BuyAway is a mobile app that tells you whether a product you are looking at abroad is cheaper there or back home. This policy explains what the app stores, where, why, and what you can do about it. It is written to be read, not skimmed; the short version is that BuyAway keeps the minimum an account needs, shares nothing with advertisers or analytics companies, and lets you delete everything yourself from inside the app.
Who is responsible: BuyAway is operated by Haim Elbaz, Israel, reachable at [email protected] (the “operator”, “we”). Under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) the operator is the data controller. Under Israel’s Protection of Privacy Law, 5741-1981, as amended, the operator is the database owner.
1. What the app stores about you
Your account
When you create an account we store the email address and display name you enter, and a one-way hash of your password. The password itself is never stored and never visible to us. Accounts are hosted by Supabase (see section 4); authentication is handled by Supabase Auth.
Your trip and settings
Your home country and the country you are travelling in, your app language, and your in-app preferences (haptic feedback, automatic exchange-rate refresh, whether you contribute prices, whether you have seen the tour). These sync to your account so they follow you to your next device. The light/dark appearance choice is stored only on the device.
Your lists
The Plan list (products you intend to buy) and the Purchases list (products you have bought): for each entry, the product’s name, brand, barcode and picture link as returned by the product database, the price you saw or paid and the home price it was compared with, the currencies and countries involved, the quantity, any note you added, and the date. These are yours alone and are never shown to other users.
Prices you record
When you enter a price you saw on a shelf, and “Share the prices you record” is switched on in Settings (it is on by default), the app stores a price observation: the barcode, product name and brand, the price, currency and country, the store name if you typed one, whether it was discounted, and the date. It is linked to your account so that it can be deleted with it.
Other users never see your individual observations, your name or your email. They see only aggregates — for example, the typical recent price of a product in a currency, and how many people reported it. You can turn contribution off at any time in Settings › Shared prices; the app then keeps your prices on your device only.
You may also report that a price shown to you is wrong. A dispute stores the barcode, currency, the figure you were shown, and the date, linked to your account.
Diagnostics
The app keeps the last few errors of the current session in memory only, so that you can copy them into a bug report if you choose to. Nothing is sent automatically. There is no crash-reporting service, no analytics SDK, no advertising SDK and no tracking of any kind in the app.
What the app does not collect
No precise or approximate location. No contacts. No photos from your library. No advertising identifier. No payment details — BuyAway sells nothing.
2. The camera
Scanning a barcode is the app’s primary function. Barcodes are decoded on your device. When a barcode is a shop’s own and no database knows it, you may photograph the label so the app can read the product name; that text recognition also runs on your device, and the photograph is discarded immediately. No image ever leaves your phone.
The text recognition component is Google ML Kit, an on-device library. Google publishes what that component may report to Google about itself (device type, app version, performance metrics); see Google’s ML Kit data disclosure. BuyAway sends it no personal data.
3. Who else receives data, and what
To identify a product and price it, the app asks public databases. Each request carries only what is listed here, plus the ordinary technical information any internet request carries (your IP address, which those services see as any website would).
| Service | What is sent | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Open Food Facts (openfoodfacts.org) | The barcode, or the words you typed when searching by name | Identify the product |
| Open Prices (prices.openfoodfacts.org) | The barcode and a country code | Find recent shelf prices in your home country |
| UPC Item DB (upcitemdb.com), via our own lookup function | The barcode, or the words you typed | Identify products Open Food Facts does not know. The request is made by our server, so UPC Item DB does not see your device |
| Exchange-rate provider (open.er-api.com) | Two currency codes | Convert between currencies |
| Supabase (supabase.com) | Everything in section 1 | Hosting the account and database, in the European Union |
Israeli home-country prices come from files that Israeli retail chains are required by law to publish. Our server downloads them nightly; no user data is involved.
We do not sell, rent or trade personal data, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers.
4. Where the data is kept
Account and database data is hosted by Supabase Inc. on infrastructure in Frankfurt, Germany (AWS region eu-central-1). A copy of your lists and settings is kept on your device so the app works offline.
If you use BuyAway from Israel, your data is transferred to the European Union. The EU has recognised Israel as providing adequate protection, and Israeli regulations permit transfers to EU member states.
5. Why we may process it (legal bases under GDPR)
- Performance of a contract (Art. 6(1)(b)): running your account, syncing your lists and settings across devices.
- Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)): building the shared, anonymous price aggregate that is the app’s purpose, and keeping the service secure. You can object by switching contribution off, at any time, with one tap.
- Consent (Art. 6(1)(a)): using the camera, which you grant through your operating system’s permission prompt and can withdraw there.
6. How long we keep it
For as long as your account exists. When you delete your account, everything in section 1 is deleted from the database at once, by a cascade that removes every row belonging to you; the copy on your device is erased at the same time. Data may persist in the hosting provider’s backups for a limited period before those backups roll over.
7. Your rights
You can, at any time:
- See and change your name, email and password in the app under Settings › your account.
- Export your lists — they are shown in full in the app — and request a machine-readable copy from us.
- Delete your account and all data yourself: Settings › your account › Delete account. It asks for your password and an explicit confirmation. See also our account deletion page.
- Stop contributing prices: Settings › Shared prices.
- Ask us to access, correct, erase or export your data, or to restrict or object to processing, at [email protected]. We answer within one month.
- Complain to a supervisory authority: in the EU, the authority of the member state where you live; in Israel, the Privacy Protection Authority.
8. Children
BuyAway is not directed at children under 16, and we do not knowingly create accounts for them. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us and we will delete it.
9. Security
Passwords are stored only as one-way hashes. All network traffic uses TLS. Database access is bounded by row-level security so that an account can read and write only its own rows; the aggregate price view carries no account identifiers. The app’s release builds contain no administrative credentials.
10. Changes to this policy
When this policy changes, the new version is published at this address and the effective date above moves. For a change that affects what we collect or why, we will also say so in the app. Earlier versions are available on request.
11. Contact
Haim Elbaz · Israel · [email protected]