Privacy policy

1. Who we are#

Tally is a free iPhone app for tracking calories and lifting with friends. In this policy, “Tally”, “we” and “us” mean Tally, which makes the app and this site. To reach us, see Contact at the end of this page.

2. What we collect#

We collect only what Tally needs to work.

• Your account. Your phone number, name and handle, and a profile photo and bio if you add them. Your number is how you sign in.
• What you log. Meals and meal photos, workouts, sets and PRs, weigh-ins, and the goal, birth year, sex and height you give us to set your targets. We keep only the year of your birthday, after checking you’re old enough to use Tally.
• Your contacts, if you allow it. Phone numbers from your address book are sent over an encrypted connection and checked on our servers against a keyed hash of each member’s number. We keep the matches (friends already on Tally) and never store the numbers of people who aren’t. Names, photos and emails in your contacts never leave your phone.
• What you share. Your bio, the posts, photos, captions, comments and reactions you share, who you follow and who follows you, and the reports you make.
• Your device. A push token, if you turn on notifications. When you sign in, we keep the IP address and app version your phone sent with your session, to keep your account secure.

3. How we use it#

• To run Tally: sign you in, save your log and keep it in sync.
• To estimate meals and to show forecasts. Forecasts are worked out on your phone from your own data.
• To show what you post to the people you choose, and to help you find people you know.
• To keep Tally safe, with moderation, reports, blocking and rate limits.
• To fix bugs and make the app better, from our own server logs. The app has no analytics or crash-reporting tools.

We don’t sell your data or share it for advertising, and Tally shows no ads.

4. What friends and followers see#

Followers are people who follow you, and friends are people who follow each other. They see only what you post: each workout or meal post goes to Followers, Friends or Only you, as you choose, and your default is in Settings → Sharing. Friends also see your place on the friends’ leaderboard, which you can hide. In Settings → Privacy you can preview your profile the way a follower sees it.

Your body weight, weigh-ins, daily calorie totals, targets, notes and time zone never appear on any post, profile, notification, widget or share image. Forecasts for friends use their own data: you never see their weight, and they never see yours.

When you log a meal or a workout with friends, it saves to everyone who was there. Each person gets their own copy and can edit or remove it without changing anyone else’s.

5. AI estimates (OpenAI)#

When you scan a meal, read a label, describe a meal or correct an estimate, Tally sends that photo or text to OpenAI to estimate food, portions and nutrition. We send no name, phone number, body weight or daily totals, and photos are resized with their location data removed.

Under OpenAI’s API terms, what we send isn’t used to train OpenAI’s models. We ask OpenAI not to store it, and it may keep a copy for up to 30 days only to watch for abuse (longer only if the law requires), then deletes it. We keep your meal photos and the estimate in your log until you delete them. A photo you scan but don’t save is deleted after about a month.

Nothing is sent until you take one of those steps yourself, and the scan and describe screens say who estimates it. If you’d rather not use AI, search the food database instead.

6. Moderation (OpenAI)#

Photos and text you share with other people (your name, handle, bio and profile photo, and the posts, captions and comments you share) are checked automatically by OpenAI’s moderation service, so content that breaks our community rules doesn’t reach anyone. We send only the photo or text being checked, never your phone number or anything you keep private, and photos you keep Only you are never sent.

If a shared photo is flagged or reported, a person on our team may look at it to decide whether it stays up. These checks are part of our terms (Community rules), which you agree to when you create your account. Under OpenAI’s API terms, what we send isn’t used to train OpenAI’s models, and OpenAI doesn’t keep what its moderation service checks.

7. Food database (FatSecret)#

Food searches go from our servers to FatSecret, which provides our food database. FatSecret receives what you searched for, never your name, number or account.

8. Apple Health#

Tally doesn’t connect to Apple Health yet, and it never asks for access to your Health data. Before that changes, we’ll update this policy to say what Tally reads and writes.

9. Who helps us run Tally#

A few companies help us run Tally. Contracts limit them to doing that work for us, and nothing else.

• Hosting, photo storage and backups: Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• AI estimates and moderation: OpenAI
• Food database: FatSecret
• Phone sign-in: Firebase Authentication, a Google service. It receives your phone number, texts you the sign-in code and checks it, and its sign-in library sends Google basic diagnostic data about how it runs, not linked to you.
• Push notifications: Apple Push Notification service, sent through Expo’s push service, which receives your push token and the notification’s text.

Tally itself uses no advertising, analytics or crash-reporting services.

10. Where data is stored#

Your data is stored on AWS in the United States (us-east-1, Northern Virginia). If you live in Canada, your data is stored and processed in the United States, where it may be accessible to authorities under US law.

11. Keeping and deleting#

We keep your data while you have an account. You can download a copy any time: Profile → Settings → Export my data. You can delete your account in the app any time: Profile → Settings → Delete account. It’s immediate, and it removes your profile, your log, your photos, your posts, comments and reactions, and your follows from our live systems.

Copies in encrypted backups are gone within 30 days. Friends keep their own copies of meals and workouts you shared with them, because those are part of their log. If your account was suspended, or a report about it was still open, we keep a keyed hash of your phone number (never the number itself) so the account can’t simply be made again, and anything the law requires us to keep as evidence stays for as long as the law requires.

12. Your rights#

Wherever you live in the US or Canada, you can ask us to show you, correct, delete or send you a copy of your data. Laws such as California’s CCPA and CPRA, Canada’s PIPEDA and Quebec’s Law 25 give many people these rights.

You can export or delete your data yourself in the app (Keeping and deleting, above). For anything else, contact us (Contact, below). We confirm it’s you with a code sent to your number, and we won’t treat you differently for asking.

13. Children#

Tally is for people 16 and older, and the app stops anyone younger at sign-up. If you think someone younger has an account, report their profile in the app or contact us, and we’ll delete it.

14. Changes#

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we’ll tell you in the app before it takes effect. The date at the top always shows the current version.

15. Contact#

Questions or requests about your data? Get in touch.