Privacy Policy
This policy is short because SweepBin collects almost nothing. Your photos and videos never leave your phone. The app was designed that way from the start.
1. Who we are
SweepBin (the app and this website, sweepbin.app) is operated by J2DIGITAL (Pty) Ltd, trading as SweepBin, a private company registered in South Africa (registration number 2026/636581/07). Our registered office is 18 Sandown Road, Unit D12 Montego Bay, Cape Town, Western Cape, 7441, South Africa.
For the purposes of the Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 ("POPIA"), we are the responsible party for the personal information described in this policy. Our Information Officer is Juan Jonck, reachable at privacy@sweepbin.app.
In this policy "we", "us" and "our" mean J2DIGITAL (Pty) Ltd. "You" means the person using SweepBin.
2. The short version
Your photos and videos never leave your device. That covers the images themselves, thumbnails, filenames, where they are stored, their EXIF data (including where a photo was taken), and even the identifiers your phone uses for them.
SweepBin reads your library on your phone, shows you your own photos, and deletes the ones you confirm. Nothing about any individual photo is ever sent anywhere.
What SweepBin does send, when it has an internet connection, is counts and totals: how many items you have deleted, how many bytes that freed, which achievement badges you have unlocked, how many of today's free swipes you have used, and the country your phone is set to. None of these numbers can be traced back to a photo, because no photo is ever described in what we receive.
3. Permissions the app asks for
SweepBin asks for one kind of permission: access to your photos and videos. It needs it to show you your library, measure how much space each item uses, mark items as favourites when you swipe up, and delete the items you confirm.
| Platform | Permission | What it's used for |
|---|---|---|
| iPhone | Photos (full or limited access) | Show your photos and videos, set Favourites, and delete what you confirm. If you choose "Limited Access", SweepBin works with only the items you have selected. |
| Android | Photos and videos ( READ_MEDIA_IMAGES, READ_MEDIA_VIDEO) |
Show your photos and videos and measure their size. Deletion always goes through Android's own confirmation prompt. |
SweepBin does not ask for access to photo locations, your camera, microphone, contacts, calendar, location or notifications, and it does not ask to track you across other apps. On Android the microphone and audio permissions that the video player would normally bring in are specifically removed.
You can change or withdraw photo access at any time in your phone's settings. SweepBin cannot work without it, but withdrawing it removes nothing from our servers because nothing about your photos was ever there.
4. What stays on your phone
The following is stored only on your device, in the app's private storage, and is removed when you uninstall the app:
- Your keep, delete and favourite decisions, so a sweep can be resumed and undone.
- A record of items you have deleted, used to calculate your lifetime total and your achievements.
- A cache of file sizes, so the app does not have to measure the same photo twice.
- Fingerprints used to spot duplicates and near-identical shots (see below).
- Your daily swipe allowance and a random identifier for this installation (see below).
- Your sign-in session, so you stay signed in.
Finding duplicates and similar shots
When you open Duplicates & similar, SweepBin works out which photos are copies of each other, and which are near-identical shots taken seconds apart. To do that it makes a small fingerprint of each photo, on your phone:
- a 64-bit summary of a tiny, blurred thumbnail, which is enough to tell that two shots look alike and nothing more; and
- for photos that might be exact copies, a checksum of the file, which only matches a byte-for-byte copy.
Fingerprints are stored only on your phone, are never sent anywhere, and are erased with the rest of SweepBin's data when you delete your account or uninstall. SweepBin does not recognise faces, people, objects, places or text in your photos, and it never downloads a photo from iCloud to check it.
5. What is sent to our servers
SweepBin uses a small online service so your progress survives a lost or replaced phone, and so the free daily allowance works. This is the complete list of what it receives:
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| An anonymous account identifier | Created automatically the first time you open the app, so it works without any sign-up. |
| Total bytes freed and number of items removed | Your lifetime stats. |
| A random identifier for this installation | So two phones on one account don't overwrite each other's totals. It is a random value the app creates itself. It is not a hardware, vendor or advertising identifier. |
| Which achievement badges you have unlocked | So they survive a reinstall. |
| The country in your phone's region setting (for example, South Africa) | To tell you how your total compares with other SweepBin users in your country, as one line such as “You’ve cleared more than 82% of SweepBin users in South Africa”. It comes from the region in your phone’s settings, never from location services. Nobody else is shown your total or your rank, and there is no list of users. Where too few people share a country, the comparison is with all users instead. |
| How many swipes you have used today, and your daily streak | To run the free daily allowance. The day is decided by our server, not your phone. |
| A scrambled device key | So the free daily allowance belongs to the phone as well as the account, and reinstalling or switching accounts doesn't reset it. It is a one-way hash (SHA-256) of an identifier that stays the same when the app is reinstalled: Android's per-app device ID, or on iPhone a value SweepBin keeps in your phone's Keychain. The original identifier never leaves your phone, and the hash can't be turned back into it. It is not your advertising identifier, and it is used for nothing else. |
| A notification address, only if you turn notifications on | So SweepBin can send you the occasional reminder or news. It is an address for SweepBin on your phone, issued through Apple or Google, and tied to your account so a message reaches only people who said yes. Turning notifications off in the app, signing out or deleting your account removes it. |
| Your email address, only if you choose to add one | So you can sign back into the same account. Never required. |
Technical information
Like any online service, when the app connects our hosting provider automatically records technical details of the connection: your IP address, the type of device and operating system, and the time of the request. These records are used only to keep the service secure and working, and to stop abuse. We do not use them to build a profile of you, and they are kept only for the provider's standard log period.
6. What we never collect
- Your photos or videos, in whole or in part
- Thumbnails or previews
- Filenames, file paths, URIs or media identifiers
- EXIF data, including the location where a photo was taken
- Contacts, calendar, camera, microphone or location data (the country above comes from your phone’s region setting, not from its location)
- Your advertising identifier
- Anything from iCloud, Google Photos or any other cloud account. SweepBin never signs into one.
The share card. When you tap Share, SweepBin creates an image showing your totals (for example, space freed) and hands it to your phone's share sheet. It never contains a photo. Where it goes after that is up to you and the app you share it with.
7. Email and signing in
Adding an email is optional. If you add one, we send it a one-time sign-in code so you can confirm it's yours and use it to sign in again later, for example on a new phone. We use your email address only for sign-in codes and for replying to messages you send us. We do not send marketing email and we do not share your address with anyone for their own use.
8. Purchases
SweepBin Pro is a once-off in-app purchase handled entirely by Apple (App Store) or Google (Google Play). We use RevenueCat to confirm purchases. We never see your card or payment details. All we receive is whether your account is entitled to Pro, together with an anonymous purchase record from the store. RevenueCat knows your SweepBin account only by its random account ID, so that Pro follows you to another phone you sign in on; it never receives your email.
9. Service providers and where your information is processed
We use a small number of providers ("operators" under POPIA) that process information on our behalf and only on our instructions:
| Provider | What it does | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Stores the account, counts and totals listed above, and handles sign-in | European Union (Ireland) |
| Resend | Delivers sign-in code emails, only if you add an email | United States |
| Expo (650 Industries) | Delivers notifications to Apple and Google, only if you turn them on | United States |
| RevenueCat | Confirms in-app purchases | United States |
| Apple / Google | App distribution and payments, under their own privacy policies | Global |
| Cloudflare | Hosts this website and forwards email sent to @sweepbin.app addresses | Global |
Some of these providers are outside South Africa. Where personal information is transferred across borders, we rely on providers that are bound by agreements, or by laws such as the EU GDPR, that give it protection substantially similar to POPIA, as section 72 of POPIA requires. We do not sell your information and we do not share it with anyone for advertising.
10. Why we process it
- To provide the app you asked for: your account, your stats, your achievements, how your total compares in your country, and restoring Pro.
- To run the free daily allowance fairly and to keep the service secure and free of abuse. These are our legitimate interests.
- With your consent, for your email address. You can withdraw that consent by asking us to remove it.
- To meet legal obligations, for example tax records for purchases, which the stores handle.
11. No tracking, ads or analytics
SweepBin contains no advertising, no advertising or tracking SDKs, and no third-party analytics. It does not track you across other apps or websites, which is why it never shows Apple's "Allow tracking?" prompt.
This website sets no cookies and runs no analytics. Our host, Cloudflare, processes visitors' IP addresses to deliver the site and protect it from attacks.
If we ever add crash reporting to help fix bugs, we will update this policy before it ships and describe exactly what it sends.
12. How long we keep it
- On your phone: until you uninstall the app.
- On our servers: for as long as your account exists. Deleting your account in the app removes it, and everything stored with it, immediately (see below).
- Connection logs: for the hosting provider's standard log period only.
- The notification address: until you turn notifications off, sign out, delete your account, or uninstall (we remove addresses Apple or Google report as no longer valid).
- The scrambled device key and its daily swipe count: 7 days. Deleting your account removes its link to the key straight away; the count itself stays until it expires, so that deleting an account can't be used to reset the day.
An anonymous account is not linked to your name, email or phone. If you uninstall without adding an email, the account can no longer be reached from any device, and what's left is a handful of counts that don't identify anyone.
13. Security
All communication between the app and our servers is encrypted (HTTPS). Every row in our database is locked to its own account, so one user cannot read another's data, and the data itself is limited to counts and totals. We regularly check these protections by testing them directly, not by assuming they work.
If a security breach ever affects your personal information, we will notify you and the Information Regulator as POPIA requires.
14. Your rights
Under POPIA (and, if you are in the EU or UK, the GDPR) you have the right to:
- Access: ask what information we hold about you and get a copy.
- Correction: ask us to correct information that is wrong.
- Deletion: delete your account and everything stored against it. You can do this yourself, at any time, inside the app.
- Objection: object to processing based on our legitimate interests.
- Withdraw consent: for example, have your email address removed.
Delete your account in the app: open SweepBin, go to Account, and tap Delete account. This immediately and permanently deletes your account and everything stored with it on our server, including your email address if you added one, and erases everything SweepBin stored on your phone. Your photos and videos are not touched. If you bought Pro, it belongs to your App Store or Google Play account and can be restored afterwards.
For any other request, or if you can't use the app, email privacy@sweepbin.app. If you added an email to your account, send it from that address so we can find your account. We respond within 30 days.
Uninstalling the app also deletes everything stored on your phone straight away.
If you are unhappy with how we handle your information, please tell us first so we can fix it. You also have the right to complain to the Information Regulator (South Africa): inforegulator.org.za, enquiries@inforegulator.org.za.
15. Children
SweepBin is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18 beyond the anonymous counts described above, which do not identify anyone. If you believe a child has added an email address, contact us and we will delete it.
16. Changes to this policy
If we change what SweepBin collects, we will update this page and change the date at the top. For any change that collects something new, the app will tell you before the change takes effect. We will never apply a change retroactively to information we already hold.
17. Contact
Information Officer: Juan Jonck
Email: privacy@sweepbin.app
Post: J2DIGITAL (Pty) Ltd, 18 Sandown Road, Unit D12 Montego Bay, Cape Town,
Western Cape, 7441, South Africa