Privacy Policy — Halal Pal

The short version: Halal Pal does not collect, sell, or share your personal data. Scan history is stored only on your device. The only data that ever leaves your device is anonymous product lookup requests.

1. Information We Collect

Halal Pal is designed to work with minimal data collection.

Data stored on your device only:

Scan history (product names, ingredients, halal verdicts)
App settings (halal mode preference, premium status)
Daily scan count for free-tier quota tracking

This data never leaves your device and is not accessible to us.

2. Product Lookups

When you scan a barcode or ingredient list, the app may send the following to our servers to look up product information:

The barcode number
A hashed fingerprint of the ingredient text (not the raw text)

These requests contain no personally identifiable information. Results are cached in a shared database to speed up future lookups for all users.

Product data is sourced from Open Food Facts, USDA FoodData Central, and Edamam. Please refer to their respective privacy policies for information about those services.

3. Advertising (Free Users)

Free users see banner ads served by Google AdMob. AdMob may use your device's advertising identifier (IDFA on iOS, GAID on Android) to show relevant ads.

On iOS, we request your permission before accessing the advertising identifier via Apple's App Tracking Transparency framework. You can deny this permission and ads will still be shown, just not personalised.

You can remove all ads by upgrading to Halal Pal Premium.

For more information on how Google uses data, visit policies.google.com/privacy.

4. In-App Purchases & Subscriptions

Subscription purchases are processed entirely by Apple (App Store) or Google (Google Play). We do not receive or store your payment information. Premium status is stored locally on your device.

5. App Store Review Prompt

After a certain number of successful scans, the app may ask you to rate it using the platform's native review prompt (Apple's SKStoreReviewController / Google Play In-App Review API). This is handled entirely by Apple or Google — we do not receive any data from this interaction.

6. Children's Privacy

Halal Pal is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect any information from children under 13.

7. Changes to This Policy

If we make material changes to this privacy policy, we will update the "Last updated" date above. Continued use of the app after changes constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

8. Contact

If you have questions about this privacy policy, you can reach us at halalpalscanner.com.