Privacy

Opie holds a record of what you eat and how your body reacted. That is private in a way most apps' data is not, and this page is specific about where it goes rather than reassuring in general terms.

Last updated 5 August 2026.

Your reactions, flags, and scans are health data, and some states hold that to a higher standard. It has its own policy: the Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy. This page covers everything Opie stores; that one covers the health part specifically.

The short version

Your scans, your reaction logs and your flags are yours. Nobody else using Opie can see them.
Photos you take while scanning go to private storage that only you can read. They are never public unless you separately choose to share one.
We never sell your information, and we do not run ads.
We never see or store your card number.

What Opie stores

Your account

Your name, the display name other members see, and your email address. Your full name is never shown to anyone else. Passwords are handled by our authentication provider and are stored only as a hash, so nobody here can read yours.

Your health information

The ingredients you have told Opie to flag, the sensitivity level you set for each, and any reaction you log: which product, a severity from one to five, the time, and whatever notes you write. This is the most sensitive thing in the app and it is treated that way. It is readable only by your own account, and it is never shown to other members, shared with advertisers, or sold.

Your scans

Each scan records the barcode or the ingredient text that was read, the product name where we have one, and which of your flags matched. This is what Recent scans shows you, and it is private to your account.

Photos

When you scan a label, the photo is uploaded to private storage so it can be read. Only your account can retrieve it, and the service that extracts the text is given a link that stops working after one minute. We keep it private deliberately: a photo taken in a kitchen or a pharmacy can catch a face, a prescription, or a piece of mail sitting next to the packet.

Separately, you can choose to contribute a label photo to the shared product database. That is a distinct action you have to take on purpose, and the screen tells you at the time. A photo shared that way becomes publicly readable, because other members need to see the label to judge whether the information is right. It is not linked to your name. Do not share a photo that has anything else of yours in the frame.

Questions you ask Opie

The question text, and the answer. If you ask about eating out, you can give a place as free text, and your browser may offer precise coordinates. Coordinates are only ever sent if you allow that prompt, and declining it still gets you an answer.

Where you are, roughly

If you add yourself to the community map, Opie stores the county you pick and nothing finer. Not your address, not your coordinates. Others see a count for a county, never a person.

Lists, posts, and reports

Your shopping lists are private to you. Anything you post in the community is visible to other signed-in members under your display name. Reports about wrong product information are visible to us so we can fix the entry.

Billing

If you subscribe, our payment processor holds the payment method and tells us only the state of your subscription: whether it is active, which interval you chose, when it renews, and whether it is set to cancel. Your card number never reaches Opie, not the form, not our logs.

Notifications and anti-abuse

If you turn on reminders, we store the subscription your browser issues so we can send them. We also keep a count of how often the scan service is called per account, to stop one account running up the cost of the service for everyone.

Who else touches it

Opie is a small product built on other people's infrastructure. These are the companies involved and the only reason each one is:

Our hosting and database provider stores everything described above and runs sign-in.
Our application host serves the site itself.
Our payment processor handles subscriptions and the card details we never see.
Our automation service reads label photos and researches ingredients. It receives a short-lived link to one photo at a time.
AI model providers do the reading and the writing. A photo of a label is passed to an AI model to turn the picture into text, and a question you ask Opie is passed to an AI model to research and write the answer. That means the contents of a label you scan, and the words of a question you type, are sent to those providers as part of answering you. They act only on our instructions and are not permitted to use what they receive to train their models.
Our email provider sends confirmation and password emails. Those emails never mention a health condition in the subject or preview line, so a notification on a lock screen tells a passer-by nothing about you.
A bot-protection service checks that sign-ups are people.

None of them are given your information for their own purposes. We do not sell or rent it, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers.

Two things about the AI part are worth saying plainly, because “we use AI” is usually where a policy stops being useful. Opie does not use your scans, your reactions or your questions to train any model, ours or anybody else’s. And an AI model is never the thing that decides whether a food is a problem for you: it reads the label and drafts the words, and what gets flagged comes from a curated ingredient list and the settings you chose.

We will hand over information if the law actually requires it. If that ever happens we will tell you, unless we are legally forbidden from doing so.

How long it is kept

Your account data stays while your account exists, because the point of a reaction history is that it is long enough to show a pattern. Scan photos are kept so you can look back at what you scanned. If you want something specific removed, ask and we will remove it.

Payment records outlast the account. If you ever paid for Opie+, our payment processor holds a record of those payments, and the email address the account used sits on it. Deleting your account cancels the membership and clears everything described above from Opie, and it does not erase the fact that a payment happened. Transaction records are kept for accounting and tax purposes, and that is the one category deleting cannot clear. It is not used for anything else, and it is never used to rebuild an account you deleted.

Getting your information, or deleting it

You can see and change most of it in the app: your flags and your name in Profile, your reaction history alongside your scans, your lists in Shopping lists.

To delete the whole account, open Profile and use Delete account. It asks you to type a word first, because it cannot be undone and there is no copy of it afterwards.

Deleting removes, for good:

Your scans and the photos taken for them, your reaction log, your flags, your shopping lists, your questions to Opie, and your place on the map.
Your sign-in and your account itself, so the email address stops being linked to anything here.

Three things are kept, and we would rather be plain about them than have you find out later. A label you chose to share with the shared product database stays, with your name taken off it, anything you posted in the community stays, with your name taken off it too, and any report you filed about a post stays the same way. The first two are things other members read: the label entries when they scan the same product, the posts when they go looking for somebody who has been through the same thing. Pulling them would take something away from people who had nothing to do with the decision. The contribution stops being yours; it does not stop being useful.

If you have a paid membership, it is cancelled as part of deleting, so you are not charged again. If the cancellation fails we stop and delete nothing, so you never end up paying for an account that no longer exists.

If you want a copy of your data rather than deletion, email support@scanag.app from the address on the account and we will send it.

Children

Opie is not built for children and is not intended for anyone under 13. If you believe a child has created an account, email us and we will remove it.

Changes

If this page changes in a way that affects what happens to your information, we will tell members by email rather than quietly changing the date at the top.

Contact

support@scanag.app. A person reads it.