You can use Care Me fully as a guest, with no account. If you choose to sign in with Apple or Google — to appear on the weekly leaderboard — that identity, a display name, and your weekly scan count leave your phone. Everything else you save — scan history, favorites, your ingredient watchlist — stays on your own device regardless. The only other thing that ever leaves your phone is a barcode number you choose to scan, sent to a product database to identify the item.
The app saves a small amount of information locally on your device, using standard on-device storage. Most of it is never transmitted anywhere; the exceptions (your account, a scanned barcode, an optional AI label read, and the referral program) are each explained in their own section below. Uninstalling the app deletes everything stored locally; your account and leaderboard history are separate and can be removed any time from Settings → Account → Delete Account.
Care Me asks for camera access to scan a barcode or read an ingredient list. The live camera feed is processed on your device — it is never recorded, saved to your photo library, or transmitted. When you photograph a label, the text is recognized on-device using Apple's built-in text recognition; only the ingredient text that was read is kept, and only in your local scan history.
Signing in is entirely optional — the sign-in screen you see once after onboarding has a "Continue as Guest" option that skips it completely, with no loss of functionality other than not appearing on the leaderboard. If you do sign in with Apple or Google, we receive the name and email your provider shares (Apple only shares your name the first time you sign in), which we use to create your account and, when available, as the default display name shown on the leaderboard. This is handled by Firebase Authentication, a service we use to run sign-in; Google's privacy policy governs how it processes that data on our behalf.
Every scan you complete is counted toward a weekly, resettable total, stored against your account (via Firebase's Firestore database) together with your chosen display name. The top 10 users each week — display name and scan count only, never your email or real name unless you've set that as your display name — are visible to every other signed-in user on the Leaderboard page. You can change your display name any time in Settings → Account.
Deleting your account (Settings → Account → Delete Account) permanently removes your sign-in, your leaderboard history, and your account record from our systems. It does not affect scan history, favorites, or other settings stored locally on your device.
When you scan a barcode, the app sends that number — and only that number, nothing that identifies you — to Open Beauty Facts, an open, non-commercial, crowd-sourced cosmetics database, to look up the product's ingredient list. If a product isn't found, the app falls back to reading the label directly on your device, with no lookup at all.
Open Beauty Facts is an independent service with its own privacy practices, which apply to requests we send it on your behalf. We don't control, and this policy doesn't cover, how it handles that traffic on its end.
When a label is too hard for on-device text recognition, you can choose "Get an AI read." Only then — and only if you tap it — the photo of that label is sent to Google's Gemini API to read the ingredient list. It's used to read the text; the resulting rating is still computed on your device. Nothing else about you is sent, and this never happens automatically. If you never tap it, no photo ever leaves your device. Google processes that request under its own API terms and privacy policy.
Settings lets you share an invite code and, if a friend redeems it, both of you earn a bonus day of scanning. To make this work and to stop a code from being farmed for free days, the app sends a random identifier — created on your device and not tied to your name, email, or anything else about you — to a small backend service we run, along with the code and the redeeming device's IP address (used only to rate-limit abuse, not stored against your identity in any lasting way).
This identifier is a device credential (kept in iOS Keychain, or Android's device ID), not an advertising or tracking identifier, and it's used solely to run the referral program. It isn't shared with anyone else and isn't linked to any other data the app collects.
You can also watch a short ad, via Google's AdMob, to unlock scans instead of buying Premium or sharing your code — this is entirely optional and never shown unless you choose it. Ads are requested as non-personalized: the app doesn't use Apple's Advertising Identifier (IDFA) and doesn't show an App Tracking Transparency prompt.
Showing an ad still requires Google's Mobile Ads SDK to make a network request, which — like any ad SDK — can involve technical identifiers (such as IP address) needed to serve and measure the ad. That happens under Google's own privacy policy, which governs how it handles that request; we don't control or see that data ourselves.
On launch, the app asks the App Store's public lookup service whether a newer version of Care Me exists, so it can prompt you to update. This request only ever asks about Care Me's own listing — it sends nothing about you or your device.
No password of any kind — sign-in is handled entirely by Apple or Google. No analytics or tracking pixels. No data is sold, rented, or shared with advertisers, and no location data is collected. We don't use Apple's Advertising Identifier (IDFA) or show ads personalized to you. Beyond your account and leaderboard entry (above) and the referral service (below) — neither of which is shared with advertisers — there's no server-side database of your activity.
If you subscribe to the premium version, the purchase is processed by the App Store and by our payments provider (RevenueCat), which handles subscription status. That transaction is between you, Apple, and that provider under their respective privacy policies; the app itself never sees or stores your payment details.
Scan history can be cleared at any time from Settings. Removing a favorite removes it immediately. Your display name can be changed any time from Settings → Account, and your account — along with its leaderboard history — can be permanently deleted from that same screen. Everything else described above is local, with no "request my data" process needed — it's already entirely in your hands, on your device.
Care Me doesn't knowingly collect information from children, and account creation requires signing in with an Apple or Google account, which each have their own age requirements. Aside from the account and leaderboard data described above, the app collects no other personal data.
If what the app collects or how it works changes, this page will be updated and the date at the top revised accordingly. Continued use of the app after an update means you accept the revised policy.
Questions about this policy or how the app works can be sent to rohitgautam131191@gmail.com.