Privacy Policy

Chitin (net.buglens.app) · Last updated: September 27, 2026

Chitin identifies insects, spiders and other arthropods from a photo you choose. This page explains what leaves your phone, what stays on it, and what our server keeps.

The photo you scan

When you scan a photo, Chitin shrinks it on your phone (about 900 pixels on the long side, with location and other metadata removed) and sends it to our server. Our server passes it to Google's Gemini API, which looks at the picture and returns the species, a confidence score and a short description. Our server sends that answer back to your phone.

• We don't save your photo on our server. It is held in memory only while your scan is being answered.
• We don't use your photos to train anything, and we don't sell or share them for any other purpose.
• Google processes the photo to produce the answer under the Gemini API Additional Terms of Service.
• The app never talks to Google directly and holds no API keys.

What is sent with each scan

• The photo itself.
• The app's language, so the answer comes back in your language.
• The app version.
• A random install ID created by the app. It is not tied to your name, Apple Account or device, and it is used only to apply fair-use limits so one install can't flood the service. Deleting the app deletes it.

What our server keeps

Our web server keeps standard technical logs for security and to fix problems: the time of a request, its status, how long it took, a random request ID, and the IP address it came from. These logs are deleted automatically after 14 days. They never contain your photo or the answer.

What stays on your phone

• Your scan history: the results, small thumbnails of your photos, and any notes or favorites you add.
• How many of your free scans you have used, and your settings.

None of this is uploaded. You can delete your history in Settings, and deleting the app removes all of it.

What we don't collect

• No account or sign-in.
• No location, contacts or advertising identifier. No tracking across apps or websites, so there is no tracking prompt.
• No third-party analytics or advertising SDKs.

Purchases

Subscriptions, free trials and restores are handled by Apple. We never see your payment details, and your purchase is not linked to any profile on our side.

Permissions

Chitin asks for the camera and photo library only to get the photo you want to identify.

Children

Chitin has no accounts and no shared content, and it does not knowingly collect personal information from children.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the date at the top of this page changes too. If a change affects what we collect, we will tell you in the app.

Contact

Questions about privacy: redpersoncoding@gmail.com