Last updated 16 September 2026
Sift keeps what it knows about you on your iPhone. There is no account, no server of ours and no sync. Nothing you scan, and nobody you add to the household, is sent to us — we never see it.
All of this lives on your device, in the app's own storage:
Label photos are written to the app's cache folder. iOS may reclaim them when storage runs low, and you can clear them yourself in Settings. Deleting Sift removes everything above from the device.
Sift uses the camera to read food and product labels, and for nothing else. The picture is processed on your iPhone. It is saved to Sift's own storage so you can look a scan up again; it is not added to your photo library and it is not uploaded anywhere.
On an iPhone with Apple Intelligence, an on-device model helps Sift make sense of a jumbled or multilingual label, and can suggest wording for an ingredient. This runs on the device. The label text is not sent to Apple, to us, or to anyone else.
Three things, each of which you control.
When Sift reads a barcode and product lookup is switched on, it asks the Open Food Facts database what that product is. Only the barcode is sent. No photo, no label text, no profile and no identifier of you or your device go with it, the request carries no cookies, and the response is not cached. Open Food Facts will see the request and the IP address it came from, as any website does; their own privacy policy applies to that.
You can turn product lookup off in Settings, and Sift will then work entirely from the label in front of the camera.
If you switch on the option to name the shop from your location, Sift asks Apple Maps for food shops near where you are and suggests the closest one. Your approximate location is used for that lookup, and is handled by Apple under Apple's privacy policy. The shop name and coordinates that come back are stored on your iPhone with the scan. This option is off unless you enable it, and you can revoke location access at any time in iOS Settings.
You can export your household setup as a .siftprofile file and hand it to another iPhone
over AirDrop, and you can share a label photo the way you share any photo. That only ever happens
because you asked for it, and it goes where you send it — not to us. An exported profile carries
the people, their reactions and your ingredient categories; it does not carry your scans,
photos or shops.
Allergies and intolerances are sensitive, and Sift treats them that way: they are typed on your iPhone, stored on your iPhone, and never transmitted. They leave only in a profile file that you export yourself.
Sift is meant for the adult doing the shopping, though a household profile may of course describe a child. Sift collects nothing from anyone, of any age, and asks for no personal details.
Everything is on your device, so you hold it. Edit or delete any person, reaction or scan inside the app; clear stored label photos in Settings; turn product lookup or location off; revoke camera or location access in iOS Settings; or delete the app to remove all of it at once.
If Sift changes what it stores or what it sends, this page will be updated and the date at the top will change with it.
Questions about this statement: hello@krugers.dev.
Ingredient and product data comes from the Open Food Facts community, under the Open Database License.
Sift is an information tool only. It does not give medical advice and it is not a food safety device.
Sift works by reading printed labels with a camera and matching what it reads against its own ingredient list. Both steps can fail. Text can be misread, blurred, cut off, obscured or missed altogether. A label can itself be wrong, out of date, or changed by the manufacturer since it was printed. Product information supplied by third parties can be incomplete or incorrect. An ingredient Sift does not recognise will not be flagged at all. Sift may therefore report ingredients that are not present and, more seriously, may fail to report ingredients that are.
You use Sift entirely at your own risk. Do not rely on it to decide whether a food is safe for you or for anyone else. Always read the packaging itself — the packet in your hand is the last word — and follow the advice of a qualified medical professional about any allergy, intolerance or dietary condition. To the fullest extent permitted by law, the developer accepts no liability for any loss, illness, injury or damage arising from use of, or reliance on, this app.