Privacy Policy

What Sphere is

Sphere is a food and calorie tracking app owned and operated by Upstory, LLC. This policy explains what data the app collects, why, and what happens to it. The short version: your data is used to run the app for you, and we don't sell it to anyone.

Data you give us

• Account details — your email address and name when you create an account (via email, Apple, or Google sign-in).
• Food logs — the meals, portions, and water you record, including photos you choose to analyze.
• Body and goal data — height, weight, weight history, age, biological sex (optional), activity level, and nutrition goals you enter during onboarding or in settings. This is used solely to compute your calorie and macro plan.

How food photos are processed

When you snap a photo of a meal, the image is sent to our servers and processed with OpenAI's API to estimate its nutrition. Photos are used only to produce your food log entry. They are not used to train AI models.

Apple Health

Connecting Apple Health is optional. If you enable it, Sphere writes your logged nutrition to Apple Health and reads weight and activity data to keep your plan in sync. Health data stays between your device, your iCloud, and your Sphere account — we never share it with third parties, and we never use it for advertising.

Connected AI assistants

You can connect Sphere to Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI assistants that support the Model Context Protocol. Connecting is optional and always starts with you: you sign in to Sphere the same way you do in the app, then approve the connection.

Once connected, the assistant can read your food log, your calorie and macro totals, and your nutrition goals, and it can add, change, or delete entries and set up your nutrition plan, all on your own account and nothing else. It only reaches your data when you ask it to do something. We do not hand your data to an assistant in the background.

What you type into the assistant, and what it says back, belongs to that assistant's conversation, and is covered by that company's privacy policy rather than this one. You can disconnect Sphere at any time from your assistant's connector or app settings, which revokes its access.

Analytics

We track a small set of product events (such as account creation and whether logging streaks form) using PostHog, tied to your account, so we can tell whether the app is actually helping people build a habit. We do not track your food choices for advertising, and we do not use third-party ad networks.

On this website we also use PostHog to measure page visits, for example which pages lead people to the App Store, so we can tell what's worth improving. PostHog additionally records website sessions, which captures the pages you viewed and where you clicked and moved on them, so we can see where the site confuses people. These recordings cover this website only, not the iOS app, and they are deleted after 30 days. Website activity isn't tied to your Sphere account or used to build advertising profiles.

Where your data lives

Your account and logs are stored with Supabase (our database provider). Payments and subscriptions are handled entirely by Apple through the App Store — we never see your payment details.

What we don't do

• We don't sell your personal data.
• We don't show ads or share data with ad networks.
• We don't use your photos or health data to train AI models.

How long we keep your data

Your account details, food logs, weight history, and nutrition goals are kept for as long as your account exists, because they are what the app shows you. There is no separate expiry: your history stays available to you until you remove it or delete your account.

When you delete your account, that data is removed from our live database immediately. Encrypted database backups roll on a seven-day cycle, so a deleted account can persist in a backup for up to seven days before it ages out. Meal photos are deleted along with the entries they belong to.

Product analytics events are stored separately in PostHog, not in our own database, and are kept for up to seven years, which is the retention window set on our PostHog plan. Website session recordings are deleted after 30 days. Support emails are kept for as long as we need them to help you and to keep a record of the request.

Deleting your data

You can delete your account and all associated data in the Sphere app under Settings → Account → Delete Account. Deletion is permanent and covers your account, food logs, weight history, and photos. Apple subscriptions are billed by Apple and are not cancelled when you delete your account — manage or cancel them in iOS Settings → [your name] → Subscriptions. You can also email support@getsphere.io for help.

Children

Sphere is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect data from them.

Who we are and how to reach us

Sphere is owned and operated by Upstory, LLC. For anything related to this policy or your data, you can reach Rick Russie, who runs Sphere, by email at support@getsphere.io or on LinkedIn.

Changes to this policy

If we make material changes, we'll update this page and the date above. Questions? Email support@getsphere.io.