CareBite is a food-label scanner for people with allergies and dietary medical conditions. Health information is sensitive, so the app is built to keep as much of it as possible on your own phone.
None of this is uploaded to us. Deleting the app deletes it.
| What | Goes to | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A barcode or search term | Open Food Facts | To look up the product. Sent without any profile or identifier. |
| A barcode | openFDA | To check it against published food recalls. |
| Your question, plus a summary of the profiles it concerns | Anthropic (Claude), via our server | Only when you use the Assistant. Not used to train models. |
| Ingredient text you photograph | Stays on your device | Text recognition runs locally. |
| An ingredient label you photograph and confirm | Our server | Sent automatically after you confirm the text against the pack, so the next person who scans that barcode gets an answer instead of a dead end. The label text and the barcode are sent — never your name, your profiles or your photograph. |
| A barcode we could not answer | Our server | When no source can identify a product, we record the barcode, the shopping region you chose, and why the lookup failed, so we know which products to add next. Nothing about you is attached to it. |
| How a scan was answered | Our server | The barcode, the shopping region you chose, which source answered, and whether the result was clear, flagged or unverifiable — so we know how often CareBite works and which products to fix first. When a product is flagged we also record which conditions it conflicts with, which is a fact about the food rather than about you. These are running counts kept against each product: no name, no account, no device identifier, and no record of when you scanned. |
| Your email address | Our server and Resend | Only if you create an account — to send your sign-in code. |
An account is optional; CareBite works fully without one. If you create one we store your email address only for as long as needed to send and check a six-digit sign-in code. Codes are stored hashed, are single-use, and are deleted the moment they are used or expire (ten minutes). We never ask for a password. If you sign in with Google or Apple we receive your email address and name from them and keep them on your device.
In the app: Profile → Settings → Delete account and data. This removes your profiles, history, lists, cart and account identity from the device, and signs you out of Google if you used it. Because your records live on the device, this deletion is complete. Contributed ingredient labels, and the record of which barcodes could not be answered, are not tied to you and stay in the shared database, as do the counts of how each barcode was answered — there is nothing in any of them to connect them to a person.
You can also email carebiteapp@gmail.com to ask us to remove an account email from our records.
CareBite is intended for adults, who may create profiles for children in their household. We do not knowingly collect information directly from children.
Depending on where you live you may have rights to access, correct, export or erase personal data we hold. Since almost everything is on your device you can exercise most of these yourself; for anything else, contact us at the address below.
CareBite is an aid, not a medical device. Ingredient data can be incomplete or out of date and recipes change without notice. Always read the printed label before eating.
If this policy changes materially we will update the date above and note it in the app.