Chic helps you decide what to buy for yourself and your family. To do that we hold some information about your preferences, and sometimes about your health. This page says exactly what we hold, why, who else touches it, how long we keep it, and how to get rid of it. If anything here is unclear, ask us and we will fix the wording.
The short version. Your preferences live on your device by default. They only reach our servers if you create an account and explicitly agree. We never sell your data, and your data is never used to train AI models. You can delete everything, permanently, from inside the app.
Who we are
Chic is operated by Block by Block Holdings, Inc., 1521 Concord Pike, Ste. 301, Wilmington, Delaware 19803, United States. We are the data controller for the information described here. Contact: [email protected].
Chic is available to people in the European Union and the United Kingdom, so we apply the GDPR and UK GDPR to everyone's data regardless of where you or we are located.
What we collect, and why
| What | Why | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Your preferences (ingredients you avoid, allow, or want flagged), and the profiles you set up for the people you shop for | This is the product. It is what a label is checked against. | On your device. On our servers only if you create an account. |
| Profile details you choose to enter, such as whether you are pregnant or nursing, and a child's birthday | To make a read relevant to your life stage rather than generic. | Same as above. Optional — the app works without them. |
| Labels you scan: the photo, the extracted text, and the resulting read | To give you the read, and to improve how well we recognise ingredients. | Our servers. |
| Questions you ask Chic, and the answers given | To answer you, and to understand what people need help with. | Our servers, if you have an account and agreed to the AI feature. |
| Your email address | To save your account and send you a sign-in code. | Our servers. Stored apart from your preferences. |
| Basic usage events (a scan happened, a screen opened, an error occurred) and app version | To find bugs and see which parts of the product actually help. | Our servers. |
We do not use advertising trackers, and we do not build advertising profiles.
Health information, and why we ask outright
Some of what you tell Chic can reveal something about health: an allergy, a sensitivity, a pregnancy, a child's age. Under the GDPR this is a special category of personal data and needs your explicit consent, not a buried checkbox. That is why, when you create an account, we ask you to tick a box confirming you want these preferences saved to your account. If you do not tick it, we do not save your preference list to your account, and the app still works on your device.
Scan records, and why we keep them
There is one thing we record even without that tick, and we would rather spell it out than let you find it later. Every time Chic reads a label, we save a record of that read — what was scanned, what the verdict was, and which of your preferences it matched. We keep the matched preferences because it is the only way to check our own work: if Chic ever tells someone “It’s Chic” when it should not have, that record is what lets us find it, prove it, and fix it. Without it we would be asking you to trust a verdict we could not audit.
These records are tied to your device, not to your name, and we do not use them to build a profile of you or share them for advertising. If you delete your account, we remove the matched preferences from every one of those records and keep only the anonymous shape of the read — the verdict, and whether the label was fully readable — so we can keep measuring how accurate Chic is without holding anything personal about you. Our reasoning: keeping a scan trail for someone who has left would be holding health-related data we no longer have a reason to hold, while the anonymous accuracy record costs you nothing.
The AI answer feature
When you ask Chic a question, we send the following to our AI provider so it can write an answer that fits you:
- a short, compact summary of the preferences relevant to your question;
- the relevant life-stage details from your profile, if you have entered any;
- your question as you typed it.
We do not send your name, your email address, or your account identifier. Your question is sent as you wrote it, so please keep in mind that anything you type is included.
Our AI provider is Anthropic, who process this on our behalf as a data processor under contract. Your data is not used to train AI models.
We ask for your agreement the first time you use this feature. That agreement is stored on your account and covers every profile in it, so you are not asked again on another device. You can ask us to withdraw it at any time.
The verdict on a product is always produced by our own deterministic rules engine, not by the AI. The AI explains, guides, and helps you decide what to look at. Chic offers educational decision support, not medical advice.
Who else processes your data
- Cloudflare — hosting, database, and file storage.
- Google Cloud — reading text from label photos, and translation.
- Anthropic — the AI answer feature described above.
Each acts as a processor on our instructions under a data processing agreement. We are a US company and some processing happens outside the EEA and the UK; where it does, it is covered by the transfer safeguards in those agreements, such as the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses.
Legal bases
- Consent — saving health-inferable preferences to your account, and the AI answer feature. You can withdraw either.
- Contract — running the account you asked us to create and syncing your preferences to it.
- Legitimate interests — keeping the service working and secure, fixing bugs, and improving how well we recognise ingredients.
How long we keep it
- Your account, preferences, and profiles — until you delete them.
- Your questions and answers — until you delete your account.
- Scans — kept while they are useful for improving ingredient recognition.
- Usage events and error reports — kept, but detached from you when you delete your account.
Deleting your data
You can delete your account from inside the app, under the account screen. It asks for a fresh emailed code first, so nobody else can do it for you. When you delete:
- your email, your preferences, your profiles, and your consent records are permanently deleted;
- your questions, the context that was used to answer them, and the answers themselves are permanently erased;
- what remains is a stripped, anonymous record that cannot identify you — for example, that a question in the "food" category was asked on a date and whether the answer helped. We keep this to understand what people need, and it can no longer be linked back to you or to your device.
Your rights
If you are in the EU or UK you can ask us to give you a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, restrict how we use it, or object to our use of it, and you can withdraw a consent you gave. Email [email protected] and we will respond within one month. You can also complain to your local data protection authority.
Children
Chic is for adults. You may set up a profile describing a child you shop for; that profile is about your shopping decisions and is yours, not an account for the child. We do not knowingly create accounts for children.
Changes to this policy
This page carries a version. If we change something that affects what you agreed to, we ask you again in the app rather than quietly relying on your old agreement.