Roughly — Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2026-09-06

Roughly is an iPhone app that estimates calories and nutrients from photos of your meals and keeps a diary of what you eat and how your weight changes. This policy explains what data the app handles, where it goes, and how to delete it. There are no accounts, no advertising, no analytics SDKs and no sale of data.

What the app stores

All of this is stored on your iPhone and, if you are signed in to iCloud, in your private iCloud database (Apple CloudKit) so it syncs between your devices. We do not run a server that holds your diary and cannot see it.

What leaves your device, and why

AI analysis of meals

When you photograph a meal, the app sends the photo (downscaled) together with a short context — your locale, the local time, a one-line summary of your goal and your daily targets — to our proxy server and on to an AI model provider to estimate the contents. When you correct an estimate in words, or add components by text, that text is sent the same way. The proxy keeps the photo for up to 10 minutes only while the model's clarifying questions are pending, then deletes it. The proxy's logs contain request metadata (route, model, token counts, latency, cost) but never photos or meal contents.

Goal setup and reports

To understand your goal and to write daily and monthly reports, the app sends the goal text, body data, calorie targets and aggregated numbers (totals per day, meal titles with calories, weight at the start and end of a month) to the same proxy and AI provider. Photos are never sent for reports.

AI provider

The current provider is OpenAI (API). Requests are made by our proxy without any account identifier of yours. Per OpenAI's API data-usage policy, API inputs are not used to train their models. We may switch providers; this page will be updated when that happens.

Device identity and abuse protection

To keep the AI service from being abused, each install proves it is the genuine app on a genuine device using Apple App Attest. The proxy stores a public key and a request counter per install, plus a daily request count. This does not identify you personally. Where App Attest is unavailable, a random per-install token is used instead.

Notifications and widgets

Reminders and "report ready" notifications are local to your device; nothing is sent to a push server. Widgets read a small summary of today's totals stored on your device.

What we don't do

Photos and camera

The app asks for camera access to take meal photos and for photo-library access only for the pictures you select. Photos stay in the app's database on your device and in your iCloud; they are not uploaded anywhere except the AI analysis described above.

Health app

With your permission the app reads from Apple Health: date of birth, sex, height and weight to pre-fill your profile, and new weight measurements to keep your weight history current. Access is read-only; nothing is written to Health. Values imported from Health are treated exactly like values you type in: they are stored on your iPhone and in your iCloud, and the body data (sex, age, height, weight, activity level) is sent to our proxy and the AI provider only for goal setup and reports, as described above. Health data is never used for advertising, never sold, and never shared for any other purpose.

Deleting your data

Settings → Delete all data removes everything from your iPhone and from your iCloud database. Deleting the app removes the local copy; iCloud data can be removed via Delete all data before uninstalling or from iOS Settings → Apple Account → iCloud → Manage Storage. Health access can be revoked at any time in iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Health → Roughly; entries already imported stay in the app until you delete them or use Delete all data.

Children

The app is not intended for children under 13 and does not knowingly collect data from them.

Changes

If this policy changes materially, the new version is published at this address with an updated date.

Contact

contact@roughly.food