Privacy policy

Hinted asks to see your photos only if you choose to find gift ideas in your screenshots. Then it looks only at your screenshots from the last 12 months, on your phone, and none of the screenshots it looks through, or their text, leaves your phone unless you save it. Choosing a photo goes through the system’s own picker, which hands the app only the photo you choose. The camera asks for camera access. If you have allowed Hinted to see all your photos, saving from the screenshot banner opens your newest screenshot straight away, with no picker. That screenshot is then treated like one you add on the capture tab.

Recognizing the text in a screenshot happens on your device. Once you have allowed auto-fill, that recognized text, never the image, is sent to our server to fill the product, the price and the brand in for you. When you add a screenshot on the capture tab, its text is sent as soon as you pick it — before you decide whether to keep the idea — so the text of an idea you go on to discard has already been sent. When you import screenshots while setting up, or sort what the screenshot scan found, only the ones you keep are sent. The image itself is uploaded only for ideas you keep, so it can be shown back to you and to whoever opens a hint list built from it.

With a paid plan, Hinted also keeps the full-size original of a screenshot you save to an idea, stored privately, so you can look at it at full size later. When you delete an idea, its images, including any original, are removed within 48 hours. If your paid plan ends, originals are deleted after 30 days, and your other images stay. Deleting your account removes your images too, apart from those on the people, ideas and hint lists that stay with your household’s owner.

Signing in stores your email address. Turning on reminders stores a notification token for your device. Both go with your account when you delete it.

Opening a hint list sets a cookie, so the page can remember what was claimed on that device, and records that the list was viewed. Claiming a hint can include a first name. Asking for a reminder stores an email address, which is used for that reminder and nothing else. If that address belongs to a Hinted account in the list owner’s household that has registered a device for notifications, the reminder may arrive as a notification instead of an email. All of it is stored until the list is deleted or the owner of the household deletes their account. Opening a list creates no Hinted account.

Claiming also records a time. The list’s owner sees it only as a number of days, never what was claimed or by whom.

If you choose WhatsApp instead, Hinted stores your WhatsApp number for those reminders and nothing else. The list owner never sees it.

We delete the number about a day after the last reminder has gone. If WhatsApp reminders are paused, the number stays until they start again and the last one has gone.

If you never tap Yes, or WhatsApp can’t reach the number, we delete it within about a week. If you reply STOP, we delete it at once and never message it again.

After the last reminder or a STOP, we keep a code made from the number with a secret key, so we can’t read the number without that key. We also keep which list it was for, its country and its language. We keep these until the list is deleted or the owner of the household deletes their account. The code of a stopped number stays after that, so we never message that number again.

We also keep a record of each message for checking costs: its country, its WhatsApp message id and whether it went through, never the number. This record stays after the list is deleted.

The recognized text of a screenshot or photo, never the image, once you have allowed auto-fill (on the capture tab, before you keep the idea; when you import screenshots while setting up, or sort what the screenshot scan found, only the ones you keep), or the title and description text of a link’s page, is sent to our server, and from there, through Vercel AI Gateway, to a third-party language model — currently google/gemini-2.5-flash-lite — that fills in details like the product, the price and the brand. Only that text goes to the model; the screenshot or photo itself is never sent to it. There is one exception, for a shop link only. When a shop’s link and page give no product name, we send the shop’s own product picture to the model so it can read the name. We fetch that picture from the shop’s own image server, and it is never one of your pictures. This is the step that turns raw text into a tidy idea card instead of a wall of OCR output.

The app asks before the first auto-fill, and nothing is sent to the model until you allow it. If you allowed auto-fill when these words did not yet mention the shop’s picture, the app asks you again before it sends one. Until you allow it, it asks at most once each time you open the app. You can turn auto-fill off at any time in Settings, after which nothing more is sent.

With your permission, the same model also writes a one-line description of your gifting habits for your gifting profile, from counts only: no names, no ideas, no prices. When you ask, it also writes a short “What they love” summary for one person from the titles and shops of the ideas you saved for them. Both are stored until you turn auto-fill off, when they are deleted, or until you delete your account. The “What they love” summary is shown only to you and the people in your household and never appears in anything you share. The one-line description appears on your profile image only if you choose to share that image. If you share a household, the “What they love” summary goes only when the owner of the household turns auto-fill off or deletes their account. A summary only you can see goes when you turn auto-fill off.

When you ask for gift suggestions for someone, and only after you have allowed auto-fill, we send that person’s age or age group, how they relate to you, your budget, the country the person lives in (or yours, if you left it as the same) to pick shops, the occasion, their “What they love” summary, the names of up to ten ideas you saved for them, up to five you bought and five you gave them, the suggestions a new set replaces, the languages to write in, and what you wrote or picked about what they love, through Vercel AI Gateway, to a third-party language model — currently anthropic/claude-haiku-4.5. On a day we are holding AI costs down, the same details go to anthropic/claude-haiku-5.5, another Claude model. Their star sign goes only if you turned star signs on. We never send the person’s name, your notes, links, prices or any picture. What you wrote or picked goes only after you, or someone who shares your household, agree to the sentence that names it, and we take out their name, email addresses, phone numbers and links first. The suggestions are stored so you can open them again, are shown only to you and the people in your household, and never appear on a hint list or in anything you share. The ones you asked for are deleted when you turn auto-fill off or delete your account.

What you write or pick about what someone loves stays with that person in your account. It is shown only to you and the people in your household, never appears on a hint list, in an email or in anything you share, is part of your data export, and is deleted when you delete your account.

We never ask for or store your religion. Which gift days you switch on, such as Diwali or Christmas, is seen only by you and your household, and is never used for ads or sent to analytics or AI. If you add a gift day to someone’s dates, its name shows wherever that date shows, including on a hint list you share and in the reminders sent to people who open that list. If a person’s next date is Christmas, the word Christmas goes with the request for suggestions. Any other gift day goes only as “custom”, never by name.

Hinted runs on a small set of outside services, each doing one job. Naming every one of them, including the two that are easy to miss:

• Vercel — hosting, the image storage an uploaded idea photo lives in, the AI Gateway above, and the scheduled jobs that send reminders and clean up deleted accounts.
• Neon — the Postgres database that stores your account and everything you add to it: people, occasions and ideas.
• RevenueCat — manages subscriptions and renewals.
• Resend — sends the emails Hinted sends, including reminder emails to a partner.
• Meta (WhatsApp) — delivers the WhatsApp reminders you ask for.
• Expo Push — delivers the push notifications Hinted sends to your phone.
• PostHog — counts how the app is used, on servers in the EU, under an id with no name attached. Events from the app say which kind of phone they came from, your App Store country, the language the app is in, your phone’s language setting and its time zone, the app’s version and the screen size. Which gift days you switch on is never included. If you use the screenshot scan, it also counts exactly how many you kept from each batch, never what is in them.
• Sentry — receives crash reports so problems can be found and fixed.
• Apple and Google — sign-in providers, used only if you choose to sign in with one of them.

The people and occasions you track — a partner, a parent, a friend, a child — are not Hinted users and never agreed to anything. You are responsible for what you record about them. Hinted does not contact them on its own, does not build a profile of anyone beyond what you save and what auto-fill writes from it if you ask, and uses their information only to show it back to you and to whoever opens a hint list you choose to share, to remind you and, if you allow auto-fill, to write a “What they love” summary and suggest gifts.

If you add people from Contacts, Hinted keeps only the names and birthdays you pick. Nothing else from Contacts is read or stored. Hinted uses the system contact picker, which hands over only the people you pick: each name and birthday and nothing else, so no phone numbers, emails, addresses, photos or notes. Hinted never reads Contacts without your choosing, and it asks for no Contacts permission.

Some of the people you add are children. South Africa’s POPIA gives a child’s information extra protection. A name is all you need to add anyone, adult or child. Anything more, such as a relationship, a birthday, a budget, a country, a star sign or what they love, is up to you. Hinted uses it to remind you what to get and by when, and to suggest gifts if you ask for them, which sends the details listed above to a language model. When you ask for suggestions, we take the person’s own name out of what we send. A name can still go if it is part of an idea’s title or a screenshot’s text.

A hint list’s web link is unlisted, not private — anyone holding the link can open it, the same way a shared document link works. Claims made on a hint list are hidden from the list’s own owner at the server level, not only in what the interface shows, so the person a list is for can never see what has already been claimed for them.

We also store when you first copied your hint list link and when something on it was first claimed, never what, to show how many days it took.

Deleting your account is a hard delete. Your account and everything in it — people, occasions, ideas — is removed from the database as part of the request itself, not queued for later. The compressed images you uploaded are held in separate storage that has to be swept by a scheduled job, which clears them within 48 hours.

If you share a household and you are not its owner, everything its owner can see stays with its owner. Your own list, and anything only you could see, is deleted with your account.

Past analytics events stay in PostHog under an id with no name attached. Your purchase record stays with RevenueCat and Apple, and crash reports stay with Sentry until they age out.

Your data is stored in Neon Postgres, in the EU (Frankfurt) region — the closest region to South Africa that is inside the European Union. Hinted is operated from South Africa, so POPIA governs how it handles your information, and this policy is written to meet GDPR’s transparency requirements as well, for anyone reading it from the EU or the UK.

A material change to this policy is reflected here, with the date above updated to match. Version 1.0 has no separate notification mechanism for a policy change — checking back here is the way to know.