Scamby is not released yet. If you have found this page and have a question anyway, write to hello@scamby.app.
No, and this is the most important thing on the page. “No match” means this particular picture is not on the list Scamby carries. A scammer using a photograph nobody has reported yet produces no match at all, and so does a photograph cropped or rotated past recognition. Treat a clean result as the absence of evidence, not as evidence of absence.
No. The list is of images that have been reported, not of people. A match means this picture has appeared somewhere it was reported from — and very often the person in the photograph is themselves a victim, whose pictures were taken from a public account and reused. A match is a reason to be careful with the account showing it, never a judgement about the face.
Because that means uploading someone's photograph, plus the fact that you are suspicious of it, to a company that keeps both. Scamby uploads a 64-bit fingerprint instead — eight bytes, from which no picture can be reconstructed — and the service that answers has no account, no log and no way to tie a request to a person.
Yes. The shared database lives on a server, and checking an image sends that image's fingerprint to it. Earlier versions of this page described an app that worked entirely offline with the database bundled inside it; that changed, and the privacy policy says exactly what the server receives and what it keeps. Your pictures and any text in them still never leave your device.
Scamby Plus is $4.99 a year, renewing automatically until you cancel. That pays for the shared database and the lookup service. Manage or cancel it from Settings on your device, or at your Apple Account subscriptions — cancelling is exactly as easy as subscribing.
No, and there is not one to make. Your subscription is checked on your device against the receipt Apple signs; the Scamby service is never told anything about your Apple Account. That is deliberate — an account would make every image you check attributable to you.
Yes — resizing and re-saving barely move the fingerprint. A screenshot with a thick band of app furniture around the picture is harder, because the border counts as part of the image; cropping to just the photograph helps. Trimming borders automatically is on the list.
Handled. Flipping an image horizontally changes the fingerprint as much as swapping it for an unrelated photograph, so Scamby checks every image both ways round. When a match only appears flipped, it tells you — flipping is a deliberate act.
Images are still fingerprinted and text is still read, both on your device — but the check cannot be made, and Scamby says so. It will never show an unchecked image as “no match”: “could not be checked” and “no match” are different answers and the app keeps them apart.
iPhone and iPad on iOS 18 or later, and Mac on macOS 15 or later. Scamby is available in the United States, in English.
Issues and the full source are at github.com/proclaim-dev/scamby. The reasoning behind the fingerprinting, including the measured limits, is in the repository's documentation rather than summarised away.
