifier. Generated by your phone's operating system for this app. We use it to register your device, deliver your Scan History and, if you subscribe, recognise your subscription. It is not your name, email, or phone number - we do not collect those.
• Your scans. The barcode, the matched product, the result we showed you, and when. We record scans on our servers for every user, including users without a Premium subscription, so that your Scan History is there if you subscribe, so that results load faster next time, and so that we can see which products people cannot find and prioritise adding them. Scan History is only viewable in the app with Premium.
• Product contributions. If you add a missing product or its ingredients, we receive the photos you take (barcode, product name, ingredients list) and any product name you type. Those photos are read by AI to extract the product name and the ingredients. Contributions become part of our shared product database so the next person who scans that product gets an answer. Please photograph only the packaging.
• Subscription status. If you buy Premium, Apple or Google takes the payment and tells RevenueCat, our subscription management provider, whether your subscription is active. We use that to unlock Premium features. We never see or store your payment card details.
• Technical logs. Standard request logs for security, rate limiting and debugging: your IP address, your device identifier, app version, the request method, path and result, request headers and, for some requests, the contents of the request. We do not use these logs to build a profile of you.
• Usage analytics and diagnostics. App events (for example that a scan happened and whether it succeeded), screen views, crash reports and app performance measurements, collected through Google Firebase Analytics, Firebase Crashlytics and Firebase Performance Monitoring. These are linked to the same random device identifier described above, so they are pseudonymous rather than anonymous. We also use Firebase Remote Config to change app settings without shipping an update.

What We Do With It

• Answer your scans: match the barcode, return the product's status and, where held, the reason.
• Maintain your Scan History and, for Premium, your offline database downloads.
• Build and maintain the product database: contributed photos and text, and the product data we hold from other sources, are analysed by AI services to read product names and ingredients and to classify whether a product contains gluten. The gluten result and the explanation shown with it are generated automatically. That classification is about the product, not about you, and it is not an automated decision about you within the meaning of Article 22 UK GDPR. Contributions are reviewed and become part of the database serving all users.
• Operate, secure and improve the service.

We do not sell personal data, we do not show third-party adverts, and we do not use your data for third-party advertising. The free version of the app shows our own promotional messages about the Premium subscription; those are not targeted using your data, and Premium removes them.

A Note on Health

The app answers questions about products, not about you. We do not ask you for any health information, we never ask whether you have coeliac disease or any other condition, we do not build a health profile of you, and we do not use your scans to infer a diagnosis.

We recognise that a record of gluten-related scans may say something about your diet or your health. Because of that we deliberately hold scan data against a random device identifier rather than your name or email, we keep only what the Scan History feature needs, we never use it for advertising or profiling, we share it only with the service providers listed below, and you can delete all of it at any time using Delete my data in the app's settings.

Gluten Free Scanner is an information tool. It is not a medical device and is not intended to diagnose, prevent, monitor, predict, treat or cure any disease or condition, including coeliac disease, gluten sensitivity or any allergy. Its results are informational only and are not medical advice - always check the packaging and speak to your doctor or dietitian about managing coeliac disease.

Who Processes Data For Us

We use a small set of service providers under contract:

• Cloudflare - serves the app's API at the network edge and stores the product database and product photos. Product photos are held in EU storage. Some transient queue processing is not pinned to a single region.
• DigitalOcean - our primary databases, hosted in the United Kingdom (London).
• OpenAI - reads contributed product photos and text on our instructions, to extract the product name and ingredients, classify the product, and translate result explanations. We use OpenAI's business API under a data processing agreement, and under OpenAI's API terms the content we send is not used to train OpenAI's models. What we send is product packaging and product text, not information about you.
• RevenueCat - subscription management: it records whether your subscription is active. It does not take payment.
• Apple and Google - payment processing for subscriptions.
• Google Firebase / BigQuery - app analytics, crash reporting, performance monitoring and remote configuration, and our analytics warehouse.
• Better Stack and Sentry - operational monitoring and error logs.

Where Your Data Is Processed

Our primary databases are hosted in the United Kingdom and product photos are held in EU storage. Some of our providers process data outside the UK and the EEA, mainly in the United States: this applies to Cloudflare's edge and queue processing, OpenAI, Google, RevenueCat, Sentry and Better Stack.

Where that happens we rely on appropriate safeguards, in most cases the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, and the providers' own UK and EU data processing terms, together with technical and organisational measures including encryption in transit and data minimisation. You can ask us for a copy of the safeguards that apply to a particular provider by emailing support@glutenfreescanner.app.

How We Protect Your Data

Traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted in transit, and our hosting providers encrypt stored data at rest. Access to our production systems is limited to the small number of people who need it and is protected by multi-factor authentication, and administrative access is logged. No system is perfectly secure, but if a breach happens that is likely to result in a risk to your rights we will report it to the Information Commissioner's Office within 72 hours and tell affected users where the law requires.

How Long We Keep Things

• Device identifier and scan history: kept while your device identity remains active, which means until you delete your data in the app or your device identity is removed from our systems. There is no fixed calendar period; the criterion is whether the device identity is still in use. Data held for devices that are no longer active is removed when the legacy system holding it is retired.
• Subscription records: for the life of the subscription and then for as long as we have to keep accounting and tax records, normally six years.
• Technical request logs: kept for as long as we need them for security, rate limiting and debugging, and deleted when they are no longer needed. We are putting an automatic 90 day deletion schedule in place.
• Analytics, performance and crash reports: retained on the standard Google Firebase and Google Analytics retention schedule, and, where events are exported to our analytics warehouse, kept for aggregate reporting. We are setting fixed deletion schedules for both and will state the periods here once they are set.
• Product contributions: retained as part of the shared product database, because they describe a product rather than a person.
• Deletion requests: we keep a record of the request itself and a minimal suppression record, whose only purpose is to make sure deleted data is not re-imported by later data processing, for as long as the service operates. We have to be able to show that we acted on your request, and re-import would defeat the erasure. Neither record is used for any other purpose and neither is used to build a profile.

Why We Are Allowed to Use Your Data

We use your data for the following purposes, on the following legal bases:

• Registering your device, answering your scans and returning a product result: performance of our contract with you, namely the Terms and Conditions you accept when you use the app.
• Maintaining your Scan History and, for Premium, your offline database downloads: performance of our contract with you.
• Recognising and managing your Premium subscription: performance of our contract with you.
• Recording scans for users who do not have Premium: our legitimate interests in making results load faster, in having your history ready if you subscribe, and in seeing which products people cannot find so that we can prioritise adding them.
• Reviewing, analysing and publishing product contributions in the shared database: our legitimate interests in building and maintaining an accurate gluten database, and the interests of other users in getting an accurate answer about a product.
• Security, rate limiting, fraud prevention and debugging: our legitimate interests in keeping the service available, safe and free from abuse.
• Analytics, performance monitoring and crash reporting: your consent where your device settings or local law require it, and otherwise our legitimate interests in understanding crashes and feature use. You can ask us to stop at any time by emailing us, and we are adding a setting in the app so that you can turn these off yourself.
• Complying with our legal obligations, for example tax and accounting records for subscriptions: compliance with a legal obligation.

Where we rely on legitimate interests we have weighed our interests against your rights and freedoms, and you can ask us for a summary of that assessment.

You do not have to give us any of this data, but the app cannot look up a product without receiving the barcode, and Scan History and Offline Mode cannot work without a device identifier.

Your right to object. You have the right to object at any time, on grounds relating to your particular situation, to our use of your data where we rely on legitimate interests. Email support@glutenfreescanner.app and we will stop unless we have compelling legitimate grounds that override your interests.

Withdrawing consent. Where we rely on your consent you can withdraw it at any time, and withdrawing it does not affect anything we did before you withdrew it.

Automated decisions. We use AI to read product labels and to classify products. Those decisions are about products, not about you, they do not produce legal effects for you or similarly significantly affect you, and we do not make automated decisions about you within the meaning of Article 22 UK GDPR.

Your Rights and Choices

Under UK and EU data protection law you can ask for access, correction, deletion, restriction, or portability of your data, and object to processing. Email support@glutenfreescanner.app and we will respond within one month.

Delete my data: use the option in the app's settings. Your data is marked for deletion straight away and permanently erased after a 30 day recovery window, during which you can contact us to cancel the request. Erasure removes your device identity, your scan history, your offline download records and the subscription records held in our own database.

Some things are kept by design. The purchase and billing records held by our subscription management provider RevenueCat and by Apple or Google are retained for accounting, tax and fraud prevention, and are also what lets you restore a subscription on a new device. Usage analytics held in Google Firebase are retained on Google's standard schedule and are not removed by this request. We keep a record of your deletion request and a minimal suppression record whose only purpose is to make sure deleted data is not re-imported by any later data processing; without it, a re-import would defeat the erasure. Deleting your data does not cancel an App Store or Google Play subscription.

Your contributions: contributed photos and product text describe a product, not a person, and are retained as part of the shared database that other users rely on for a food safety decision. Where a contribution does contain personal data, for example a face, a hand, a name or anything else that identifies someone, tell us and we will remove or redact it, and we also do this on our own initiative when we spot it during review.

If you are unhappy with how we handle your data you can complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk) or, if you are in the EEA, to your local supervisory authority.

For Users in the United States

We do not sell or share your personal information, as those terms are defined in California and other US state privacy laws, and we do not use it for cross-context behavioural advertising or to infer characteristics about you. If the law of your state gives you rights to know what we collect, to obtain a copy of your data, or to correct, delete or appeal, you can exercise them using the contact details in this policy, and we will not treat you differently for doing so.

Children

The app is a general-audience shopping tool and is not directed at children under 13. Where the law of the country in which you live sets a higher age for children to use online services without a parent's permission, which is 16 in several EU countries including Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands and 15 in France, we do not knowingly collect data from children below that age without a parent's permission. There are no accounts in the app, so we cannot verify age; we rely on the age ratings applied by the Apple App Store and Google Play.

We know that children and teenagers live with coeliac disease and may use the app, so we design it to be low risk for them: there are no accounts or profiles, no behavioural advertising and no profiling, no messaging between users, we collect the minimum we need, and our default settings are the most privacy-protective ones. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, contact us at support@glutenfreescanner.app and we will delete it.

This Website

This policy also covers the glutenfreescanner.app website. We set no cookies of our own on it. Nothing beyond what is needed to show you a page is loaded unless you ask for it or agree to it first, and the only third-party things the site can load at all are Google Analytics and Google Translate, both described below.

Analytics. We would like to use Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages are useful. On your first visit a banner asks whether you agree, with an Accept option and a Reject option that are equally easy to use. Until you press Accept, Google Analytics is not requested at all: no script is fetched from Google, no analytics cookie is set, and no request carrying your IP address is made. We also set Google's Consent Mode v2 signals to denied by default, so that analytics, advertising and personalisation storage start switched off. If you press Reject, or close the banner without choosing, nothing loads. If you press Accept, Google Analytics loads and sets its own cookies to recognise your browser on later visits. We do not use it to build a profile of you and we do not use it for advertising.

Your choice, and changing it. Your answer is stored in your browser's local storage on your own device, not in a cookie, and it is not sent to us. You can change it at any time using the Cookie settings link in the footer of this site, which brings the banner back. If you switch from Accept to Reject we turn analytics storage off and delete the Google Analytics cookies already on your device. You can also block anything you like using your browser's cookie and script settings or a tracking blocker.

Fonts. The typeface used on this site is served from our own website, so simply opening a page does not make a request to Google or to any other font service.

Translation. Our legal pages offer a Google Translate option. Google's translation service is only loaded when you press Translate this page, or when you open the page from a link that already asks for a particular language, which is how the app opens these pages in the language you use it in. Doing either sends your request to Google and lets Google set its own cookies. If you do not ask for a translation, nothing is loaded from Google's translation service.

Server logs. Like any website, ours is served by a hosting provider that keeps standard server logs, including IP addresses, to deliver the pages and protect the site from abuse.

You can ask us anything about this at support@glutenfreescanner.app. The mobile app itself does not use cookies.

Product Data Sources

Product information comes from our own community of contributors and from Open Food Facts. Open Food Facts data is copyright Open Food Facts contributors and is used under the Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0, available at opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1-0/.

Language

This policy is written in English. Translations are produced automatically by a third-party translation service when you ask for one, and are provided for convenience only. If anything is unclear in your language, email support@glutenfreescanner.app and we will explain it.

Changes

We will update this policy when the service changes and revise the date above. Material changes will be highlighted in the app or on this page.

Contact Us

If you have any questions or requests about this Privacy Policy or your data, contact us at support@glutenfreescanner.app.

Food Barcode Scanner Ltd, 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom. Registered in England and Wales, company number 14560869. ICO registration reference ZC221611.