Privacy Policy

Véda · version 2026-10-on-phone-v7 · effective 12 October 2026

Véda takes a photo of your face each time you take a reading, measures your skin from it, and shows you how those measurements change over time. This page says exactly what that involves: what we keep, where, for how long, and how you get rid of it. It is written to match what the app actually does; if the app changes in a way that affects your data, this page changes and the app asks for your agreement again.

Where your photo is measured

Android. The face-finding model and the measuring code run on your phone. The photo, the face geometry, and the marks drawn on the photo never leave it. The phone sends our server only the numbers described below: the scores, what they are calculated from, and a note about the light.

iPhone, for now, and older versions of the app. The app sends the photo to our server for a few seconds. The server finds your face, measures the photo in memory, returns the numbers and discards the photo and the face geometry; it keeps only the numbers. The iPhone app is being moved to measuring on the phone like Android. When that is done this paragraph is removed from this page and the app asks you to agree again.

Who is responsible

AryaVedics, LLC operates Véda and is responsible for your data under this policy. Contact: support@aryavedics.com.

What we collect

• Face photos. One photo each time you take a reading. It is taken, measured and kept on your phone, and on Android it goes nowhere else. (On an iPhone, and in older versions of the app, it also travels to our server for a few seconds so the server can measure it; the server does not store it.) Readings made with app versions before 0.3.2 had their photo stored on our server; the app moves those onto your phone and our copies are then deleted (see How long we keep it).
• Face geometry, during analysis only, and on your phone. To find the areas of skin to measure, the face model locates points on your face in each photo (around the eyes, brows, nose, lips and jaw). Some laws, including Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act, treat this kind of face geometry as biometric information. On Android this happens on your phone: the points exist only in the phone’s memory while the photo is being measured, are discarded straight afterwards, and are never sent to us or to anyone. (On an iPhone, and in older versions, the server does this while it measures the photo and discards the points just as quickly.) They are never saved, never used to identify you or to compare you with anyone, and never sold, leased, traded or otherwise used to profit. See Biometric information below.
• Measurements. The scores the app shows (redness, texture, pores, spots, acne, evenness, wrinkles), the underlying numbers they are calculated from, the same numbers for each part of the face (forehead, cheeks, nose, chin, under the eyes), and a note about the light if it was dim, uneven or shiny. For a reading measured on your phone, the marks the app draws on your photo and where your face sits in it stay on your phone and are not sent to us.
• Shot details, only if you turn on Help improve Véda. How bright your skin looked in the photo and how grainy it was (three numbers per reading). Off unless you turn it on; see Help improve Véda.
• When and how. The date and time of each reading, and whether you marked it as a morning, midday or evening reading.
• A device identifier. A random code the app generates on first launch so your readings can be tied to your account without a sign-up. It is not your phone's hardware ID and cannot be used to find you on other apps or services.
• Account details, if you add them. An email address and password, only if you choose to claim your account so you can sign in on another phone. The password is stored as a hash, never as the password itself. If you forget your password, we use the email address to send you a short-lived code to choose a new one; we do not use it for anything else. If you choose to sign in with Google or Apple instead, we keep an identifier from that sign-in and the email address it shares with us (Apple may give a private relay address instead of your own). We never receive your Google or Apple password.
• Consent records. When you agreed to this policy (and which version), when you withdrew, and the app version and platform you did it from. We keep these because "we obtained consent" is a claim we may have to prove.
• Operational logs. Our hosting providers record the network address and time of requests to the service, as every web service does, for security and to keep the service running. These logs are kept briefly and are not linked to your readings. The service also counts requests per address for a few minutes at a time to limit abuse; those counts are held in memory only and never stored.

What we do not collect

• Nothing about your face reaches us from an Android phone, and nothing else from any phone beyond what is described here: no contacts and no location. (If you turn on the optional morning weather note, your phone looks up the forecast itself and sends your approximate location to a weather service, never to us; see below.)
• No advertising identifiers, and no analytics or tracking tools. The app shows no ads at present; before any are shown, this page is updated and the app asks you to agree again.
• No facial recognition. Nothing is used to work out who you are or to match your face against anyone else’s. The app does no face detection while you line up the shot; your face is looked at only in the photo you take, on your phone (on an iPhone, for now, on our server while the photo is measured, as described above).

What we use it for

Two things, and only these two.

Showing you your own readings. Each photo is analysed to produce the measurements, which are shown back to you in the app. The photo itself stays on your phone, where the app shows it with the measured areas marked. If we improve how readings are measured, your earlier readings keep the numbers they were measured with, and the app tells you that measuring changed so you know old and new may not line up exactly.

Improving the accuracy of the measurements for everyone. The scale that turns a raw measurement into a 0–100 score was set before the app had real users, and it is corrected against real readings as they accumulate — in particular so that it reads the same across different skin tones and cameras. This uses the measurements, in aggregate. It never identifies you, never compares you with anyone else inside the app, and never leaves the service described below.

We do not share your photos with anyone. Current versions of the app send us none to keep (and Android sends us none at all), so there is nothing for us to look at. The only photos we still hold are older ones, from readings made before app version 0.3.2 (see How long we keep it). Where an account agreed to the earlier wording, which allowed it, those older photos have been measured in aggregate, by software only, to improve the accuracy of the measurements; nobody looks at them one by one, and photos belonging to anyone who has agreed to this version are not used for that.

Help improve Véda (optional)

This is off unless you turn it on, in Profile or when the app asks you once, and you can turn it off again at any time. The app works the same either way.

If you turn it on, we also keep details of how each photo was taken — how bright your skin looked in it and how grainy it was — together with your numbers, to help Véda read every skin tone and every phone more accurately. No photo and no face information is part of this. The details are three numbers for each reading and are used only for that purpose, never to identify you.

If you turn it off again, the details we kept for your readings are deleted, and when it is off we do not keep them at all, including for readings measured by our server. They are included when you export your data, and deleted with your readings or your account like everything else. (Added 13 October 2026; this describes a setting that is off by default and does not change anything you have already agreed to.)

Where it is stored, and who else touches it

These companies work on our behalf and process your data only to provide the service described:

• Railway runs the server and the database that holds your measurements, account details and consent records.
• Cloudflare (its R2 storage service) holds, in a private bucket encrypted at rest, only those older photos that have not yet been moved to a phone. We delete every photo it holds before the app is released publicly.
• Resend delivers the password reset emails. It receives only the email address and the message, and only when you ask to reset a password.

If you choose to sign in with Google or Apple, that company confirms to us that the login is yours. It learns that you signed in to this app; we do not send it your readings, photos or any other data. Its handling of your sign-in is covered by its own privacy policy.

On Android, finding your face in the photo uses two small face models (published by Google as part of its MediaPipe project) that run entirely on your phone, through TensorFlow Lite, an interpreter that has no network connection of its own. Nothing about your photo, your face or how the models run is sent to Google or to anyone. (We deliberately do not use Google’s MediaPipe software library, which sends Google usage information.)

If you turn on the optional morning weather note and allow location access, your phone sends your approximate location (rounded to about a kilometre) straight to the public forecast service of MET Norway, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, to get the forecast for where you are. It does not pass through our server and we never see or store it; the app keeps that rounded position on your phone only, to work out the local sunrise. If you decline location access, everything else works the same and you simply get no weather note.

Their data centres may be in a different country from you. Data travels between the app and the service over an encrypted connection (HTTPS). We do not sell, rent, or otherwise disclose your data to anyone else, and would share it only if legally compelled to.

Biometric information

This section is our written policy for biometric information, including our retention schedule and how we permanently destroy it.

• What and why. The face geometry described above, measured from each photo for the sole purpose of locating the skin areas the app measures. On Android it is measured on your phone and never reaches us.
• Consent first. Nothing is analysed until you have read what is collected, why and for how long, and agreed in writing by ticking the box on the consent screen. The version you agreed to and when are recorded.
• Not stored. Face geometry is held in memory during one analysis and then discarded. It is not written to the database, to storage or to logs. For a reading measured on your phone our server keeps no face location at all: the plain rectangle that marks where the face sits in the photo, so the app can frame it, stays on your phone. (Readings measured by our server, on an iPhone or in older versions, store that rectangle; it says nothing about the shape of your face.)
• Photos it could be measured from again stay on your phone, not with us, and you can delete them at any time. Any older photo still held on our servers is destroyed on the schedule below.
• Never disclosed or sold. We do not sell, lease, trade or otherwise profit from it, and do not disclose it to anyone except the hosting providers listed above, which process it only to run the service, or where the law requires it.

How long we keep it

Photos. We keep none. Your photos live only on your phone, in storage private to the app and left out of iCloud and Google backups, until you delete them. If you lose or replace your phone, we cannot recover them; the backup file in Profile is how you move your data yourself.

Older photos on our servers. Readings made before app version 0.3.2 had their photo stored on our servers. When you update, the app copies each one onto your phone, checks the copy is intact, and only then tells our server to delete its own. We delete every photo still held on our servers before the app is released publicly, and in any case any photo belonging to an account with no reading for 3 years is deleted automatically. A photo that was not moved to a phone before then cannot be recovered.

Measurements and account details. Kept until you delete them.

You can delete data at any time, in one of three ways:

• Delete a reading (Profile → Readings): the reading's measurements are removed from our servers and its photo from your phone.
• Withdraw consent (Profile): any photo still on our servers is removed immediately and the app deletes the photos on your phone. Your account and the numbers remain until you delete the account, and no new readings can be taken until you consent again.
• Delete your account (Profile → Delete account): everything — measurements, account details, consent records, and the photos on your phone — is removed permanently. This cannot be undone.

Deletion in the app removes the data from the live service straight away. Hosting providers' backups may hold a copy of the data on our servers for a short period afterwards before it is overwritten.

What stays only on your phone

Your reading photos, the marks drawn on them and where your face sits in them, the cycle calendar, wellness check-ins, the food diary and the backup file you can make in Profile live only on your phone. We never receive them. If you share or export a file from the app, where it goes is your choice.

Guest readings

An account holder can let someone else take a single reading on their phone (“Let someone try it” in Profile). The guest sees this policy and agrees to it themselves before the photo is taken; the account holder's agreement does not cover anyone else's face. A guest reading is stored under a separate account of its own, so it never appears in, or affects, the account holder's readings.

A guest's photo is not stored anywhere. On Android it is measured on the phone, shown to the guest on the result screen, and then discarded; it is not sent anywhere and not kept on the phone either. (On an iPhone, for now, it is sent to our server for the seconds it takes to measure and discarded.) The anonymous measurements from it are kept. (Guest readings made with app versions before 0.3.2 had their photo kept on our servers for up to 12 months, then deleted automatically; any that remain are deleted before public release.) A guest can delete their measurements immediately, on the screen that shows their result. We record which account hosted a guest reading, to tell readings from the same camera apart; that link is never shown to either person.

Your rights

You can see and take away everything we hold about you: Profile → Export my data produces a file containing your account details, every reading's measurements, and your consent history. Your photos are on your phone, where you can see and delete them. You can delete any of it, or all of it, as described above, without asking us. If you are in a jurisdiction that gives you further rights over your personal data — access, correction, portability, objection, complaint to a supervisory authority — you have them, and you can exercise them by contacting us at the address above.

Security

Connections are encrypted. Your photos sit in the app's private storage on your phone, which other apps cannot read and which is excluded from iCloud and Google backups. Any older photo still on our servers sits in a private bucket that is not reachable from the internet; the app fetches it through the service, which checks it is yours. Passwords are hashed. Access to the production systems is limited to the people who run the service. No system is perfectly secure; if we learn of a breach affecting your data we will tell you.

Children

Véda is for adults. It is not intended for anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly hold photos of anyone under 18. If you believe we do, contact us and we will delete them.

Not a medical device

The app measures visible properties of skin in photographs. It does not diagnose, treat, or advise on any condition, and its numbers are not medical measurements. Nothing in it replaces a dermatologist.

Changes to this policy

If we change what we collect, why, or how long we keep it, this page is updated with a new version number and the app asks you to agree again before you can take another reading. We do not change the terms of consent quietly. The version you agreed to is recorded with your consent record.