Privacy Policy
1. The short version
PhotoSweep does not collect, transmit, sell, or share any personal data. There is no account, no sign-in, no analytics, and no server. Every scan, fingerprint, size calculation, and duplicate comparison happens on your iPhone. Your photos and videos never leave the device through this app.
2. Who we are
PhotoSweep is developed by CS42.org (“we”, “us”). For any privacy question, contact hello@cs42.org.
3. Data we collect
None. We collect no personal data, no usage data, no device identifiers, no diagnostics, and no contact information. We do not build a profile of you, and we have no database in which one could exist. The expected App Store privacy label for PhotoSweep is Data Not Collected.
4. Permissions and why they are needed
| Permission | Requested | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Photo Library (read-write) | Yes, once | Read access lets the app list your photos and videos, calculate their sizes, and compare them for duplicates. Write access is required by iOS in order to move the items you select into Photos’ Recently Deleted album. |
| Camera | No | Never requested. |
| Microphone | No | Never requested. |
| Location services | No | Never requested. See section 6 regarding GPS data already embedded in your photos. |
| Contacts, Calendar, Health | No | Never requested. |
| Notifications | No | Never requested. |
| Tracking (ATT) | No | The App Tracking Transparency prompt never appears, because there is nothing to track. |
iOS lets you grant limited photo access instead of full access. PhotoSweep fully supports this: it will work on only the photos you selected, display a banner telling you it can see a subset, and offer a Manage button so you can change that selection at any time.
5. How your photos are processed
All processing is local. Specifically: file sizes are read from the photo library’s own resource metadata; duplicate candidates are grouped by media type, pixel dimensions, and duration; and photo comparison uses a perceptual fingerprint computed from a small grayscale thumbnail generated in memory. Those fingerprints exist only for the duration of a scan and are never written to disk, exported, or transmitted.
PhotoSweep has no share sheet, no export function, and no upload path. It never edits, re-encodes, renames, or moves your photos. The single write operation it performs is the deletion you explicitly confirm.
6. Location data in your photos
Many photos carry GPS coordinates recorded by the camera. When comparing two candidate duplicates, PhotoSweep reads those existing coordinates on device and checks only whether the two shots were taken within roughly 30 metres of each other — a signal that helps confirm they are the same shot. The app does not request location permission, does not track your location, does not store coordinates, and never transmits them.
7. Network activity
PhotoSweep contains no networking code of its own and communicates with no servers, analytics endpoints, or advertising networks. One indirect case is worth naming honestly: if you use iCloud Photos with “Optimize iPhone Storage”, some originals live in iCloud rather than on the device. When such a photo must be displayed at full resolution or fingerprinted, iOS itself fetches it from your iCloud account. That is Apple’s system service acting on your own account and your own file; we are not a party to it and receive nothing.
8. Data stored on your device
The app saves a small amount of its own bookkeeping in its private container: which items you have marked keep or trash (stored as the identifiers iOS assigns to those items, plus their sizes, so the Trash list survives quitting the app), and your sound-effects and haptics preferences. This never leaves the device and is deleted when you delete the app.
9. Third parties
There are none. PhotoSweep ships with zero third-party dependencies: no analytics SDK, no advertising SDK, no crash reporter, no attribution framework, no A/B testing service. No data is shared with anyone because none is collected and there is no channel to share it through.
10. Children’s privacy
PhotoSweep is rated suitable for all ages and collects no data from anyone, including children. It contains no ads, no in-app purchases, no external links to user-generated content, and no communication features.
11. Deletion and recovery
When you confirm a deletion, iOS presents its own confirmation dialog and then moves the items to Photos’ Recently Deleted album, where they remain recoverable for approximately 30 days. Emptying that album is a separate action you perform in the Photos app; after it, recovery is not possible through PhotoSweep or by us. We never hold a copy of any photo, so we cannot restore anything on your behalf.
12. Your rights
Data-protection rights such as access, correction, portability, and erasure apply to data a company holds about you. We hold none, so there is nothing for us to disclose, correct, export, or erase. Deleting the app removes everything it stored locally. If you would like this stated in writing for your own records, email us and we will confirm it.
13. Apple App Store
Downloading PhotoSweep from the App Store involves Apple, not us. Apple may collect information about that transaction and may provide us with aggregate, non-identifying statistics such as download counts and crash aggregates through App Store Connect. That processing is governed by Apple’s Privacy Policy. Aggregate figures shown to us contain no information that identifies you.
14. Security
Because no data is transmitted or stored off-device, there is no server-side breach surface. On the device, your photos remain under iOS’s own protection and the app’s local preferences sit inside its sandboxed container.
15. Changes to this policy
If this policy changes, the updated version will be published on this page with a new “Last updated” date. Material changes — for example, if a future version ever introduced an optional network feature — would be described clearly, and any such feature would be opt-in.
16. Contact
Questions about this policy: hello@cs42.org. We reply to privacy questions personally, usually within 48 hours.