Scamby has no account, collects no personal information, and never uploads your pictures. What it does send is one 64-bit fingerprint per image you check. This page says exactly what that means, and what it does not mean.
When you check an image, Scamby sends a 64-bit perceptual fingerprint of it — and a second one of its mirror image, because flipping a photo horizontally defeats the first — to the lookup service, which replies with whether anything in the shared database is close. That request contains two things: the name of the fingerprinting algorithm, and the fingerprints. There is no field for anything else, and only one file in the app is permitted to make a network request at all.
A fingerprint is not reversible. Nobody can reconstruct a face, or any part of the picture, from eight bytes. What a fingerprint can do is confirm that an image you already have was checked by somebody.
If you report a picture, that request carries the fingerprint and two labels chosen from fixed lists — where you saw it, and what happened, which you may decline to answer. There is no box to type in anywhere in the app, because free text is where a name ends up, and it would be the one part of a report stored centrally and shown to strangers. The service refuses a label it does not already know.
If you tell us a picture is yours, that request carries the fingerprint and nothing else — no name, no email address, no proof. See a picture of me is in Scamby.
The service receives your fingerprints and, as with any connection over the internet, the IP address the request comes from. It keeps neither. There is no access log, no record of lookups, no per-image counter, and the database schema has nowhere to store any of it. Its abuse protection counts requests against a salted digest of the address, with the salt replaced regularly and never written down, so that even the rate limiter cannot be turned into a record of who connected.
We want to be clear about the kind of claim that is. Everything in the sections above is enforced by the app's own code and can be verified from its published source. This paragraph describes the behaviour of software running on a server. It is open and auditable, but it is a promise rather than a guarantee, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.
Scamby Plus is verified on your device, against the receipt Apple signs. Nothing about your Apple Account, your subscription, or any transaction identifier is sent to Scamby's service — which is why the service has no way to associate a lookup with a subscriber, or with anyone at all.
Purchases are handled entirely by Apple. We never see your payment details. Manage or cancel from Settings on your device, or at your Apple Account subscriptions.
No accounts, no sign-in, no email address, no analytics or telemetry of any kind, no third-party SDKs, no advertising identifier, no crash reporting service, no cookies, and no contact, location, camera, microphone or health access. Scamby asks for the photos you choose, and nothing else; the picker runs outside the app and hands back only your selection, so Scamby never sees the rest of your library.
Scamby's database is a list of images that have been reused, not a list of people, and a match is never a statement about anyone's character — usually the person in a reused photograph is the one it was taken from. You can tell us, in the app or by email, without proving anything. What that does, and what it deliberately does not do, is a page of its own.
Scamby is not directed at children and collects no information from anyone, of any age.
No analytics, no cookies, no forms, and no JavaScript of ours. The pages are static files. The only third party is Google Fonts, which serves the typeface; the site's Content-Security-Policy permits the font host and blocks everything else, including scripts.
The site is served by Cloudflare, which keeps standard request logs as any host does. We do not read them for anything beyond keeping the site up, and we have no way to connect a visit to a person.
If this policy changes in a way that matters, the change is visible in the repository's history alongside the code that implements it. This page was rewritten when the shared database moved from inside the app to a server — before that, Scamby made no network requests at all, and saying so is more useful to you than quietly updating the text.
Last updated 27 October 2026.
