Trace Privacy Policy

Last updated: 5 August 2026

Trace is made by Pyrean B.V.

This policy is short because Trace does very little with your data. There is no account, no sign-in, and no server run by us. We do not receive your photos, your meals, your nutrient readings, or anything else from the app.

What Trace records

Your photographs of meals. When you photograph a meal, the photo is written into Trace's own storage on your iPhone. It is not saved to your photo library, and it is not uploaded anywhere — not by the reading, and not by sharing.

Your meals. The name, the foods that were read out of the photo, the calories and the fifteen nutrients each food carries, the kind of meal, when you ate it, and the reference profile that was set at the time.

Which nutrients you were short of, and when. This never leaves the device in any form. It is the most revealing thing the app holds, and there is no setting that sends it anywhere.

All of it lives in a file inside Trace's own storage on your iPhone.

How photos are read

Trace uses Apple Intelligence to read your food. On your iPhone is the default, and it is what happens unless you change it: Apple's on-device model reads the photo on the device itself, and nothing is sent anywhere to be analysed.

Apple's Private Cloud Compute is the one exception you can turn on, in Trace's settings under Reading Your Meals. The photo is then sent to Apple's Private Cloud Compute and nowhere else: Apple built it so that the photo is not stored, and cannot be read by Apple, by us, or by anyone — a design that is publicly documented and independently inspectable. If the cloud is unreachable, Trace reads the photo on the device instead. It never touches a server run by us, because there isn't one.

On iPhones where Apple Intelligence is unavailable, you fill the meal in yourself and nothing is analysed anywhere.

Estimates are estimates. Trace works nutrients out by looking at a photograph, which is a good guess and not a lab result. Every reading is shown for you to correct before it is saved.

Not a medical device

Trace does not diagnose anything, and it is not a substitute for a doctor or a blood test. The daily amounts are general adult reference intakes, not advice for you. If you think you may be deficient in something, ask a clinician.

What we receive

Nothing.

Trace has no analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising, and no third-party SDKs of any kind. We have no way to see your photos, your meals, or how you use the app.

Paying for it

Photographing meals is free. A subscription shows more than the last seven days of your record, and can be bought monthly, yearly, or once outright.

Purchases go through Apple. We never see your payment details, your Apple Account, or your name. What Apple tells the app is one thing: whether this device is entitled. That check happens on the device itself — the app reads a signed receipt locally and verifies it there. There is no subscription server, because there is no server.

Nothing about your food is involved in any of this, and nothing about your subscription is attached to your meals.

If you stop paying, nothing is deleted. The meals outside the free week stay on your iPhone exactly as they were; the app simply stops showing them until you subscribe again.

Apple Health

If you turn on Save Nutrients to Health, Trace writes each saved meal to Apple Health on your iPhone with its calories and every nutrient Trace read. Trace writes only; it reads nothing from Health.

Health data stays in Apple Health on your device. It is governed by Apple's own privacy protections. Trace never transmits it, and we never see it.

You can turn this off in Trace's settings, or revoke Trace's access entirely in iOS Settings under Health → Data Access & Devices.

Sharing with friends

If you turn on sharing, Trace uses Apple's iCloud (CloudKit) so the friends you invite can see how your days are going. Specifically:

• What is shared: two figures a day — how many of the fifteen nutrients that day covered, and how many meals it took — plus a display name you choose. Nothing else.
• What is never shared: your photographs, the individual meals, the foods on them, your calories, and which nutrients you were short of. A friend seeing "short on iron and folate for nine days" would be reading something much closer to a blood test than a summary card, so that breakdown is not shared at all. The photos never leave your iPhone.
• Where it goes: into your own iCloud account, which counts against your own iCloud storage. It does not go to Pyrean B.V., and we have no access to it. Apple does not give app developers access to users' private or shared iCloud data.
• Who can see it: only the people you explicitly invite, and only after they accept. Invitations are not public links.
• How to stop: turn off sharing in Trace at any time. Everything you shared is deleted, and disappears from your friends' copies of the app.

Data held in iCloud is subject to Apple's privacy policy and iCloud's security protections.

Children

Trace is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone. Since we collect nothing at all, there is nothing for us to hold or delete.

Deleting your data

Deleting the Trace app removes every meal and photograph stored on your device. If you had sharing turned on, turn it off before deleting the app so that what you shared is also removed from your friends' copies; alternatively you can remove the Trace data from your iCloud account in iOS Settings under your name → iCloud.

Nutrients already written to Apple Health belong to Health, not to Trace, and remain there until you delete them in the Health app.

Changes to this policy

If Trace ever starts doing something this policy does not describe, we will update this page and note the date at the top. We will not quietly widen what the app does with your data.

Contact

Questions about this policy or about Trace: Pyrean B.V., martijn@verbove.com.