Last updated: February 27, 2026
Overview
PlateSense ("the App") is a nutrition tracking app that uses AI to analyse food photos and text descriptions. We are committed to protecting your privacy and being transparent about how your data is collected, used, and shared.
Information We Collect
When you use PlateSense, we collect and store the following information:
- Account information: Your name, email address, and profile photo from Google Sign-In or Apple Sign-In. If you sign in with Apple and choose to hide your email, we receive only your Apple relay email address.
- Profile data: Gender, date of birth, weight, height, and activity level (provided by you during onboarding)
- Meal data: Food items you log, including nutritional information (calories, protein, carbohydrates, fat), timestamps, and thumbnail images of meals
- Daily nutrition targets: Calculated or manually set calorie and macronutrient goals
AI-Powered Food Analysis
Important: PlateSense uses a third-party AI service to analyse your food.
When you photograph a meal or type a food description, that data is sent to the Anthropic Claude API (api.anthropic.com) for nutritional analysis. Specifically:
- What is sent: Meal photos (compressed to approximately 1200px resolution) and/or text descriptions of food
- What is NOT sent: Your name, email, profile information, health data, account details, or any other personal information. Only the food image or text is transmitted.
- Data retention by AI provider: Anthropic processes images and text in real-time to generate nutritional estimates. Per Anthropic's API data policy, API inputs and outputs are not used to train their models and are not retained after processing.
- Purpose: Solely to identify food items and estimate nutritional content (calories, protein, carbohydrates, fat, portion sizes)
By using the food analysis feature, you consent to your meal photos and food descriptions being transmitted to Anthropic's servers for processing. You may choose to manually enter nutrition data instead of using AI analysis.
How We Use Your Information
- Nutrition tracking: Your profile and meal data are used to calculate daily totals, trends, and progress toward your personalised targets.
- Cloud sync: Your profile and meal data are stored in Google Firebase Firestore to enable syncing across your devices.