Your meals, goals, history and conversations stay on your phone and are never uploaded. The exceptions are scanning, chat, voice and the result page: a photo you take, a description you type, a recording you make, or the list of foods you picked is sent to be read or drawn, and then discarded. Everything else in the app works with no network at all.
Most of The Plate works signed out. Browsing meals, building a plate by hand and reading what the rules work out on your phone need no account at all. The four AI features above — scanning, chat, voice and the drawn result — ask you to sign in with Google the first time you use one, because they cost real money to run and the account is how the allowance is counted.
Your goal, your dietary and budget preferences, the meals you have saved, your after-meal check answers, any photos you scan, and the picture that was drawn for each patch you saved. All of it lives in your phone’s app storage and none of it is uploaded. Removing a saved patch deletes its picture with it, and uninstalling The Plate deletes the lot.
Before it leaves your phone, the photo is cropped to the guide circle, resized, and stripped of all metadata — so no location, no device model and no timestamp travel with it.
It is then sent through The Plate’s server to Google’s Gemini API, which describes the food it can see. The Plate does not store the photo. Google processes it under its paid API terms and does not use it to train its models.
If you generate a visual preview, that generated image is held on our storage for up to 24 hours so your phone can download it, then deleted automatically by a rule on the storage bucket rather than by anyone remembering to do it.
If you type a description of a meal into the chat, that text is sent through The Plate’s server to Google’s Gemini API, which reads it and names the food it recognises. The Plate does not store what you typed, and it does not store the reply. Both stay on your phone; our server keeps only an identifier for the reply so you can rate or report it. Google processes the text under its paid API terms and does not use it to train its models.
The picture that comes back with a reply is drawn by Cloudflare Workers AI from a fixed description built out of the app’s own food list — never from the words you typed. It is held on our storage for up to 24 hours so your phone can download it, then deleted automatically. Pictures are not kept on your phone between sessions.
While you hold the microphone button, The Plate records you. When you let go, that recording is sent through The Plate’s server to Google’s Gemini API, which reads it and names the food it recognises. The recording is deleted from your phone the moment it has been sent, and neither The Plate nor its server stores it. Google processes it under its paid API terms and does not use it to train its models.
What was heard is shown on screen so you can see whether it was understood correctly, and it is kept on your phone as part of the conversation. The spoken reply is read aloud by your phone’s own voice, so no audio of the answer leaves the device either.
The microphone is only ever on while the button is held. There is no listening in the background, and no wake word.
When a result page opens, the names of the foods you picked and the one addition being suggested are sent to The Plate’s server — nothing else, and no free text. Google’s Gemini API writes a sentence about that plate, and Cloudflare Workers AI draws a picture of it. Neither the list nor the sentence is stored.
This part is decoration. The suggestion itself is worked out on your phone by a fixed set of rules, so the result page still tells you what to add with no network at all — you just do not get the picture.
When you sign in, Google gives The Plate a signed token. Our server checks that token against Google’s own public keys and keeps three things from it: your Google account identifier, your email address and your name. That is the whole of it. Your profile picture is shown in the app straight from Google and is never sent to or stored on our server.
The account exists for one reason: so your free week and your allowance follow you rather than a particular phone. It is not linked to anything you eat — your meals, saved patches and conversations never leave your device, signed in or not.
The sign-in itself happens between you and Google, under Google’s privacy policy. The Plate asks Google for your email address and basic profile only, and never reads your Gmail, Drive, contacts or calendar.
Signing out is not deleting. Signing out ends the session on that phone and leaves the account standing, so you can come back to the week you had left. Deleting removes the account itself — see below.
| What | Why | For how long |
|---|---|---|
| Your Google account identifier, email address and name | So your free week and allowance follow you rather than one phone | Until you delete your account |
| A device identifier, and which account it is signed into | So the app can be recognised between sessions | Until you delete your data or uninstall |
| A record that a scan happened — how long it took, whether food was found | To see cost and whether recognition is working | Until you delete your data |
| An identifier for each chat reply, and the thumb you gave it — no words from the conversation | So a generated reply can be rated and reported, as Google Play requires | 90 days, or until you delete your data |
| Reports you send about an AI result | Required by Google Play, and used to fix bad results | Until resolved |
There is no record of what you ate attached to any of it. The scan record contains no photo and no food names, the chat record contains no words from your conversation, and your profile picture is never stored on our server.
If you subscribe to Plate Pro, your app store (Google Play or the App Store) processes the payment and RevenueCat — the service that manages the subscription — receives a purchase record and an anonymous identifier for your device so your subscription can be restored later. No meal data and no health information is ever included.
No phone number, no location, no contacts, no advertising identifier, no profile picture. There is no analytics SDK and no advertising in The Plate, and your meal history is never uploaded. Beyond your email address and name, nothing about you is collected — and nothing at all is collected until you sign in.
Food recognition and visual previews are produced by a generative AI model. It misreads things. That is why you confirm what it saw before anything is suggested, why a generated preview is labelled as illustrative, and why every AI result has a Report control on it.
The Plate is a general-audience app and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect information from them.
The Plate offers simple, general food suggestions. It is not a medical device, it does not diagnose or treat anything, and it is not a substitute for advice from a doctor or a registered dietitian. If you have a medical condition, an allergy, or are pregnant, talk to a professional before changing what you eat.
Settings has a Delete my account and data control. It erases what is on your phone and tells our server to forget the lot — your account, your email address and name, your device, your allowance, your scan records and any reports. It is one tap and it is not reversible. Uninstalling the app removes everything stored on the phone but leaves the account, so use the control first if you want that gone too. If the app is already gone from your phone, email support@platepatch.app from the address you signed in with and it is deleted within 30 days. Full detail on the Delete your data page.
To cancel a subscription, use your app store’s subscription settings — Google Play or the App Store. Cancelling and deleting are separate.
Questions about this policy: support@platepatch.app