Dogoos privacy policy

The app needs an account, because a household shares its dogs across more than one phone. Reading a dog's mood sends the video and its audio to Google's Gemini model; the clip is deleted from your phone once the read finishes and is never uploaded to our storage, but it does leave your device to be analysed. What we keep is the result of the read, one small keepsake still, and whatever you type in yourself.

There is no advertising in Dogoos, nothing is sold or shared with data brokers, and nothing about your dog is used to train anyone's model.

Signing in uses Firebase Authentication, with an email address and password, a Google account, or Sign in with Apple on iOS. We hold the account identifier, the email address attached to it, and your display name. If you sign in with Apple's private relay address, that relay address is all we ever see.

You are also asked for the country you are in. It is a free-text field used to make the assistant's suggestions sensible — food brands, vet conventions, units — and it is not used to locate you. The app does not request location permission and does not read GPS.

When you record a read, the clip and its audio are sent to Google's Gemini model through Firebase AI Logic. They travel inside the analysis request itself rather than being uploaded to a file store first, and they are sent together with the dog's profile — its name, breed, age, and anything you have written in its health notes — because the model produces a much better read when it knows what it is looking at.

Once the read comes back, the clip is deleted from your device. It is never uploaded to our Cloud Storage, we keep no copy of it, and it does not appear anywhere in the app afterwards. What survives the read is the structured result and a single still frame, described in the next section.

Google processes the request to return the result and, under the terms that apply to the Gemini API used here, does not use it to train its models. If you would rather a clip were never analysed, do not take the read — there is no way to produce a mood read without sending the video, and the app does not pretend otherwise.

Your data lives in Google Cloud Firestore under your account, and in Cloud Storage for images. The processing functions that support the app run in Google Cloud's us-central1 region, in the United States.

Reads are kept as a record so the monthly story and the trends over time can be built from reads that actually happened rather than estimated. One still frame per read is kept as a keepsake, downscaled to at most 900 pixels wide.

Ask Rex is a chat assistant, and what you type into it is sent to Google's Gemini model in the same way a read is. So is the information it needs to answer — if you ask about your dog's recent meals or how its week has gone, the relevant records go with the question, including entries from the health journal.

The assistant can also write to your records: logging a meal, a walk or a journal entry from a sentence is the point of it. Anything it writes is visible in the app and can be edited or removed like anything you entered yourself.

If you use voice rather than typing, speech is transcribed by your phone's own speech recognition. On most Android phones that is a Google service and is governed by Google's terms and your device settings, not by this policy.

A household lets more than one person look after the same dog. Everyone in a household can see its dogs, reads, keepsakes and health journal — that is what it is for, and it is worth understanding before you invite someone.

Each person keeps their own account and can leave. Photos are the exception to the shared-everything rule: only the person who captured one can delete it, so that leaving a household does not silently remove someone else's keepsakes.

The app uses Google Analytics for Firebase to understand which features are used, and Firebase Crashlytics to receive crash reports. Neither carries the contents of a read, a clip, a photo or a journal entry.

Analytics is on when you first install the app, and you can turn it off at any time in Settings under Privacy. Crash reporting is always on: when the app crashes it sends the technical details of the crash — device model, operating system version, and the internal stack trace — so the fault can be found and fixed.

The app also downloads its fonts from Google Fonts the first time it needs them, which discloses your device's IP address to Google in the same way that loading any web page from a font service would.

Subscriptions and one-off purchases are handled by Google Play Billing. Your card details go to Google and never reach us — we receive only the fact that a purchase is active, so the app knows what to unlock.

The app also reads Google Play's install referrer once, on first launch, which tells us which listing or campaign an install came from. It identifies the route in, not the person.

Scanning a food label reads the barcode on your device using Google ML Kit — the camera image is processed on the phone and is not sent anywhere. The barcode itself is then looked up in Open Pet Food Facts, an open database, which means that service sees the product code you scanned.

Firebase App Check runs in the background to confirm that requests are coming from a genuine copy of the app rather than a script. On installs from Google Play it uses the Play Integrity API.

Dogoos is written for adults looking after a dog and is not directed at children. The app does not currently ask your age, and we do not knowingly collect data from children.

If you believe a child has created an account, email us and we will delete it and everything attached to it.

Deletion is built into the app rather than being something you have to write in and ask for. You can remove a dog and everything recorded against it, or delete your account entirely, and both take effect immediately rather than being queued for review. You can also export your data as a file first.

One honest limitation: reads cannot be deleted one at a time. The records are written so that they cannot be altered after the fact — that is what makes a monthly story trustworthy — so an individual read is hidden rather than erased. Deleting the dog, or your account, removes them properly.

Some images the app has already shown you stay in its cache on your own device after you sign out. Clearing the app's storage in your phone's settings, or uninstalling it, removes those.

You have the right to ask what we hold about you, to have it corrected or deleted, to object to how it is used, and to have it in a portable form. The export and delete controls in the app cover most of that immediately; for anything else, email us and we will respond within one month.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

The date at the top of this page changes whenever the substance does, and this page is always the current version. Any change to what the app collects is a change to this text in the same release.