Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

Alydo (“we”, “our”, or “us”) is committed to protecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, disclose, and safeguard your information when you use our grocery receipt management application (“Alydo” or the “Service”).

We comply with the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) contained in the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). By using Alydo, you consent to the data practices described in this policy.

2. Information We Collect

2.1 Account Information

When you create an account, we collect:

• Email address (required for authentication)
• Display name (optional)
• Timezone and currency preferences
• The Australian state you choose for catalogue specials, so we show that state's specials

2.2 Receipt Data

When you upload a receipt, we collect:

• Receipt images (temporarily processed, then stored)
• Extracted information including:
  • Store name and address
  • Purchase date
  • Items purchased (name, quantity, price, category)
  • Total amounts and taxes

2.3 Shopping List Data

When you create shopping lists, we collect:

• List names and items
• Item quantities and categories
• Sharing preferences and collaborator information

2.4 Forwarded Emails

Every account has a private forwarding address. When you forward or auto-forward an email to it, we receive the whole email: the sender's name and address, the subject, the body and any attachments. We use it as follows:

• If the email looks like a receipt, we read its body, or the first PDF attached to it, to build the same receipt record a scan produces (Section 2.2)
• If it does not look like a receipt, we do not read it further
• We do not keep the email body or its attachments after reading them
• We keep a log entry for each email: the sender's name and address, the subject, when it arrived and what happened to it. Settings uses it to tell you what was added
• When Gmail sends its forwarding confirmation to your address, we keep the confirmation code or Google's confirmation link so Settings can show it to you, and nothing else from that message

An email you forward by hand carries your own name and email address as the sender, and any email can contain a name, a delivery address or part of a card number. Forward only what you are happy for Alydo to read.

2.5 Technical Information

• Your IP address, which we use to limit how often one connection can call the Service (Section 5.9)
• Your IP address and browser details, recorded with security events on your account such as a request to delete it
• Which features of the Service you use, recorded against your account so we can see what is working. This stays with Alydo
• Page views on the website: the page, the referring site, your browser, device type and country (Section 5.8)
• How you arrived. The first time you open the website, your browser stores on your own device (in its local storage, not a cookie) the campaign tags on the link you followed, the first page you opened and the name of the site that referred you. Nothing is sent to us at that point. When you create an account we record those three things with your account, so we can tell which links bring people to Alydo, and remove them from your device. They are deleted with your account

2.6 Trying a Receipt Without an Account

The Try a receipt page reads one receipt photo for a visitor who has no account. For that page:

• The photo is sent to Google Gemini to be read, as described in Section 5.1. We send the photo and nothing else
• We do not store the photo, and we do not store what was read from it. The result is shown on the page and is gone when you leave or reload it
• The page is limited to a few receipts a day. To hold that limit we keep a count of the day's tries against a one-way scrambled form of your network (IP) address. We do not store the address itself, the scrambled form cannot be turned back into it, and it changes every day. Counts from earlier days are deleted the next time anyone uses the page
• Like every request to Alydo, a request from this page is also checked against a short rate limit that uses your network address for about a minute

3. How We Use Your Information

We use your information to:

• Provide and maintain the Service
• Read your receipts, shopping lists and recipe ingredients with an AI model (Section 4)
• Display your purchase history and spending analytics
• Enable shopping list creation and sharing
• Show your receipts, totals, insights and shopping lists to the other members of your household, if you join one (see Section 5.5)
• Generate restock suggestions based on your purchase patterns
• Send transactional emails (e.g., six-digit sign-in codes, list and household invitations)
• Send occasional product emails about your account: getting started reminders, new features, and tips for using the Service. Every one of these carries a one-click unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing stops all of them. See Section 9.5.
• Improve and develop the Service

We send product emails because you hold an Alydo account and they relate to that account. We do not send advertising for other companies, and we never share your email address with advertisers.

For each product email we count whether it was opened and which of its links were clicked, recorded against your account, so we can tell which emails are useful.

4. Alydo Intelligence Processing

4.1 What Alydo Intelligence Does

When you upload a receipt, Alydo Intelligence:

• Analyzes the image to identify text and structure
• Extracts store information, items, prices, and totals
• Categorizes items (e.g., produce, dairy, household)
• Infers product types for purchase pattern analysis
• Generates search keywords for easier item lookup

Alydo Intelligence also turns a photo or text of a shopping list into list items, groups the same product across stores by its generic name, and suggests recipes from the ingredients on a receipt.

4.2 Inferred Information

Based on your purchases, Alydo Intelligence may infer information about your preferences and habits. For example, purchasing health products may indicate health-related information, or purchasing specific food items may indicate dietary preferences or religious practices.

We do not use this inferred information for advertising, profiling, or any purpose other than providing the Service to you.

5. Data Sharing and Disclosure

We share your information with the following third parties:

5.1 Google (Gemini API)

Alydo Intelligence runs on Google's Gemini API. We send Google the content each job needs, and no identifiers from your Alydo account:

• Receipt scanning: the receipt photo or PDF you upload
• Forwarded emails: for an email that looks like a receipt, its sender's name and address, subject and body text, or the PDF attached to it. Emails that do not look like a receipt are not sent
• Shopping lists: a photo of a list, or the text you type, paste or dictate, when you ask Alydo to turn it into items. For dictated lists we also send the names and categories of items you have bought before and how often you bought them, so the model can match what you said to what you buy
• Recipe ideas: the ingredient names from a receipt and your dietary preference (for example vegetarian or halal)
• Product matching: item names and categories from your receipts, so the same product is grouped across stores

We do not send your name, email address, account id or any other identifier from your account with these requests. Every request goes out under Alydo's own Google credentials.

The content itself can still identify you. A receipt can show a loyalty number or part of a card number, and a forwarded email carries its sender's name and address, which are yours when you forward it by hand, along with anything else written in it.

• Location: United States
• Retention: what Google keeps, and whether it is used to improve Google models, is set by the Gemini API terms and not by Alydo.

5.2 Supabase

• Purpose: Database and authentication services
• Data shared: All user data described in Section 2
• Location: Sydney, Australia

5.3 Resend

• Purpose: Sending our emails and receiving the ones you forward
• Data shared: Your email address and display name, and the content of each email we send you. That includes the copy of your data when you ask for it by email, and the store, total and item count in the notice that a forwarded receipt was added
• When used: Authentication, list and household invitations, and the product emails described in Section 3
• Fonts: our emails load their font from Google Fonts, so a mail app that loads remote content contacts Google when you open one
• Forwarded emails: mail sent to your forwarding address (Section 2.4) is received by Resend, in full, and passed on to Alydo. How long Resend keeps it is set by Resend's terms and not by Alydo

5.4 Shared Shopping Lists

If you share a shopping list with someone, they can see and edit that list: its name, its items, quantities and notes, and who added each item. They can also see the display names and avatars of the other people on the list. They do not see your receipts, your spending or anything outside that list. Any suggestions shown to them for the list are drawn from their own history, not yours.

5.5 Households

A household is how the people who shop together see one set of numbers. You join one by accepting an invite sent to your email address, and the invite can only be accepted with the address it was sent to. Nothing is shared until you accept.

When you join a household, sharing works in both directions: every other member can see the following about you, and you can see the same about them.

• Every receipt you scan, with its store, date, items and prices
• Your spending totals, and the insights and suggestions built from them
• Your shopping lists, which household members can also edit
• The monthly budget, which is one limit for the whole household: any member can see it, change it, and see how much of it each person has spent
• Your display name and avatar, and which receipts you scanned

Each receipt shows who scanned it. Only the person who scanned a receipt can edit or delete it.

What stays personal: your price alerts, preferences, health interests, receipt photos and notification settings. Household members see the parsed receipt, not the photo.

The person who created the household (the owner) can invite and remove members. Anyone can leave at any time from Settings > Household. When someone leaves, is removed, or the owner closes the household, sharing stops immediately: they no longer see your data and you no longer see theirs. Receipts and lists stay with the person who created them.

5.6 Community Specials

When a scanned receipt shows an item on special, Alydo can add that deal to a shared pool that other Alydo users see: the item, the store and its postcode, the price, the discount, and the date it was seen. A shared deal expires three days after it was last seen. Shared deals are anonymous: the pool holds no name, account or receipt. Other users see the deal and a count of how many people have seen it, and nothing about you. We keep a private link between the deal and your receipt item so that we can update or withdraw it. That link is never shown to anyone.

Sharing is on by default. You can turn it off at any time in Settings > Profile. Deals from receipts you scan after that are not added to the pool.

5.7 Apple (Microphone and Speech Recognition)

The Alydo iOS app has a microphone button in the add item row on the Lists tab, so you can add an item to a shopping list by speaking it. That is the only place the app uses the microphone, and it listens only while you are adding an item that way.

Alydo does not send the audio anywhere. Speech is recognised by Apple's own speech framework, on the device or on Apple's servers, whichever iOS chooses. Alydo receives only the recognised text, never the audio: we do not record, store or upload what you said. If you then ask Alydo to turn a dictated list into items, that text is handled as described in Section 5.1.

5.8 Vercel (Hosting and Analytics)

• Hosting: the Alydo website and its servers run on Vercel, so everything you send to Alydo passes through Vercel on its way to us, including the receipt photos and PDFs you upload
• Analytics: Vercel Web Analytics counts page views on the website: the page, the referring site, your browser, device type and country. It sets no cookies, and we do not send it your account

5.9 Upstash

• Purpose: Limiting how often one connection can call the Service
• Data shared: Your IP address and the address of the part of the Service being called. For two requests, emailing yourself a copy of your data and deleting your account, your account id is used in place of the IP address
• Retention: Upstash holds these as counters that expire by themselves: within minutes for an IP address, and after about two days for an account id

5.10 Open Food Facts

• Purpose: Nutrition information for the food on your receipts
• Data shared: The product name, brand or product type of an item on your receipt. Items filed as household or personal care are never looked up. The lookup is made by Alydo's servers and carries nothing about you or your account

5.11 Expo (App Updates)

The Alydo iOS app gets fixes through Expo's update service, EAS Update. Each time the app opens, it asks Expo's update server whether a newer version of the app's code is available.

• Purpose: Delivering updates to the app
• Data shared: A random install identifier created by the app, your IP address, your phone's platform and the app's runtime version. After the app has crashed, the next check also sends the text of the last crash message (up to about 1,000 characters). Nothing from your Alydo account is sent
• Location: United States

We do not sell your personal information to third parties.

6. Cross-Border Data Transfers

In accordance with Australian Privacy Principle 8 (APP 8), we disclose that your personal information may be transferred to and processed in countries outside Australia, specifically:

• United States: the content listed in Section 5.1 is processed by Google Gemini servers located in the United States
• United States and other countries: Vercel, Resend and Upstash are United States companies, and may handle the information listed in Sections 5.3, 5.8 and 5.9 there or in other countries where they operate
• United States: Expo receives the update check described in Section 5.11 each time the iOS app opens
• France: Open Food Facts is a non-profit based in France. It receives product details only (Section 5.10)

We take reasonable steps to ensure that overseas recipients of your personal information do not breach the Australian Privacy Principles. Google's data processing terms include commitments to protect personal information in accordance with applicable privacy laws.

7. Data Security

We implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect your data:

• Access Control: Row-level security limits every request to your own data, plus the receipts and lists of your household members if you have joined a household (Section 5.5)
• Authentication: Sign-in with a six-digit one-time code sent to your email, with session management
• HTTPS: All data transmission is encrypted in transit

While we strive to protect your information, no method of electronic storage or transmission is 100% secure. We cannot guarantee absolute security.

8. Data Retention

• Receipt data: Retained until you delete it or your account
• Shopping lists: Retained until you delete them or your account
• Account information: Retained until you delete your account
• Receipt images: Stored for your reference; you can delete at any time
• Household membership: Retained until you leave, are removed, or the household is closed. Your receipts and lists stay yours afterwards
• Forwarded email log: Entries older than 90 days are deleted each day. Deleting your account deletes all of yours
• Security log: Your IP address and browser details, recorded with sign-ins, sign-in attempts, sign-outs and account deletions, are kept for 90 days, then deleted each day. They help us look into misuse of an account
• Gmail confirmation code or link: Shown in Settings for 24 hours and deleted about a day after that at the latest

When you delete your account you can tell us why you are leaving. This exit survey is optional. If you answer it, we keep your answer after your account is deleted: the reasons you picked, your note (with any email addresses removed), whether you left on the web or iOS, the week you left, and rough ranges for how long you had the account and how many receipts you had scanned. It is stored anonymously, with no user id, email address or link back to your account, and we use it only to understand why people leave.

9. Your Rights

Under the Australian Privacy Principles, you have the right to:

9.1 Access Your Data

To get a copy of your data on the web, open Settings > Your data and choose Download my data. You get a ZIP with spreadsheets (CSV files) of your receipts, receipt items, shopping lists, price alerts and budgets, and the products and the receipt wordings your household filed under them, plus a JSON file you can import from Settings > Your data if you come back. In a household, some products and wordings come from another member's receipts. Their name isn't included. In the iOS app, open Settings > Delete account and choose Email me my data, and we email the same ZIP to the address on your account. Receipt photos are not included.

9.2 Correct Your Data

You can edit your profile information, receipt details, and shopping lists directly within the app.

9.3 Delete Your Data

You can delete individual receipts and shopping lists in the app. To delete your account and everything in it, open Settings > Your data > Delete account on the web, or Settings > Delete account in the Alydo iOS app. Both let you email yourself a copy of your data first. Deletion happens immediately, is permanent and cannot be undone. Security log entries about your account, including those recording the deletion, are kept for up to 90 days after they were made, as described in Section 8. If you created a household, deleting your account closes it for every member; if you joined one, you leave it. Either way the other members keep their own receipts and lists, and shopping lists you created are deleted for everyone on them. If you answer the optional exit survey, that answer is kept anonymously, as described in Section 8.

9.4 Withdraw Consent

You can stop using the Service at any time. Deleting your account will remove your data from our systems.

9.5 Stop Receiving Product Emails

Every product email we send carries an unsubscribe link in its footer, and supports one-click unsubscribe in mail clients that offer it. You do not need to sign in to use it. One unsubscribe stops all product emails, not just the one you clicked from, and it takes effect immediately.

Unsubscribing does not affect transactional email. You will still receive sign-in codes and shopping list and household invitations, because those are how the Service works rather than messages about it.

10. Children's Privacy

Alydo is not intended for children under 16 years of age. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you are a parent or guardian and believe your child has provided us with personal information, please contact us.

11. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of any changes by posting the new Privacy Policy on this page and updating the “Last updated” date.

We encourage you to review this Privacy Policy periodically for any changes. Your continued use of the Service after any changes indicates your acceptance of the updated policy.

12. Contact Us

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy or our privacy practices, please contact us at:

• Email: support@alydo.app

You may also lodge a complaint with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) if you believe we have breached your privacy rights. Visit www.oaic.gov.au for more information.