FAT App Privacy Policy
Effective date: July 18, 2026
The FAT App (Farm Animal Transparency) is operated by Farm Animal Transparency. This policy explains what data the app accesses, what it stores, and what it transmits.
Camera
The app requests camera access solely to photograph meat, poultry, and seafood labels for analysis. Images are processed entirely on your device using Google ML Kit’s on-device text recognition. No photos or image data are transmitted to any server.
Scan History
Scan results are saved locally on your device in the app’s own storage — on Android via standard app storage, on iPhone in the app’s private container. This data never leaves your device and is deleted when you uninstall the app or clear the app’s data.
Lookup Requests
When you use the Lookup tab to search by USDA establishment number or brand name, the app sends that search term to farmanimaltransparency.com to retrieve public enforcement and ownership records. No personal information, device identifiers, or location data are included in these requests.
Unrecognized Brand Reports (iPhone only)
The app matches the brand on a label against a brand database it carries. When it cannot find a match, the iPhone version sends us a short excerpt of the scanned label text so we can identify brands missing from that database and add them. The Android version does not send this.
The excerpt is capped at 120 characters, and digits, email addresses, web addresses, and phone-shaped numbers are stripped out before it is sent. It is accompanied only by the app version and your device’s language setting. It is not linked to you or your device, the same text is not sent twice in a session, and our server records only a one-way cryptographic hash of the originating IP address — never the address itself. Photographs are still never transmitted; this is text only.
What We Do Not Collect
- No personal information (name, email, phone, location)
- No device identifiers or advertising IDs
- No behavioral tracking, profiling, or advertising analytics
- No account registration is required or offered
- No third-party advertising SDKs
Apart from the lookup requests and the iPhone unrecognized-brand reports described above, the app transmits nothing about how you use it. We do not track which products you scan, and we have no way to connect a scan to an individual person.
Children
The FAT App does not knowingly collect any information from children under 13.
Changes to This Policy
If this policy changes materially, the updated version will be posted at this URL with a revised effective date.
Contact
Questions about this policy: info@farmanimaltransparency.com