Last updated: July 2026 · Effective: July 2026 · Developer: João Henriques
Fonzi does not create user accounts, does not collect your name or email address, and does not sell your data to anyone. This policy explains the limited data the app uses to function.
1. What Fonzi Does Fonzi is a recycling guide for Portugal. It uses your camera and location to identify items and tell you where and how to recycle them. It works with ecopontos, ecocentros, mobile collection points, Electrão, Humana, Volta, VALORMED and other services.
2. Camera When you scan an item, the image is sent to Anthropic's Claude Vision API to identify what the item is and how to recycle it. Fonzi does not store images on its servers. Images are processed by Anthropic and subject to Anthropic's Privacy Policy (anthropic.com/privacy). Camera access is only used when you actively start a scan. No background camera access occurs. If you save a scanned item to your Saved list, a small copy of the photo is kept on your device only — it is never uploaded — until you delete the item.
3. Location Fonzi uses your device location to show nearby ecopontos, ecocentros and collection points on the map, detect your municipality to show relevant recycling rules and bin colours, and calculate distances to collection points. Precise GPS coordinates are used locally on your device and are not sent to Fonzi's servers. Your detected municipality name (e.g. "Lisboa", "Porto") is sent with text queries so the recycling answer can take local rules into account, and is stored alongside the query in our text query cache (see the Text query cache section). Municipality names alone don't identify you — many users share each municipality, and no user identifier is ever attached. You can use the app without granting location permission — some features will be limited.
4. User Reports ("Is this info outdated?") If you tap "Is this info outdated?" on a result card, Fonzi sends the following to its database: the report type, the municipality name, the disposal type that was flagged, and the app version. No personal information is collected with these reports. They are used solely to improve data accuracy.
5. Text Query Cache Text queries you submit through "Type instead" — like "plastic bottle" or "old phone" — are sent to our server, processed by Claude AI, and the answer is stored in a cache so the next person asking the same thing gets an instant reply.
We store:
The normalised query text (lowercased and accent-stripped) The language (English or Portuguese) Your detected municipality name, if any (e.g. "Lisboa", "Porto") Claude's answer (recycling classification, bin colour, tip text) We never store a user identifier, your name, device ID, IP address, or precise GPS coordinates.
The cache is hosted in the European Union (Frankfurt) by Supabase. We process it under the legitimate interest legal basis (GDPR Article 6(1)(f)). The legitimate interest is keeping Fonzi fast, free, and ad-free, while managing the cost of the underlying AI service.
You can object to this processing at any time (GDPR Article 21) — in practice, since the cache holds no identifier that links a query to you, the most effective way is to stop using "Type instead". For broader objections, email us at the address below.
Queries that mention sensitive categories — health items, medicines, intimate hygiene, religious objects, racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, trade union membership, or sexual orientation — are processed by Claude to give you the right answer, but are never written to the cache.
Cached entries expire automatically after 90 days of inactivity, and rarely-used entries (fewer than 3 hits within 30 days) are removed sooner. Only Fonzi's server reads the cache.
6. Analytics & Advertising Fonzi contains no third-party analytics SDKs, no cross-app trackers, and no advertising.
We do log anonymous scan metadata to a database we control. For each scan we store the item name Claude returned, the bin colour and disposal type, your municipality name (if your GPS gives one), the model used and the latency of the call, and whether you flagged the answer as wrong (with the reason you picked).
We never log a user identifier, your name, device ID, IP address, precise GPS coordinates, or the photo itself.
The database is hosted in the European Union (Frankfurt) by Supabase. We process it under the legitimate interest legal basis (GDPR Article 6(1)(f)) — the same basis as the text cache. The legitimate interest is improving recycling accuracy and reliability by understanding what the app misclassifies. You can object to this processing at any time (GDPR Article 21) by emailing us.
Fonzi does include one third-party error-monitoring SDK: Sentry (Functional Software, Inc.). If a scan fails with a technical error, the iOS app sends Sentry a report so we can fix the bug: the type of failure (network, server, or an unreadable AI response — including a short excerpt of that response), a random per-scan ID, the app version, and your device model and OS version. These reports never include your name, your photo, your location, your IP address, or any user identifier. Sentry hosts them in the European Union (Frankfurt), keeps them for 90 days, and processes them only on our behalf, under the same legal basis (GDPR Article 6(1)(f)) and with the same right to object (GDPR Article 21).
7. Data We Do Not Collect Fonzi does not collect your name, email address, or any account information, your precise location history, photos or images beyond processing them in real time, device identifiers linked to personal information, or payment information. Items you save for later — including any notes, photos, and reminder times you add — are stored only on your device and are never sent to Fonzi's servers. Saved photos are excluded from device backups. Deleting a saved item (or uninstalling the app) deletes its data. Reminders and the optional weekly recap are local notifications scheduled on your device — Fonzi has no push notification server and never receives a push token.
8. Third-Party Services Fonzi uses the following third-party services to function: