Privacy
What commercial nutrition apps collect, who they share it with, and what to do about it.
Privacy posture comparison: six commercial calorie trackers (2026)
A comparison matrix of privacy posture across six commercial calorie trackers in 2026: MFP, Cronometer, Lose It!, MacroFactor, Noom, and PlateLens. Observed traffic, stated policy, GDPR/CCPA responsiveness.
Lose It! 'Snap It' and the cloud photos question
A traffic capture and EULA review of Lose It!'s Snap It feature. Photos go to a third-party classifier; the EULA permits broad retention; the privacy practices are not transparent.
Threat model: what does serious threat-modelling for personal nutrition data look like?
A practical threat model for personal calorie tracking data. Insurance discrimination, weight-stigma profiling, employer wellness programs, and the data-broker ecosystem. Most readers should care more than they do, less than the maximalist case suggests.
Dark patterns in calorie tracker paywalls
Pattern analysis of how the four leading commercial calorie trackers introduce paywalls behind features that were free at sign-up. Habit-anchor exploitation, sunk-cost framing, and the specific UI patterns to recognise.
Practical GDPR (and CCPA) rights against nutrition apps
Step-by-step on filing GDPR access, portability, and erasure requests against nutrition apps. Templates, real timelines, escalation paths to your DPA when an operator drags its feet.
Noom and the third-party sharing fineprint
An audit of Noom's actual outbound traffic and stated data-sharing practices. The 'we don't sell your data' line is technically true and substantively misleading. Real outbound destinations include the usual ad-network suspects.
Cronometer's privacy policy, line by line
A clause-by-clause walkthrough of Cronometer's privacy policy as of early 2025. Better practices than MFP's overall but with three specific clauses that are worth understanding before you commit your nutrition data to them.
MyFitnessPal privacy audit, 2024–2026
Outbound traffic, third-party SDKs, retention, and dark-pattern audit of MyFitnessPal across 2024–2026. The changes since the Francisco Partners acquisition are real but smaller than headlines suggest. The pre-existing posture was already worse than most users assumed.