Privacy Policy for ChooseWell

Effective Date: September 30, 2026
Last Updated: October 23, 2026

Shopper Assist, LLC ("we," "us," or "our") operates the ChooseWell mobile application (formerly Shopper Assist) (the "App"). This Privacy Policy explains what information the App collects, how we use it, and the choices you have.

By using the App, you agree to the collection and use of information as described in this policy. If you do not agree, please do not use the App.

1. What the App Does

ChooseWell lets you scan a product's barcode, photograph the front of a package, type a product or company name, enter a produce sticker code, choose a screenshot of a shopping cart or order, or enter a vehicle identification number (VIN) to see:

Political involvement — whether the company that makes the product is investing substantial financial resources to influence federal or state policy, legislation, or government regulations. This is built from publicly disclosed records: corporate PAC contributions and the party of each recipient, federal lobbying spending and the issues lobbied, giving to Super PACs, state-level giving to candidates, parties and committees, and, for some companies, a short list of documented public actions with a link to the primary source
Safety — ingredients on the label checked against a published watch list of regulated additives and chemicals, plus recall notices (FDA food, drug and device recalls, Consumer Product Safety Commission recalls, and NHTSA vehicle recalls)
Nutrition — label nutrition facts compared against thresholds you set for yourself, and, if you choose, your body weight
Reviews — ratings and comments posted by other users of the App

The App covers packaged goods, cosmetics and household products, books, medicines and medical supplies (via FDA records), fresh produce sold by sticker code, basic foods sold by kind (such as meat, eggs and milk, via USDA data), and cars (via NHTSA). To provide these features, the App looks the item up in public and third-party data sources (described in Section 4) and displays the results to you.

An optional Political tab (switched on in Profile) shows candidates, sitting officials and corporate PACs from the same public records, and a My Shopping Impact page sums, for the products you mark as purchased, where their makers' political money went. Neither involves any information about you beyond what is described in Section 2.

2. Information We Collect

The App does not have user accounts. You never create a login, and we do not collect your name, email address, or password.

### a. Information You Provide
- Nutrition preferences. The healthy/unhealthy thresholds and dietary settings you configure in the App (for example, target sugar or calorie levels). These are stored on your device.
- Body weight. If you enter your body weight in Priorities, it is stored only on your device and is sent with score requests solely to personalize the Safety score's "% of daily limit" figures. We do not store it on our server.
- Reviews you post. If you rate or review a product, we store the rating and your comment together with a random identifier generated on your device (so you can edit or remove your review). That identifier is not linked to your name, Apple ID, Google account, or device hardware. If you report another user's review, we store the report and your reason, if you give one, so we can moderate it.
- Product photos you choose to send. If a product isn't recognized, you can choose to send a photo of its front so we can add it; if a product has no ingredient list on file, you can photograph its ingredient panel, and the text read from it on your device becomes that product's ingredient list (marked as read from a label photo). In both cases the photo, the text read from it and the barcode (if any) are stored on our server for our review queue, are never shown to other users in the App, and are deleted once reviewed or after 90 days at the latest. After a person has reviewed it, we may contribute the photo, with the product's name, brand and barcode, to the Open Food Facts family of public databases (Open Food Facts, Open Beauty Facts, Open Products Facts) under their open licences, so the product is recognized for everyone; nothing about you, your device or your location is included, and a contributed photo stays in those databases under their terms. Please frame only the product; do not include people or personal papers.
- Search terms. Product and company names you type into Search, and candidate, official, PAC or country names, state names or ZIP codes you type into the Political tab, are sent to our server to run the search. A ZIP code is used only to look up its congressional districts and appears only in short-lived server logs. When a product or company search or a scan finds nothing, we keep the term or barcode, but not who searched for it, in a list that guides what we add next.
- Cart screenshots ("Check a cart"). If you choose a screenshot of a shopping cart or order from your photo library, the text is read on your device (Apple's on-device text recognition on iPhone, Google's on-device ML Kit on Android). The picture never leaves your device and is discarded after it is read. Only the item names read from it are sent to our server, one at a time, as search terms; prices, quantities, store names, addresses and everything else in the picture are dropped on your device before anything is sent, and the item names are handled like any other search term above.
- "Purchased?" answers. If you answer "Purchased?" on a product page, the answer is stored only on your device. To build the My Shopping Impact page, the App sends our server only the identifiers of the makers of those products — never the products, the answers or anything about you — and the request appears only in short-lived server logs. You can clear every answer with the Reset link on that page or by clearing your scan history.
- Countries to highlight. Countries you choose to highlight on the Political tab or in Priorities, so that makers controlled from them are flagged, are stored only on your device and are never sent to our server.

### b. Information Collected Automatically
- Scan data. The barcode, produce code or other product identifier you scan is sent to our server to look the product up. Products found are cached on our server as product records, not linked to any person; the request itself appears only in short-lived server logs (see Technical data). Your scan history is kept on your device.
- Vehicle identification number (VIN) lookups. If you enter or scan a VIN, we send it to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's public database to retrieve vehicle and recall information for that vehicle. The VIN is used only to perform that lookup and is not retained by us afterward, in any form — it is not stored, logged, or linked to reviews. The result appears in the scan history on your device only, which you can clear at any time.
- Label text ("Scan item front"). If you photograph the front of a package or a produce sticker, the text is read on your device using Apple's on-device text recognition. Only the recognized words are sent to our server to match a brand, product or produce code; the photo itself never leaves your device unless you then choose to send it (see Product photos above), and is otherwise discarded after it is read.
- Camera access. The App uses your device's camera to scan barcodes, labels, and VINs. We do not store or transmit the camera feed or any photos beyond what is needed to read the barcode, label, or VIN, unless you explicitly choose to save an image.
- Photo library access. The App opens your photo library only when you choose a cart screenshot, reads only the picture you pick, and does not scan, index or upload your photos.
- Technical data. When the App contacts our server, the server receives the standard technical information any internet request carries (such as your IP address and the App version) and keeps it in short-lived logs, up to 30 days, to keep the service running and to limit abuse. Each request also carries the App's random device identifier (see Reviews above) so that our server can limit how many lookups one installation makes per day; the identifier is not linked to you. VINs and your body weight are removed from these logs. We do not collect usage analytics.
- Crash reports. If the App fails, it sends our server the error text, the screen it was on, the App version, the operating system version and the App's random device identifier, so we can fix the problem. Crash reports contain no name, account, location, photos or scans, and are deleted within 90 days. You can turn this off at any time in Preferences → Send crash reports.

### c. Membership and Billing Information
Scanning and product pages are free. ChooseWell Pro is an optional auto-renewing yearly membership at a price you choose in the App. Memberships are billed and processed through the Apple App Store or Google Play, depending on your device, and are tied to your Apple ID or Google account — no separate login with us is required. To know whether your membership is active, the App uses RevenueCat, a subscription-management service: it receives the App Store's or Google Play's purchase receipt and stores your membership status under an anonymous identifier that RevenueCat generates. RevenueCat never receives your name, email, or payment card details from us.

Because the membership auto-renews, your payment method will automatically be charged for the next year unless you cancel at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. You can manage or turn off auto-renewal at any time in your Apple ID or Google Play account settings; doing so stops future charges but does not refund the current period, except as described in our Terms (30-day refund on request).

### d. Information We Do Not Collect
We do not collect payment card numbers, government ID numbers, or precise health/medical records. Nutrition preferences you set (e.g., "low sugar") reflect a personal preference, not a medical diagnosis, and are treated as ordinary app settings.

3. How We Use Information

We use the information above to:

Operate core App features (matching your scan, photo, search or code to product, company, political-spending, safety, review and nutrition data, and applying your personal nutrition thresholds and body weight)
Decide which products and companies to add next, using the anonymous list of unmatched searches, barcodes and photos
Maintain, secure, and improve the App
Diagnose technical issues and fix bugs
Communicate with you about the App, if you contact us
Comply with legal obligations

We do not sell your personal information.

4. Third-Party Data Sources and Services

To show you political-involvement, safety, review, and nutrition information, our server queries public and third-party data sources. These lookups are about the product or company, not about you — our server sends only the barcode, code, VIN, or search words needed to retrieve public information, never anything that identifies you, and this policy does not control how those sources separately handle any data you interact with directly. The sources currently used are:

Product identity, ingredients and nutrition: the Open Food Facts family of community databases (food, beauty, pet food, general products); Open Library (books); USDA FoodData Central; openFDA drug labels, the FDA National Drug Code directory and the FDA device registry (medicines and medical supplies); the IFPS produce-code list; and UPCitemdb, a commercial barcode database that receives only the barcode
Safety and recalls: openFDA enforcement reports, USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service recalls, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, NHTSA recall and vehicle-decoder data, and published ingredient watch lists (California Proposition 65, IARC, EU cosmetics and chemicals regulators including ECHA, Health Canada, the FDA's food-substance inventory and EPA Safer Choice)
Political involvement: Federal Election Commission filings and bulk data files (OpenFEC; committee-to-candidate contributions; candidate summaries), Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act filings, IRS Form 8872 filings by political organizations, state campaign-finance records, covering 45 states, and, for the Political tab, committee assignments from the public congress-legislators dataset and rosters of sitting state and local officials from the Open States project and Wikidata
Company information: SEC EDGAR company filings, SAM.gov entity registrations (ownership self-certifications), and Wikidata (brand and parent-company relationships)

We do not use third-party analytics services.
We do not use third-party advertising services.
The App contains two third-party SDKs: RevenueCat's, used solely for membership status as described in Section 2(c), and Meta's app-events SDK, which reports anonymous app events (such as first launch and a membership purchase) so that we can measure our own advertising; it does not receive the advertising identifier, your scans, or anything you type. We do not use any SDK that collects location.

The App also uses Apple's and/or Google's in-app purchase systems to manage membership billing. Their handling of your payment information is governed by the Apple Privacy Policy and Google Privacy Policy, not by us.

5. Data Sharing

We share information only:

With the service provider that hosts our server (Fly.io, in the United States), under its confidentiality obligations, and with the data sources in Section 4, which receive only the product identifier, code or search words being looked up
If required by law, court order, or governmental request
To protect the rights, property, or safety of Shopper Assist, LLC, our users, or others
In connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, with notice to you

We do not share your scan history or nutrition preferences with product manufacturers or political organizations.

6. Data Retention

Your scan history, "Purchased?" answers, nutrition preferences, countries to highlight and body weight are stored only on your device; you can clear your scan history and your "Purchased?" answers in the App at any time, and deleting the App removes all of it. Cart screenshots are never stored by the App. Server logs are kept up to 30 days. Reviews stay until you delete them in the App. Photos you send for review are deleted from our server once handled and after 90 days at the latest; a copy we contributed to the Open Food Facts databases after review stays there under their licence. VINs are never retained. Product records and the anonymous list of unmatched searches and barcodes contain nothing about you and are kept to run and improve the App, unless a longer retention period is required by law.

7. Your Rights and Choices

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to:

Access, correct, or delete the personal information we hold about you (because the App has no accounts, the data we hold about you is minimal — see Section 2)
Delete your on-device data at any time by clearing your scan history in the App or deleting the App, and delete any review you posted from the product's page
Withdraw consent to camera or photo library access at any time through your device settings (note: this will prevent scanning, or choosing cart screenshots)
Manage or cancel your membership at any time through your Apple ID or Google Play account settings — App Store refunds are decided by Apple; Google Play refunds within 30 days can be requested from us; canceling less than 24 hours before renewal may not stop that period's charge

To exercise these rights, contact us at [email protected]. Residents of California, the EU/UK, and other jurisdictions with specific privacy laws (CCPA/CPRA, GDPR, etc.) may have additional rights under those laws.

8. Children's Privacy

The App is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has provided us personal information, contact us at [email protected] and we will delete it.

9. Security

We use reasonable technical and organizational measures to protect information from unauthorized access, alteration, or loss. No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

10. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will notify you through the App or by other reasonable means before the changes take effect. The "Last Updated" date above reflects the most recent revision.

11. Contact Us

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, contact:

Shopper Assist, LLC
Brooklyn, NY
[email protected]