Your training is yours. Workouts, food, bodyweight and weigh-ins are stored on your iPhone and are never uploaded anywhere.
One part of the app is shared on purpose: if you choose a username, your ranked lifts appear on a leaderboard your friends can see. Choosing a username is the opt-in, and it starts with your lifts being shared. You can change what it shows, or turn it off and delete it, from inside the app at any time.
The app shows a banner ad, served by Google AdMob. That is the one thing in here that involves another company, and iOS asks your permission before it can use anything that follows you between apps. You can say no, and the app works exactly the same.
There is no analytics software in this app and I receive no report of what you do in it. Nothing you log is ever sent to an advertiser.
Log My Lift is made by Matthew Baker, an independent developer, under the name Baker Innovation and Technology Solutions (BITS). If you need to reach a person about anything on this page, email [email protected].
All of this is stored in the app's own database on your device. It is never sent to me, and it is never sent to anyone else:
If you delete the app, all of it is deleted with it. It is included in your iPhone backups, which are yours and are covered by Apple's privacy policy, not this one.
The app is completely usable without any of this. You never have to pick a username, and nothing below happens until you do.
Choosing a username publishes it, and only it, so friends can find you. Your real name is not published. Usernames are stored in a public database that Apple operates as part of iCloud, called CloudKit, in an area belonging to this app.
Once you have a username, the app publishes, for each ranked lift: the exercise name, your estimated one-rep max, your best set's rep count, and the set it came from, for example 225 × 5. That is the setting you start with, not one you have to switch on, so if you would rather share nothing, turn it off in Compete once you have picked your username.
If you choose pound-for-pound instead, it publishes a single ratio, rounded to two decimals, and nothing else. Never both. Your bodyweight itself is never published in either mode, because a ratio published beside the numbers it came from would give your bodyweight away exactly. That is why the two modes cannot be on at the same time, and why the ratio is rounded before it leaves.
Turning sharing off removes what was published.
To put friends on a leaderboard the app has to ask the public database for their numbers, and to ask it has to name them. So when the Compete screen loads, the usernames of the friends you added are sent to CloudKit as the question "what has any of these people posted for this exercise". Nothing about you goes with it and nothing is stored by the asking. It is worth knowing anyway, because it means the usernames on your friends list reach Apple's servers even though the list itself never leaves your phone.
You can send a friend a workout, ask them for one, or propose a time to train together. Those messages contain who sent it, who it is for, and either a workout (its name, its exercises and how many sets each) or a date and time. There is no message box: you cannot type a sentence to somebody. What you can send is a workout, and a workout carries names you typed yourself, so those names do reach the person you send them to and are checked against a content filter before they go and again when they arrive. Messages are removed automatically about 30 days after they are sent.
If you report someone, the app records the username you reported, your username, and the reason you wrote, so I can act on it. Once sent, a report can be read only by me. It is not shown back to you anywhere in the app, nobody else can read it, and it is not listed alongside your profile. A report is also the one thing that outlives deleting your profile: it has to, or reporting somebody and then deleting your profile would erase the complaint, which is how a report system gets gamed. See the next section.
On a finished workout you can tap share and hand it to anything on your phone: Messages, Mail, Notes, another app entirely. That makes a summary, or a picture of one, containing the workout's name, its exercises, and the sets, weights and reps you did. Nothing happens until you pick where it goes, and once you have picked, it is in that app's hands and covered by that app's privacy policy, not this one. The same is true of the invite link for adding a friend, which contains your username.
If you add a Log My Lift widget, iOS runs it as a separate small program that cannot reach the app's database. So the app writes the handful of numbers the widgets show into a small file that both can read: your most recent bodyweight and recent weigh-ins, and today's calories against your goal.
That file is on your iPhone, inside the app's own storage, and is not uploaded anywhere. The thing to know is not where it lives but where it shows: a widget on your lock screen is readable by anyone who picks your phone up, without unlocking it. If your bodyweight is not something you want visible like that, do not add that widget, or remove it. Deleting the app deletes the file with it.
Open Profile and use Delete my profile. It removes your username, your published numbers and your messages from the public database, and frees the username for someone else. Your workouts, food and weigh-ins are untouched, because they were never part of it. They stay on your iPhone.
One thing is kept: any report you filed about another lifter stays, with the username you used at the time. That is deliberate, for the reason in the section above. If you want a report of yours removed as well, email me and I will remove it by hand.
The app can photograph a nutrition label and read the numbers off it. That happens entirely on your iPhone using Apple's built-in text recognition. The photo is not uploaded, not sent to any service, and not saved. The app reads the numbers, fills in the form, and the image is gone.
You can also point it at a label you already photographed, with Choose a photo. The picker that opens is run by iOS, not by this app, and that distinction is the whole point: the app cannot see your photo library. It never asks for access to it, iOS never shows it to the app, and the app is handed the single image you picked and nothing else. That image is read the same way, on your phone, and is not uploaded or kept either.
The app shows one banner, served by Google AdMob. It is how a free app with no subscription pays for itself. Everything below is what actually happens, rather than what a privacy policy usually says about advertising.
To decide which ad to show and to count that it was shown, Google's software receives from your device: your device model and iOS version, your rough region, your language, the fact that it was this app asking, and, only if you allow it, Apple's advertising identifier, which is a number iOS gives to apps and which you can reset or switch off at any time in Settings. Google's own description of this is in its Business Data Responsibility and partner sites pages.
Nothing you log. Not a workout, not a set, not a weight, not a food, not your username, not your friends. The advertising code has no access to the app's database and is never handed anything out of it. It is a rectangle at the bottom of the screen with no view into the rest of the app.
The first time it matters, iOS asks whether Log My Lift may track you across other companies' apps and websites. Say no and nothing follows you. You still get a banner, it is just chosen without knowing anything about you. Nothing in the app is withheld, nagged for, or degraded because you declined. You can change the answer later in Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking, and you can turn tracking off for every app at once in the same place.
iOS 14.5 and later require that prompt before any app may use the advertising identifier. If you have already told iOS to refuse all tracking, the prompt does not appear and the answer is no.
If you buy the ad-free option, Apple handles the whole transaction. I never see your card, your billing address or your name. All the app is told is whether this Apple Account owns the purchase, which is a yes or a no and nothing else. That answer is what switches the banner off, and it follows your Apple Account to any device you sign in on.
The shared parts of the app run on Apple's CloudKit. Apple stores those records and, to keep the feature honest, tells the app which iCloud account created a record so that nobody can send a message pretending to be your friend. That identifier is meaningless outside this app and is not linked to your name or email. Apple's handling of it is covered by Apple's privacy policy.
Log My Lift is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect anything from them. The advertising is configured with a ceiling on what the banner may show: creatives rated for a teen audience or below are allowed, and mature-audience creatives are not eligible at all. That setting is applied before the advertising code starts, not afterwards.
If what the app does with data changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top changes too. Anything significant, advertising in particular, will be described here before it ships.
Questions, corrections, or a request to remove something: [email protected]. It is one person reading these, so please allow a few days. Reports of another lifter are the exception and are acted on within 72 hours.