MenuGallery — Legal
Privacy Policy
MenuGallery (“we,” “us,” or “our”) makes the MenuGallery mobile app, which reads a printed menu from a photo you take and shows you the dishes with illustrative images and estimated nutrition. This Privacy Policy explains what the app does — and, just as importantly, what it does not do — with your information. It covers the MenuGallery mobile app only.
The short version: the app has no accounts and no logins, shows no ads, and does not track you across other apps or websites. When you photograph a menu, your photo is sent securely to be read by an AI service and then discarded — we never store it on our servers. Your saved scans — the full dish list, prices, estimated nutrition, and the generated images — live on your device, under your control; on our servers we keep only the extracted dish names and descriptions, anonymous usage tallies, and basic anonymous product analytics.
If you have questions about this policy or your data, email us at info@menugallery.app.
1. Information We Collect and Process
When you use MenuGallery, the app works with the following information:
- Menu photos. When you choose to scan a menu, the app uses your device camera to take a photo. The app only uses the camera — it never accesses your photo library or your existing pictures. The image is resized on your device and sent securely to be read by an AI service. We do not store your menu photos on our servers; they are processed to extract the menu and then discarded.
- Extracted menu content and nutrition estimates. The full results the app produces from your photo — dish names, descriptions, prices, and the estimated calories, carbohydrates, and protein — are saved on your device. Our servers also keep a copy of the dish names and their short visual descriptions (never your photo, and no prices or nutrition data), linked only to the anonymous identifier described below, to operate the service and prevent abuse.
- Generated dish images. The illustrative images the app creates for each dish are stored only on your device.
- Anonymous installation identifier. When the app is first installed, it generates a random identifier that is not linked to your name, email, or any personal information. It is used only to keep the service running fairly, as described below.
- Usage counters. On our backend we keep a simple daily tally — a date and the number of scans and image generations associated with that anonymous identifier. These counters exist only to enforce fair-use limits and prevent abuse; they contain no personal information and no menu content.
- Anonymous product analytics. The app records basic product events — for example, that a scan started, completed, or failed — using PostHog, tied to the same anonymous identifier. These events help us understand which features work and where the app breaks. They are not used for advertising, and they do not track you across other apps or websites.
We built MenuGallery to need as little as possible. The app does not collect or have access to any of the following:
- Your name, email address, phone number, or any account — the app has no sign-up and no login;
- Your location;
- Your contacts or your photo library;
- Advertising identifiers — the app shows no ads;
- Crash-reporting data;
- Payment or financial information — the app has no purchases or subscriptions.
2. How We Use Information
We use the limited information above only for these purposes:
- To read the menu in your photo and extract its dishes, prices, and details;
- To generate an illustrative image for each dish;
- To enforce fair-use limits and prevent abuse of the service;
- To understand, through anonymous analytics, how the app's features are used and where they fail, so we can improve them.
We do nothing else with it. Specifically, we do not sell your information, we do not use it for advertising or profiling, and we do not build a profile of you. Your photos and menu content are sent to our AI providers only so they can return the results you asked for; our AI providers process it solely to return those results and not to train their models, in accordance with their API terms.
3. How Your Photo Is Processed
When you scan a menu, here is exactly what happens to your photo:
- Your device resizes the photo to reduce its size before anything is sent.
- The photo is transmitted over an encrypted HTTPS/TLS connection to our backend, which runs on Supabase Edge Functions.
- Our backend forwards the image to OpenRouter, which routes it to an AI model that reads the menu.
- The extracted menu is sent back to your device, where it is saved.
- At no point do we write your photo to any database or storage. It exists only in transit and is discarded once the menu has been read.
When the app generates a dish image, it sends only the dish’s name and description to the AI service — never your original photo.
4. Third-Party Service Providers
To run the app we rely on three service providers, and only three:
- Supabase hosts our backend and the small database of anonymous usage counters and extracted dish text. You can read Supabase’s privacy policy at https://supabase.com/privacy.
- OpenRouter routes menu-reading and image requests to AI model providers (such as OpenAI-family models). You can read OpenRouter’s privacy policy at https://openrouter.ai/privacy.
- PostHog processes our anonymous product analytics. You can read PostHog’s privacy policy at https://posthog.com/privacy.
These providers process data only on our behalf and to provide their service to us, and they are required to protect it to at least the standard described in this policy. We share your information with no one else — there are no advertisers or data brokers involved.
5. Data Retention and Deletion
Because most of what the app creates lives on your device, you are in control of it:
- You can delete individual scans from within the app at any time.
- Uninstalling the app removes all of its data from your device.
On our servers, we retain the anonymous usage counters, the extracted dish names and descriptions, and the anonymous analytics events described above. These records contain no personal information and no photos, and we keep them as operational records for running the service. Because they are tied only to a random identifier, they generally cannot be connected to you as a person.
If you would like to make a deletion request, email us at info@menugallery.app and we will help where we can, bearing in mind that anonymous records usually cannot be matched to a specific individual.
6. Your Rights and Choices
You can control the app’s access and exercise your privacy rights at any time:
- The camera is the only permission the app requests. You can grant or revoke it whenever you like in your device’s settings; if you revoke it, you simply will not be able to scan new menus.
- You can delete your on-device data at any time, as described above.
Depending on where you live — for example, in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or California — you may have rights to access, correct, or delete personal information we hold about you. You can exercise these rights by emailing info@menugallery.app. Please note that, because we do not collect information that identifies you, in most cases we will not have any personal data to access or delete.
7. Security
We protect your information with sensible safeguards. All data sent between the app and our services travels over encrypted HTTPS/TLS connections. Because we do not store your photos or menu content on our servers, there is very little of your data for anyone to reach in the first place. That said, no method of transmission or storage is ever completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.
8. International Data Transfers
Our backend and the AI processing that reads your menu take place on servers located in the United States. If you use the app from outside the United States, the information involved in a scan is transferred to and processed in the United States, which may have data-protection laws that differ from those in your country. By using the app, you understand that your menu photo is processed there in order to return your results.
9. Children’s Privacy
MenuGallery is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children. Because the app has no accounts and collects no identifying information, we do not knowingly hold any data about a child. If you believe a child has somehow provided us with personal information, contact us at info@menugallery.app and we will address it.
10. Changes to This Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time — for example, if we add a feature that changes how the app handles data. When we do, we will post the updated policy at this URL and revise the “Last updated” date at the top of this page. If the changes are significant, we will make a reasonable effort to bring them to your attention.
11. Contact
MenuGallery is an independent app, and we are glad to hear from you. If you have any questions, concerns, or requests about this policy or your privacy, email us at info@menugallery.app.
For the rules that govern your use of the app, please see our Terms of Use.