Privacy Policy

1. Scope

This policy applies to Aretic, the public site at aretic.app, the API at api.aretic.app, and the native iPhone app distributed under the Aretic brand.

2. Information we collect

• Account info like email and Apple or Google sign-in IDs used to access the service.
• Profile information used to calculate nutrition targets, including units, time zone, age, sex at birth, height, weight, goal, activity context, adaptive target preference, and target-adjustment history when provided or enabled.
• Meal, workout, message, and correction history submitted through the app.
• Uploaded media such as meal photos, selected meal media, thumbnails, and generated render images.
• Apple Health data and permission status when you connect HealthKit, including body, activity, sleep, workout context, plus export state for approved meal or workout syncs.
• WHOOP connection, body measurement, and activity context if you are eligible for the TestFlight/beta integration and choose to connect WHOOP, including WHOOP user id, profile email or display name when returned, granted scopes, token expiry, sync health, workout timing, calories, strain, heart-rate fields, sleep, recovery context, and body measurement weight when available.
• Community login metadata when you open the Aretic community, including member ID, verified email, display name, generated username, short-lived handoff token, and Discourse account/session metadata needed to create or access your community account.
• Strava OAuth connection state if you are eligible for the TestFlight/beta integration and choose to connect Strava, including athlete id, display name or username, granted scopes, token expiry, sync health, minimum activity metadata, workout timing, calories, distance, transient route-cache metadata when available, and source links for imported workouts.
• Community posts, replies, reactions, and profile content you submit inside the Aretic community, subject to community settings and Discourse-hosted functionality.
• Support requests, product feedback, app-edit requests, capture calibrations, account-settings changes, and pending account-deletion records when you use those features.
• Typed notes, photos, screenshots, annotations, and voice notes sent via User Suggestions, Support Requests, App Edit Requests, or Capture Calibrations through Account Settings or related flows.
• Operational telemetry needed to secure the service, investigate issues, and monitor usage or abuse.
• Structured product/package nutrition-label facts extracted from meal media when a label is clear enough, such as brand or product identity, barcode when available, serving size, calories, macros, confidence, validation state, source policy, and hashes. These product-level facts are stored separately from account photos and meal logs.
• Technical diagnostics used to investigate crashes, freezes, launch failures, resource pressure, and reliability problems. These may include crash stacks, Apple MetricKit diagnostics, app and build version, operating system and device model, random installation and session identifiers, bounded screen and operation categories, lifecycle state, aggregate pending-work counts, and coarse memory, thermal, power, or storage-pressure status.

3. How we use information

• Authenticate members and maintain secure sessions.
• Generate nutrition targets, day rollups, coaching moments, and opted-in adaptive target adjustments.
• Process messages, photos, screenshots, annotations, voice notes, Apple Health context, WHOOP context when connected, edits, and workouts through server-side AI interpretation, queued retries, and mechanical day rollups. Direct Strava workout imports are processed only through deterministic import, linking, add-back, retention, and deletion logic and are excluded from AI operation, embeddings, RAG, analytics, product improvement, advertising, and model providers.
• Operate subscriptions, restore access, and reconcile entitlements.
• Create a DiscourseConnect community login from your active Aretic session to open the Aretic community without a separate password.
• Handle in-app User Suggestions, Support Requests, app edits, capture calibrations, account email changes, Apple Health approval or export workflows, and account deletion or recovery workflows.
• Support customer service, product reliability, service improvement, fraud prevention, and legal compliance.
• Reuse de-identified structured product-label facts inside Aretic and CraveTwist, DMLS's related recipe service, to improve exact product nutrition accuracy when a later food has matching barcode or strict package identity. Product name alone, visual similarity, and image embeddings do not authorize this reuse.
• Investigate stability problems, suppress duplicate reports of the same occurrence, group related technical issues, verify symbolication and build identity, and measure crash-free operation. Technical diagnostics are not used for advertising, behavioral profiling, nutrition decisions, or eligibility decisions.

4. AI and nutrition processing

Aretic uses server-side AI systems to interpret meals, corrections, workouts, onboarding inputs, and coaching requests. Label text, branded food data, public food-composition data, prior history, and similar meals may be used as supporting evidence. When a submitted meal image includes a clear nutrition label, Aretic may extract structured product-level label facts and later reuse those de-identified facts inside Aretic or CraveTwist only for exact product/package matches. Raw label media, OCR text, meal context, and account identifiers are not part of the shared product fact. The stored nutrition result is AI-authored, while the rails and daily summaries mechanically roll up stored entry and target values. Optional evidence shelves may include USDA FoodData Central, Open Food Facts, Edamam Food Database, FatSecret, and independently fetched official web documents discovered through Parallel. Edamam and FatSecret requests are scoped to the meal-resolution request; their raw responses, returned nutrient payloads, images, and embeddings are not placed in shared or durable storage.

When you submit screenshots, photos, annotations, or voice notes for support, app edits, or capture calibration, these may be processed with vision or transcription providers to support the workflow. Apple Health data is used only to support the requested feature and exported only if you enable that integration.

If you connect Strava, direct Strava data is used only for deterministic private workout import, same-member linking, add-back math, retention, deletion, and connection health. Aretic does not use direct Strava data or direct Strava-derived data for AI operation, prompts, context windows, embeddings, RAG, analytics, product improvement, advertising, data brokerage, or model-provider transfer.

If you connect WHOOP, Aretic uses WHOOP workouts, body measurement weight when available, sleep, recovery, strain, HRV, and heart-rate context only for your private account experience. WHOOP context is not medical advice and is not used for AI model training, cross-user analytics, targeted advertising, or data broker activity.

If you opt in to automatic target adjustments, Aretic may use recent weight/body data from Apple Health imports, connected apps such as WHOOP when body sync is enabled, or manual entries, recent logging adherence, and your saved goal to make conservative future target changes. Each evaluation is recorded whether it applies, skips, is suppressed, or needs review. Applied changes are announced in chat and by transactional service email when Aretic has a verified contact email. If you later remove or reapply an automatic change from history, Aretic records that action, recalculates the active target, and sends a service email without adding a new chat notice.

Community posts are not part of the nutrition resolver and are not used to create or adjust your private meal, workout, target, or coaching records. If you choose to discuss nutrition in the community, do not include information you would not want visible to other community members under the community's current visibility settings.

AI features need permission to share the information you provide with the services below. Only information needed for the feature is sent.

Meal photos, messages, portions, meal history, preferences, and imported workout details may be sent to Xiaomi MiMo to estimate nutrition and adjust daily targets.

Audio you submit is sent to AssemblyAI to turn speech into text.

OpenAI, Cohere, Cloudflare, Runware, DeepInfra: Depending on the feature, submitted text or images may be sent to these services to find relevant information, read images, remember meal details, or create meal illustrations.

You can decline or withdraw permission in Privacy & Account. AI processing pauses while permission is off. Saved captures remain available to resume or delete, and you can still view saved records and manage your account.

Withdrawing permission stops new AI requests. Information already sent cannot be recalled, and processing already underway may finish.

5. Sharing

We use infrastructure and service providers to operate hosting, object storage, messaging, payments, analytics, transcription, AI processing and support workflows. We do not sell personal information. Data is shared only when required to operate the service, comply with the law, or protect rights and safety. For a meal-resolution request, Aretic may send bounded meal evidence, such as a member-supplied phrase, barcode, OCR observation or temporary signed image URL, to USDA FoodData Central, Open Food Facts, Edamam Food Database, FatSecret, Cohere image retrieval or an independently fetched official source reached through Parallel. Commercial provider responses and web-discovery output are request-scoped and are not used to build a cross-member corpus or train a provider model.

Aretic is built for private personal tracking, not public social sharing. Your logs are tied to your account and not published to others.

When you open the Aretic community, Aretic shares only verified account info needed for DiscourseConnect, like member ID, email, username, and display name. Aretic does not send meal logs, photos, Apple Health data, workouts, coaching state, support requests, app-edit requests, or billing state to community threads.

Direct Strava data is not sold, licensed, disclosed to other members, used in advertisements, transferred to model providers, or processed in aggregated, de-identified, AI, embedding, RAG, analytics, or product-improvement systems. Strava may monitor and collect usage data related to Aretic's access to the Strava API under Strava's API terms and privacy policy.

WHOOP data is not sold, licensed, disclosed to other members, used in advertisements, or processed in aggregated or de-identified analytics. WHOOP data remains scoped to the connected member's private Aretic account and the services needed to operate that account.

Aretic does not publish your meal photos, logs, notes, OCR text, or account-scoped evidence links to other members or CraveTwist. A fully de-identified structured product-label fact may be reused inside Aretic and CraveTwist to improve exact product nutrition results, but only after it is separated from the member, meal, media, and evidence records that produced it.

Aretic uses Firebase Crashlytics for in-process native crash reporting and does not enable Firebase Analytics for this purpose. Crashlytics receives crash and other diagnostic data plus bounded privacy-safe technical context. Aretic does not send meal text, voice transcripts, nutrition or health data, workout or route details, raw photos or photo links, email addresses, display names, passwords, authentication tokens, OAuth state, user-entered support text, or connected-service source payloads to Crashlytics.

6. Retention

We retain account, nutrition, Apple Health, support, app-edit, capture-calibration and operational records for as long as reasonably necessary to operate the product, support members, preserve auditability and comply with legal obligations. USDA source identifiers and provenance may be retained with a meal because USDA FoodData Central is public-domain data with requested source citation. Open Food Facts records remain in an isolated licensed namespace with their required provenance. Edamam and FatSecret response content, commercial provider images, temporary signed URLs, Parallel search output and current-photo query embeddings are request-scoped by default and are not retained in shared storage; only non-content operational receipts and approved attribution metadata may remain.

Cached Strava API data is kept only for the operational window needed to sync and reconcile workouts; raw cache records are kept no longer than seven days. If Strava reports an activity deleted, hidden, or private, Aretic suppresses that data promptly within Strava’s required window.

If you disconnect Strava or revoke Aretic's access from your Strava account, Aretic removes Strava tokens, pending Strava import suggestions, Strava connection links, transient Strava route cache, and Strava-origin imported workouts where Strava was the only source. Member-owned workout records that you keep in Aretic may remain only after Strava attribution and integration-derived metadata are removed.

If you disconnect WHOOP or revoke Aretic's access from your WHOOP account after eligible TestFlight/beta access is enabled, Aretic removes WHOOP tokens, pending WHOOP import suggestions, WHOOP connection links, daily WHOOP context, WHOOP-origin body metrics, and WHOOP-origin imported workouts where WHOOP was the only source.

Media such as meal photos, selected meal media, thumbnails, and generated renders may be retained as part of account history and product operation. The iPhone app may also keep bounded local caches and temporary source files that age out automatically.

Community handoff tokens expire after minutes and are stored only as hashes in Aretic. Discourse retains community account records and content per community configuration and moderation needs.

If you request scheduled account deletion, we place the account into a pending-deletion state for 14 days before permanent removal. During that period, active sessions are revoked and new sign-in is blocked. You can request recovery before the deadline by emailing support@aretic.app. Some limited records may still be retained when required for security, billing, fraud prevention, or legal compliance. A verified product-label fact may remain available to Aretic and CraveTwist only when it has been fully de-identified and is independently useful product data; the member evidence, media, OCR, meal, and account links are deleted with the account.

Aretic keeps local technical journals and queued diagnostic uploads bounded and removes or suppresses unsent optional diagnostics after you turn sharing off. Firebase states that Crashlytics keeps crash stacks and associated identifiers for 90 days before beginning removal from live and backup systems. Turning sharing off does not erase diagnostic records already delivered to Apple, Firebase, or Aretic, and it does not disable ordinary operating-system crash logging controlled by Apple.

7. Your choices

You can use the in-app Account Settings sheet to update your display name, request a verified email change, manage Apple Health permissions, turn automatic target adjustments on or off, open billing actions, contact support, or initiate account deletion. You can also contact support@aretic.app for support or deletion questions.

Direct WHOOP and Strava connections are limited to eligible TestFlight/beta members while full API access remains pending. Each connection requires your explicit provider authorization, and you can disconnect it from Aretic. If you need help with connection records, contact support@aretic.app.

Opening the Community is optional. You can choose not to use it and contact support@aretic.app for private account, support, privacy, or deletion requests instead of posting publicly.

Share technical diagnostics is on by default and can be turned off at any time in Account Settings without affecting core app functionality. The setting controls automatic Aretic diagnostic uploads and Crashlytics collection; Crashlytics collection changes made by an opt-out take effect on the next app launch. The separate Send diagnostic report action remains an explicit manual choice.

8. Deletion and billing

Account deletion and subscription cancellation are separate. Deleting your Aretic account does not cancel App Store billing. If subscribed through Apple, manage or cancel subscriptions via Apple’s subscription settings.

9. Sign-in methods and one-time codes

Aretic supports Sign in with Apple, Continue with Google, and email-based one-time codes. Email sign-in sends transactional one-time passcodes only in direct response to your sign-in request.

Phone/SMS sign-in is disabled. For account access help, contact support@aretic.app.

10. Contact

For privacy questions, contact support@aretic.app.