Last updated 12 September 2026
AskCal has no accounts and no ads. Your food log is stored on your phone, not on our servers. One thing does leave your device: a meal photo, sent once so it can be turned into an estimate. This page explains exactly what happens to it.
Everything you log is held in local storage on your phone:
None of this is uploaded, backed up to us, or readable by us. Uninstalling the app deletes it. You can also erase it at any time from Settings → Delete account and data, and export it first from Settings → Export everything as CSV.
When you scan a meal, the photo is resized on your phone and sent to our service, which forwards it to Google’s Gemini API to produce the estimate. We do not keep the photo — it is held in memory for the length of the request and never written to storage.
We do cache the result — the dish name, components and numbers — for seven days, so re-scanning the identical photo costs you neither a scan nor another model call. That cache is keyed by a cryptographic hash of the image combined with a hash of your app identifier, so that one person’s cached result is never served to anybody else. It contains no image data, and the hash cannot be turned back into your identifier.
Google’s handling of data sent to the Gemini API is governed by Google’s API terms.
The “Keep meal photos” switch controls whether the photo is kept on your phone after the estimate. It does not stop the photo being sent once to produce the estimate, because that is the feature itself.
When you scan a barcode, the number is sent to OpenFoodFacts, a public food database, to look the product up. Nothing else is sent with it.
Text you type into food search is sent to our service, which queries the USDA FoodData Central database. The search term is not stored.
AskCal uses RevenueCat to manage subscriptions. RevenueCat issues an anonymous app user ID. That ID is the only identifier we hold, and it is used for two things: checking whether you have an active subscription, and counting how many photo scans you have used so the allowance can be enforced.
| What | Keyed by | Kept for |
|---|---|---|
| Number of scans used | Anonymous RevenueCat ID | Until you delete your data |
| Whether a subscription is active | Hash of the anonymous ID | 24 hours |
| Scan results (no images) | Hash of the image | 7 days |
That is the complete list. There is no name, no email address, no phone number, no location and no food log on our servers.
AskCal is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them.
If this policy changes in a way that affects what leaves your device, the date at the top changes and the new version is published here before the change ships.
Questions about this policy: firodiya.ritesh@gmail.com