Privacy Policy

The short version

• Your logs live on your phone first. The app works fully offline.
• We never store your meal photos. A photo is analysed and then discarded — it is not written to your phone, your account, or our cloud storage. The AI provider that analyses it may hold it briefly for abuse monitoring before deleting it; see below.
• Cloud sync happens only if you create an account and sign in, and your data is scoped to your own user ID.
• We do not sell your data and there are no advertising trackers. The app does measure feature usage, which you can turn off.
• AI is opt-in and separate. Setup asks before anything is collected, and declining AI still leaves you the full offline tracker.
• You can export everything or delete your account from Settings at any time.
• Crumb Count is an 18+ app, and we ask you to confirm that before collecting anything.

Who is responsible for your data

Crumb Count is provided by Xeros (by Nevish), a sole proprietorship established in India. We decide what data is collected and why, which makes us the data fiduciaryunder India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 and the data controller under the GDPR. Responsibility for how your data is handled — including by the companies we use to process it — rests with us.

A named person is accountable for this and answers privacy questions and complaints:

• Shiven Upadhyay, Software Engineer — grievance officer and privacy contact
• shiven302@gmail.com
• A003, Sarla Mansion, Sector 44, Noida 201301, Uttar Pradesh, India

What we collect, and why — in detail

Rather than describe this in categories, here is each kind of data, the single purpose we collect it for, and whether it ever leaves your device. We do not use any of it for a purpose not listed here; if that ever needs to change, we will update this notice and ask you first.

Your profile — you enter it during setup

• Height, weight, age, sex, body-fat percentage — to calculate your calorie targets and your energy expenditure. There is no other use.
• Activity level, goal and diet style — to set your daily targets and filter food suggestions.
• Units and appearance preferences — to display the app the way you asked for it.

What you log — the core of the app

• Meals, food items, quantities, calories and macros — to show your daily totals and your history, which is the service itself.
• Daily totals, targets and logging history by date — to draw your history and streaks.
• Workouts, routines, folders and gym sessions — to record your training and estimate calories burned.
• Weight entries and activity entries — to show progress over time.
• Saved favourite meals — so you can re-log something without retyping it.

Your account — only if you sign in

• Email address and an account identifier — to authenticate you and to attach your data to you alone. We never see or store your password.

AI features — only if you turn them on

• A meal photo or your typed description — sent to an AI provider to be turned into food items with estimated nutrition. The photo is discarded immediately afterwards and never stored by us.
• Your messages to the AI coach and meal chat — to answer you, and kept so a conversation has continuity. These are the most sensitive records in the app, because people often mention far more than the app asks for.
• A summary of your recent logging and profile — sent with coach and review requests so the answer is about you rather than generic.

From your health app — only if you connect it

• Steps, active energy, total energy, heart rate and exercise sessions — to make your calorie-burn figure reflect what you actually did. Read-only, and nothing is written back.

Technical records

• AI usage entries — which provider and model ran, tokens used, and when. To monitor cost and reliability and to enforce quotas. They contain no photo, description or resulting food items.
• App usage events — which screens are opened and counts of actions. To decide what to fix and build next. No free text, no personal content; see below, and you can switch it off.
• Your consent choices and the time you made them — because we are required to be able to demonstrate that you agreed.

What we deliberately do not collect

No precise location. No contacts, no calendar, no microphone. No biometric identifiers such as fingerprints or face templates. No advertising identifiers, and no data purchased from data brokers.

Consent — what we ask, and how to take it back

Before any of your health data is collected, setup asks you separately for each thing that needs consent. Nothing is pre-ticked, and the boxes are not bundled together or into your acceptance of the Terms of Service:

• Confirming you are 18 or older — required to continue.
• Processing your health data — your body measurements, meals and workouts — so the app can do what it does.
• Sending content to a third-party AI provider — asked as its own question, because it is a different thing to agree to. You can decline and still use the full offline tracker.
• Reading Apple Health or Health Connect — asked in the app, and again by your operating system, which is the permission that actually controls access.

Withdrawing is as easy as giving. Settings → Privacyturns AI processing off, which stops content being sent from your next action onward — the check runs before any request leaves the app. Health access is revoked in your operating system’s own settings. Withdrawing does not undo processing that already happened lawfully, and if you withdraw consent to health processing altogether the app can no longer provide the service, so the appropriate step is to delete your account.

What is stored on your device

Crumb Count is offline-first. The following is written to a local database on your phone and is the app’s primary copy of your data:

• Meals and their food items, quantities, calories and macros
• Daily totals, targets and your logging history by date
• Workouts, routines, routine folders and any in-progress gym session
• Weight entries and activity entries
• Saved favourite meals
• Your profile and settings — height, weight, age, sex, activity level, goal, diet style, units and appearance choices

If you never sign in, this information stays on your device and nothing is transmitted anywhere except as described under AI meal analysis below.

What is synced to the cloud

If you create an account and sign in, the data above is synced to Google Firebase (Firestore and Firebase Authentication) so that a new phone or a reinstall can restore your history. Everything is stored under a path keyed to your own account ID, and our security rules prevent one account from reading another’s data.

Sync is two-way and conflict-resolved by whichever record was edited most recently. Deleting a record on one device removes it from the others.

Use of artificial intelligence

These features send your content to a third-party AI provider:

• Meal logging from a photo or a typed description, and the follow-up chat used to correct an item
• Describing an activity or a workout in words instead of picking it from the catalogue
• The AI coach, and the weekly and monthly reviews that summarise your logging

Everything else runs entirely on your device and sends nothing: the 6,410-food catalogue, manual meal and workout logging, the calorie-burn calculations, widgets, streaks and history.

Requests are routed through our own server, which holds the API keys — the app on your phone never talks to a provider directly. Depending on our server configuration, the provider handling a request is OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. Because that routing is configurable, we name all three rather than only the one active today.

What is sent depends on the feature: a meal photo or description; your chat messages; and, for the coach and reviews, a summary of your recent logging and profile so the answer is about you. Anything you type is sent as you wrote it, so please avoid putting medical details into chat that you would not want processed by a third party.

What the providers do with it

Crumb Count does not retain your meal photos — a photo is never saved into the meal record, your local database, or our cloud storage. Only the resulting text is kept. But we should be precise about what happens downstream rather than leave you with an absolute-sounding promise: to return a result, the content is transmitted to the provider, which may retain a copy briefly within its own processing environment for abuse monitoring — currently up to 30 days for OpenAI and 7 days for Anthropic — after which it is deleted.

We use these providers on their business/API terms, under which your content is not used to train their models. We do not use it to train any model of our own either.

AI output is an estimate

Nutrition figures from a photo or description are produced by an AI system and are estimates, not measurements — portion size in particular can only be guessed from an image, which is why every item stays editable. Coach replies and reviews are AI-generated, are general wellness information, and are not medical advice. Crumb Count is not a medical device and does not diagnose, treat or prevent any condition.

Health and fitness data

If you choose to connect Apple Health (iOS) or Health Connect (Android), the app requests read-only access to exactly five things, and each one has a specific job:

• Steps — the baseline for your daily movement, and the only type the integration actually needs to function
• Active energy— your device’s own estimate of calories burned moving, used in preference to ours when available
• Total energy — used to recognise when a figure already includes your resting burn, so we do not count it twice
• Heart rate — used to detect whether a workout was recorded with a watch, which tells us how much to trust its energy figure
• Exercise sessions — so workouts recorded in another app appear in your day instead of being missed

We ask for nothing beyond these. Sleep, blood glucose, blood pressure, nutrition, cycle tracking, oxygen saturation and body temperature are all available through those APIs and we deliberately do not request any of them, because the app has no use for them.

Crumb Count does not write anything backto Apple Health or Health Connect. Health data read this way is used to compute what you see in the app and is not sold, shared, or used for advertising. You can revoke this permission at any time in your operating system’s health settings, and the app will fall back to its own estimates.

Accounts and sign-in

You can sign in with an email address and password, or with Google Sign-In. Authentication is handled by Firebase Authentication; we receive your email address and an account identifier. We never see or store your password.

Diagnostic and usage data

When you are signed in, the app records a small technical entry for each AI request — which provider and model handled it, how many tokens it used, and when. This exists to monitor cost and reliability. It does not contain your photo, your meal description, or the resulting food items.

The app also uses Firebase Analytics (Google) to measure how features are used — which screens are opened, and counts of actions like logging a meal or finishing a workout. This tells us what to fix and what to build next.

These events carry no free-text and no personal content: no meal names, no photos, no chat messages, no body measurements. Numbers are bucketed into ranges rather than reported exactly, so an event records that something happened, not what you ate or what you weigh. Analytics is disabled entirely in development builds.

Analytics is on by default and can be turned off in Settings → Data, which stops collection at the SDK level. The app contains no advertising SDKs and we do not use this data for advertising, nor sell it.

Children

Crumb Count is an 18+ app. Setup asks you to confirm you are 18 or older before any of your data is collected, and the Terms of Servicerequire it too. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. Calorie tracking is generally inappropriate for children without professional supervision, and India’s DPDP Act treats everyone under 18 as a child.

That Act also prohibits tracking, behavioural monitoring and targeted advertising directed at children outright. We do none of those to anyone, at any age: there is no advertising in Crumb Count, no behavioural profiling, and no cross-app tracking. Our usage measurement counts how often features are used and is never used to profile or target an individual.

If you believe a child has created an account, write to xerosbynevish@gmail.com and we will delete it.

Your choices and rights

Export your data

Settings includes an export that produces your meals and settings as JSON. API keys are deliberately excluded from the export.

Delete your account

Settings includes account deletion. This removes your cloud records — meals, favourites, saved state and usage entries — deletes your authentication account, and wipes the app’s local database and secure storage on the device. Deletion is permanent and cannot be undone.

Withdraw your consent

Settings → Privacyhas a switch for AI processing. Turning it off stops your content being sent to any AI provider from your next action onward, and costs you nothing else — manual logging, the food catalogue, workouts, widgets and streaks all keep working. Apple Health and Health Connect access is revoked in your operating system’s own health settings.

Use the app without an account

You can skip sign-in entirely and use Crumb Count as a purely local app. You will not get cloud backup or multi-device sync.

Correct your data

Every field is editable in the app — your profile, your weight entries, and any meal, workout or food item, including anything the AI got wrong. If something cannot be fixed in the app, write to us and we will correct it.

The rights you have where you live

These differ by country, and so do the deadlines. We apply whichever is most favourable to you rather than sorting you by jurisdiction — but so that this notice is accurate rather than flattering, here is what each regime actually gives you.

India (DPDP Act, 2023). You have the right to a summary of your personal data and how it is processed, together with the identities of anyone we shared it with; to correction, completion, updating and erasure; to raise a grievance with us; and to nominate someone to exercise these rights on your behalf if you die or become incapacitated. You must raise a grievance with us before approaching the Data Protection Board. We respond within 90 days, and usually much sooner.

EU and UK (GDPR). Access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, objection, and portability in a machine-readable format, plus the right to withdraw consent at any time. Our legal basis is your explicit consent for health data (Article 9(2)(a)), and performance of our contract with you for running your account. We respond within one month, extendable by two for complex requests, and you can complain to your national data protection authority.

Washington and Nevada (US). Confirmation, access, a list of who we shared your health data with, withdrawal of consent, and deletion — within 45 days, with an appeal route. See the Consumer Health Data Privacy Notice.

Everyone. There are no automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects for you: the app calculates targets and shows estimates, and every decision about your eating and training remains yours.

How to make a request or complain

The fastest routes are in the app — export and account deletion are immediate and need no request. For anything else, write to shiven302@gmail.com from the address on your account, so we can tell it is you. Requests are free.

Complaints go to Shiven Upadhyay, Software Engineer, at the same address or at A003, Sarla Mansion, Sector 44, Noida 201301, Uttar Pradesh, India. We acknowledge within 72 hours. If we have not resolved it, you can escalate to the Data Protection Board of India, to your national data protection authority in the EU or UK, or to the Washington State Attorney General.

Processors we rely on

These companies process your data on our instructions, under contract, and not for their own purposes. We name them specifically rather than describing them as “service providers”, because a generic description is not a disclosure.

• Google LLC — Firebase Authentication and Cloud Firestore for sign-in and account sync; Cloud Functions, which run our server-side AI requests; Secret Manager, which holds our API keys; and Firebase Analytics for usage measurement.
• OpenAI, L.L.C., Anthropic, PBC and Google LLC — AI analysis of meal photos and descriptions, activity descriptions, the coach and periodic reviews. Which one handles a given request is set by our server configuration and can change, so all three are named.

We do not share your data with anyone else. There are no advertisers, data brokers, social networks or analytics vendors beyond the above, and we do not sell your data under any definition of sale. If we ever add a recipient, this page will name them before the change takes effect.

Where your data goes

Our database and servers run in the United States on Google Cloud, and our AI providers are US companies. If you are in India, the EU or the UK, your data is transferred internationally to reach them.

India’s DPDP Act permits transfers except to countries the government restricts, and no such restriction currently applies to these. For EU and UK users, the transfers rely on the safeguards in our providers’ data processing agreements — standard contractual clauses and, where the provider is certified, the EU–US Data Privacy Framework.

How long we keep it

• Your logs, profile and history — for as long as your account exists. The point of the app is a history you can look back through, so we do not expire it behind your back. Delete individual records whenever you like, or delete the account.
• Meal photos — not retained by us at all. Held in memory, sent, discarded.
• At the AI provider — up to 30 days at OpenAI and 7 days at Anthropic for abuse monitoring, then deleted. Not used for training.
• On account deletion — your records are erased server-side straight away. Backup copies age out within 30 days.
• Technical logs — kept for a limited period for security and reliability, then discarded.

If you stop using Crumb Count without deleting your account, your data stays until you delete it, because it is the record you would come back to.

How we protect it

• Your data is scoped to your account, and server-side rules stop one account reading another’s.
• All traffic is encrypted in transit, and data is encrypted at rest by our cloud provider.
• API keys live in a dedicated secret store and never ship inside the app, so your requests go through our server rather than exposing a credential on your phone.
• Records our servers own, such as usage counters, cannot be altered by the app at all.
• We run an automated suite that attacks our own security rules, so a change that would expose one account’s data to another fails before it ships.

If a breach affects your data, we will tell you. We notify affected users without undue delay, describing what happened and what to do, and we notify the relevant regulators within the deadlines that apply — including the Data Protection Board of India and, for EU and UK users, within 72 hours. No system is perfect; report a security problem to xerosbynevish@gmail.com rather than disclosing it publicly.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes materially, the date at the top of this page will be updated and, where the change is significant, we will surface a notice in the app.

Contact

Privacy, data-protection requests and grievances: Shiven Upadhyay, Software Engineer — shiven302@gmail.com, A003, Sarla Mansion, Sector 44, Noida 201301, Uttar Pradesh, India.

General support: xerosbynevish@gmail.com.

See also the Terms of Service, our Legal & Data Protection page, and — for Washington and Nevada residents — the Consumer Health Data Privacy Notice.