WonkyCam is a camera app for iPhone and iPad: funny live effects, photo strips, GIFs, boomerangs and video. This policy describes what the app actually does with information, starting with the things people ask about most: their pictures and their faces.
It describes the app's real behaviour rather than a general template. Where a statement is enforced by the way the app is built rather than by a promise, it says so.
The short version
- Your photos and videos stay on your device unless you share, save or print them.
- WonkyCam does not collect face data. It does not detect, measure, recognize or identify faces.
- There is no account, no advertising and no tracking across other companies' apps. Optional diagnostics never include pictures, and you can turn them off.
1. Your photos, videos and strips
They stay on your device. WonkyCam has no account, no server and no upload. Captures are written to your device's storage and, if you allow it, to your Photos library.
We never receive them. The app never sends a picture, a frame, a thumbnail, a filename or anything derived from a picture to us or to any third party on its own.
Pictures leave your device only when you send them, using a control you tapped:
- the system share sheet (Messages, Mail, AirDrop, or any app you choose),
- saving to your Photos library, which iCloud Photos may then sync if you have turned it on in your device's settings,
- printing over AirPrint.
In each case the picture goes where you sent it, and what happens to it there is governed by that service, not by us.
2. Camera and microphone
The camera is used to show the live preview and take the picture. The microphone is used only while recording a video clip, and only if you have allowed the app to use it. There is no in-app setting that turns video sound off; declining the microphone in the system Settings app is what does that, and the app then records silently and tells you it is doing so.
Neither is streamed anywhere. Frames are processed on the device — the effects run on the device's own GPU — and are discarded unless you capture them.
The app asks for these with the system permission prompts. You can withdraw either at any time in the system Settings app; the app continues to work with whatever you allow, and tells you plainly what it cannot do.
3. Photos library
If you allow access, the app saves captures to an album and shows your saved captures in its own gallery. It reads only what it needs to show that gallery and to let you build a strip from photos you choose.
If you choose Limited access, the app works with the photos you selected and says so rather than showing an empty gallery that looks like data loss. If you decline, captures stay inside the app.
4. Face data
4.1 What face data WonkyCam collects
None. WonkyCam does not collect face data. It does not use face detection, facial landmarks, face recognition, face tracking, the TrueDepth camera or ARKit face tracking, and it does not create face geometry, face prints, face templates or any other biometric identifier.
Your pictures can of course show faces, because they are pictures of people. Those pictures are covered by section 1: they are processed on your device and kept only where you save them.
4.2 How the effects work without face data
Warps, mirrors, colour looks and the other live effects change the picture itself. They run on the device's GPU and do not locate a face.
Backdrop looks use Apple's on-device person segmentation (part of Apple's Vision framework) to separate the people in the frame from the background, so the background can be replaced. This produces a temporary outline of where people are in that one frame. The outline is not face data: it contains no facial features or measurements and cannot be used to recognize anyone.
4.3 Use, storage and retention
The outline is made on your device and used only to draw the frame you are looking at or capturing. It is held in memory only while that frame is drawn and is then discarded. It is never written to storage, never saved with your pictures, never included in diagnostics and never sent anywhere.
4.4 Sharing
No face data, and no person outline, is shared with us or with any third party, including Google Firebase (section 5). There is nothing to share, because nothing is kept.
4.5 Deletion
There is nothing to delete, because nothing is retained. Pictures you chose to save can be deleted as described in section 9.
5. Diagnostics and usage analytics
This is the only information the app sends on its own, and it is the reason this policy does not say "nothing leaves your device".
What is sent
The app uses Google Firebase Analytics while Share diagnostics is on, which it is by default. Firebase automatically collects:
- an app-instance identifier (a random identifier for the installation, not for you, and reset if you delete the app),
- device model and operating-system version,
- language and region,
- an approximate location derived from your IP address, no more precise than a region,
- session counts and durations.
In addition, the app records a small, fixed vocabulary of product events — opening the app, a first run, a screen being shown, a capture being attempted, completed or failing, a capture mode or Auto being selected, an effect being applied or favourited, a category being chosen, a strip being built, the share sheet or printing being opened, an error, and launch or hang measurements — with parameters such as which capture mode was used, which effect was chosen, how many photos were in a strip, and how long something took.
What is never sent
No photo, video, frame, thumbnail, filename, face data, person outline or text you typed.
This is structural rather than a promise. Every event the app can record is drawn from a fixed list of event names and a fixed list of parameter names, each of which can hold only a preset value, a whole number or a true/false flag. There is no case in that vocabulary capable of carrying free-form content about a person or a picture.
Turning it off
Settings ▸ Privacy ▸ Share diagnostics. Switching it off stops both the app's own events and Firebase's automatic collection, not merely the first. The setting is read before every single event, so turning it off takes effect immediately rather than at the next launch.
Who else is involved
Google acts as a data processor for this information. Its handling is described at https://firebase.google.com/support/privacy and https://policies.google.com/privacy.
We do not sell this information and do not share it with advertisers. The app contains no advertising SDK, does not access the advertising identifier and does not track you across other companies' apps and websites, which is why it does not ask for App Tracking Transparency permission.
6. Crash and performance reports
The app subscribes to Apple's MetricKit, which delivers an on-device summary of launch times, hangs and crashes. The app records only aggregate numbers from it — an average launch time, an average hang time, and a count of crashes, hangs or disk-write problems from the previous run — as diagnostics events, under the same Share diagnostics switch above.
Separately, Apple may send crash reports to us if you have opted into sharing analytics with app developers in your device's own Settings. That is Apple's collection under Apple's consent, not ours, and you can change it in Settings ▸ Privacy & Security ▸ Analytics & Improvements.
7. Purchases
WonkyCam is free and has no in-app purchases. The app does not ask for or receive payment information. If purchases are added in a future version, Apple will process them and this policy will be updated first.
8. Children
WonkyCam is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect personal information from them. It has no accounts, no messaging, no user-to-user features and no advertising.
9. Retention and deletion
- Live camera frames and person outlines: held in memory only while a frame is drawn, then discarded.
- Pictures you saved to Photos: kept until you delete them in the Photos app. Deleting WonkyCam does not delete them. Photos keeps deleted items in Recently Deleted for up to 30 days, and iCloud Photos follows your Apple settings.
- Temporary files inside the app: while a strip, GIF or video is being made and saved, the app writes a temporary file and removes it once the save succeeds. If saving to Photos fails, the app keeps the capture so you can try again or discard it. A copy prepared for sharing is kept in the app's cache for about a day, so the app you shared to can finish reading it, and is removed the next time you share after that. iOS may also clear these files at any time, and deleting the app removes all of them.
- Settings: stored on your device until you delete the app.
- Diagnostics: kept by Google for the retention period set in the app's Google Analytics settings, no longer than 14 months, and then deleted. Turning Share diagnostics off stops new data from being sent. Deleting the app removes the installation identifier from your device, but it does not delete diagnostics that were already sent; those expire under the retention period.
10. Your rights
Depending on where you live you may have rights to access, correct, delete or restrict the use of personal information, and to object to it. We hold no account, name, email address or picture of yours. Diagnostics are keyed only to a random installation identifier that the app does not display, so we usually cannot find them from an email address alone. The practical controls are the Share diagnostics switch and deleting the app. If you want something explained, confirmed or deleted, write to us and we will do what we can and tell you plainly if we cannot.
11. Changes to this policy
If this policy changes materially, this page will be updated and the date at the top will change. Material changes to what is collected will also be described in the app's release notes.
12. Contact
WonkyCam is developed by the publisher named on its App Store listing. This policy covers the iPhone and iPad versions of the app, which share a single App Store record.