Privacy
Privacy policy
What stays on your device
Stored in an app-private database that no other app can read:
- Barcodes and product names you have scanned or entered
- A name of your own for a product, if you rename it on this device. The product keeps its own name as well, and removing your name brings it back
- Carbohydrate values and, for Open Food Facts products, protein values; measurement basis, package sizes
- Your verified values, and the online value they replaced
- The last portion you used per product, and when you last used it
- Countable portion units (e.g. “1 slice = 36 g”), and whether you have checked them against the package
- Portions you have used more than once for a product, so they can be offered as shortcuts. These are kept per product; the app has no way to assemble them into a picture of what you eat overall
- The items in your current meal, if you use that feature. There is only ever one meal, it has no name and no date, and it stays until you clear it. The app cannot store a past meal, so it holds no record of meals you have eaten
- The dish you are building, if you use that feature: the ingredients you added, how much of each, the value each was calculated with, and how many portions the dish makes or what it weighed (as a whole, or plate by plate as you served it, with the empty container you took off). There is only ever one and it has no name; when you are editing a saved dish, it also notes which one. The time each ingredient was added and the time the dish last changed are kept, to keep the ingredients in order and to tell a dish left since yesterday from one being made now; they are never shown. The dish stays until you save it, clear it, start another or remove its last ingredient, including across a restart
- Dishes you chose to save: the name you gave each, what went into it, how many portions it makes or what it weighed, when it was saved and when you last opened it (to put the dishes you open most recently first). Nothing about a serving is kept: not how many portions you had, when, or what is left
- The weights of the last three pans or bowls you subtracted from a scale reading, so they can be offered again. They are weights only and have no names
- Favourites, and your settings (including whether Home shows your favourites or your dishes)
There is no login, no cloud profile and no synchronisation. Deleting the app deletes all of it.
What leaves your device
Three things: a barcode lookup, a product photo, and — only if you use it — a search you typed.
| Recipient | Open Food Facts, for product data (world.openfoodfacts.org), search (search.openfoodfacts.org, or world.openfoodfacts.org if that service does not answer) and product photos (images.openfoodfacts.org or static.openfoodfacts.org; for search results, also Open Food Facts’ image archive at openfoodfacts-images.s3.eu-west-3.amazonaws.com, which runs on Amazon Web Services infrastructure, Amazon S3) |
|---|---|
| When | Product data: only when you scan or enter a barcode not already saved on your device. Photos: when that lookup returns a product that has a photo, and for each result shown while you search by name. Some search-result photos are served from Open Food Facts’ Amazon S3-hosted image archive: the app uses the archive only when it can tell the archived photo is the same, unedited picture, and otherwise — or when the archive does not have it — uses Open Food Facts’ own image host. The app checks every photo address and will not load an image from any other host. Search text: while you search by name — once you have typed at least three characters and paused for about a third of a second, or when you press the search action. Fewer than three characters are never sent |
| What is sent | The barcode number and a User-Agent identifying the app and version (product lookup); a standard image request with no additional data attached (photo); the search words, plus the list of languages whose product names should be searched (search). That list starts with Turkish when your phone’s language is Turkish, so it can reveal that setting. Your phone’s region is used only on the device, to order the results, and is not sent |
| What Just the Carbs does not attach | An account/user ID, advertising ID, your portions, results, history, or verified values. The recipient still receives normal network metadata such as IP address |
| Transport | HTTPS only; cleartext traffic is disabled at the platform level |
About the search text specifically. Unlike a barcode, this is text you typed, so it deserves naming rather than folding into “product lookups”. It is sent while you search — after you pause typing, not on every keystroke — with no app-supplied user identifier, and Just the Carbs does not store it on your device or on a Just the Carbs server — the app keeps no search history and has no server. Open Food Facts’ own retention of search requests was not established by a primary source in the 14 August 2026 review. If you do not use Search by name, nothing of this kind is sent by Just the Carbs.
Open Food Facts is an independent organisation and will receive your IP address as an unavoidable part of any internet request; their handling of that is governed by their own privacy policy. A search-result photo served from Open Food Facts’ image archive travels over Amazon Web Services infrastructure, so Amazon Web Services, which operates that storage for Open Food Facts, also receives that request’s network metadata, such as your IP address. A cached product — and an already-loaded photo — is served with no network request at all.
Camera and photos
The camera is used to read barcodes and nutrition labels. A photo you already have can be read the same two ways.
- Processing is on-device. Live camera frames are processed in memory and discarded immediately.
- When you explicitly capture a nutrition label, a temporary image is stored in the app’s private cache solely for on-device OCR and deleted immediately after processing. Images are not uploaded or retained.
- If you choose a photo in the app, or share a picture into it from another app, the app receives that one picture only: the system photo picker, or the app you shared from, grants a one-time read of it. The app copies it into its private cache, reads it on the device exactly as it reads a capture, and deletes the copy once it has been read or you dismiss it. A copy left behind by an app that was closed part-way is deleted the next time the app starts. The picture is never uploaded, and a shared picture is never assumed to be a barcode or a label: the app asks.
- No storage or photo-library permission is requested, so the app cannot see your gallery, and the temporary copies above are never written anywhere a gallery or another app could see them.
- Access is requested when you first open the scanner, not at launch. You may decline — manual entry always remains available.
What Just the Carbs does not contain
No advertising SDK. No advertising ID. No developer-configured analytics or crash-reporting service. No social login. No Health Connect. No Bluetooth. No location permission or location feature. Just the Carbs does not sell data or share it for advertising. ML Kit’s SDK metrics are described separately below.
One thing we want to be precise about
Just the Carbs uses Google ML Kit for barcode and label recognition. Google states that camera input and recognition results are processed on-device and are not sent to Google. Google also states that the SDK collects device and app information, per-installation identifiers, performance metrics, API configuration, feature events and errors for diagnostics and usage analytics. It says this data is encrypted in transit and not transferred to third parties. See Google’s ML Kit disclosure and Terms & Privacy, checked 14 August 2026.
The SDK’s com.google.android.datatransport component cannot be removed without
breaking barcode scanning (verified in an emulator experiment) and adds the
ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE permission. Just the Carbs does not control Google’s retention of
those metrics.
Backup
Android backup is disabled. Your food history is never copied to your Google account. The trade-off is that saved products do not transfer to a new phone.
Your control
| You want to | Do this |
|---|---|
| Remove usage history, keep verified products and saved dishes | Settings → Clear recent history |
| Delete every saved product and dish and everything derived from them | Settings → Clear saved products |
| Discard the dish you are building | Open it from Home, then its menu → Clear dish (while editing a saved dish, Discard changes) |
| Delete one saved dish | Open it, then its menu → Delete dish (or press and hold its card on Home) |
| Remove all data permanently | Uninstall the app |
| Stop all network requests | Use the app offline; saved products keep working |
Precisely what the two Settings actions do:
- Clear recent history forgets that you used anything. For every product — favourites included — it clears the last-used time, the last portion, the remembered portion mode, the remembered countable unit and the remembered count, and it deletes every usual-portion record and the pan weights remembered for dishes. Your products, your saved dishes, their carbohydrate values, your verifications and your favourites all stay, and so does a dish you are still building.
- Clear saved products deletes every saved product, every countable portion unit and every usual-portion record. It also deletes every dish you saved, with its list of ingredients, and the pan weights remembered for dishes. It does not change your app preferences (theme, result style, haptics) or discard the meal you are currently assembling or the dish you are still building — none of those is saved product data, and this row previously said "delete everything the app has stored", which overstated it.
There is no account to delete, because there is no account.
Children
Just the Carbs is not directed at children. It has no child-oriented design, account, advertising, or public user content. The same Open Food Facts requests and ML Kit collection described above apply regardless of a user’s age; no separate claim of zero collection is made for children.
Changes
Material changes will be reflected here with an updated date, published alongside the app release that introduces them.