Privacy Policy

1 Who we are

CattleScale is operated by Origae, a sole trader based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia ("CattleScale", "we", "us"). We handle personal information in line with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles, whether or not the Act strictly applies to a business of our size.

This policy covers the CattleScale iOS app, the web version of the app it loads, and this website. Contact: nick.patterson@origae.dev.

2 There are no accounts

CattleScale has no sign in of any kind. We do not collect or hold your name, email address, phone number, postal address, date of birth, payment card details or any password.

A purchase is proved by a signed token that says only "one weighing has been paid for". It carries no identity. Apple takes the payment and never shows us your card or your Apple ID.

3 What we collect

This is the complete list. If it is not here, we do not collect it.

4 Why we collect it

• Photographs and what you type: to produce the assessment. That is their only use.
• The assessment we keep (section 6): so the weight you unlock is still there when you come back for it.
• The install number: to give each install one free weighing, and nothing else.
• Apple's purchase record: to confirm the purchase is real and unlock one weight.
• Your IP address: to limit requests per minute and to label scale-weight records.
• Scale weights you send: to measure and improve the accuracy of the estimate (section 12).

We do not use any of it for marketing, profiling or advertising.

5 Artificial intelligence

The assessment is produced by a large AI model that looks at pictures. Your photographs are sent over an encrypted connection to Google LLC, whose Gemini model reads them. If Gemini returns nothing usable, the same photographs are sent to OpenAI, L.L.C. instead. Both are United States companies. To reduce guesswork, we ask the model several times per assessment, so the same photographs are uploaded to that company more than once in a single request.

We use both companies' paid developer services. Under their published developer terms, photographs sent that way are not used to train their models. We have not opted in to any training use, and our software sets nothing that would allow it. Those terms belong to the companies and can change; we will update this policy if they change in a way that matters.

One thing the AI writes is kept. Along with the numbers, the model returns two to four sentences explaining how it reached its estimate. We store that text with the assessment for 30 days (section 6). It is about the animal, but nothing prevents it from mentioning something else that was in the picture.

The AI can be wrong. It can mistake the sex or breed of an animal, misjudge its condition, or produce a weight that is well out. Section 4 of the Terms of Service explains what that means for you.

6 How long we keep things

• Photographs: for the length of the request only. Never written to our disk or database.
• The assessment (the weight, the measurements, the valuation, the AI's short explanation, and the breed, sex and age the model reported): 30 days, then deleted automatically. This is kept for every assessment, paid or not, under a random 32-character code that only your phone holds. Nothing in it says who you are.
• Proof of purchase: 120 days. It records that one purchase was used on one assessment, so a single purchase cannot unlock a whole herd. It holds a scrambled version of the purchase number, not the number itself, and no identity.
• Scale weights you send: kept indefinitely, as part of the dataset used to improve the estimate. See section 12 for exactly what is in a record.
• Your install number: on your phone until you delete the app. Our server does not store it; it only uses it, once, to sign your free weighing.
• Server logs: our hosting provider keeps short-lived operational logs of requests. Our own log lines record errors, the weights involved, and the Apple purchase number of each verified purchase so a refund can be traced. They do not record IP addresses or photographs.

7 Who else handles your data

Only these, and only for the purpose named:

• Google LLC (United States). Its Gemini model reads your photographs to produce the assessment. See section 5.
• OpenAI, L.L.C. (United States). Reads your photographs as the backup, when Gemini returns nothing usable. See section 5.
• Apple Inc. (United States, operating worldwide). Processes purchases made in the iOS app under Apple's own privacy policy. Apple takes the payment; we never see your card or your Apple ID. Apple gives the app a signed purchase record. Our server reads four things from it: which product, whether it was refunded, the purchase number, and whether it was a test purchase. Our server also contacts Apple to check the record's signature is still valid.
• Vercel Inc. (United States). Runs our server. As at the date of this policy our server functions run in Vercel's Sydney region, so the photograph you upload lands in Australia before it is sent to the AI company. Vercel keeps its own short-lived request logs, which include IP addresses, as any host does.
• MongoDB, Inc. (United States). Stores the assessment, the proof of purchase and any scale weight you send, in a managed database. As at the date of this policy that database is hosted in Sydney, Australia. Photographs are never written to it, and nothing in it identifies you.
• Meat & Livestock Australia (Australia). We read published market indicators from MLA to turn a weight into a dollar figure. Nothing about you or your animal is ever sent to them.
• Google Fonts, on this website only. The pages you are reading load their typeface from Google's servers, so your browser sends Google an ordinary web request when you open them. The app itself does not do this: its typeface is bundled with it.

8 Overseas disclosure

Two different questions, with different answers.

By using CattleScale you consent to those overseas disclosures. Those companies are subject to the laws of their own countries, which differ from Australia's, and we do not have the ability to make them follow the Australian Privacy Principles. We have chosen them because their published terms match what this policy says.

For the record: an earlier version of this page said data was held in Australia while the server actually ran in the United States. The server moved to Sydney on 24 August 2026, and we would rather say that here than delete it.

9 Security

What is actually in place, not what would sound good:

• All traffic to our server is encrypted in transit (HTTPS). The iOS app refuses to load over anything else.
• There are no accounts, so there are no passwords to steal and no profile to leak.
• Purchase tokens and scale-weight tickets are signed with a secret key only our server holds, so a forged one cannot unlock anything or poison the dataset.
• Each assessment is filed under a random 32-character code. Without the code, which only your phone holds, it cannot be looked up.
• Every request is checked for size and shape before it is processed, and each address is limited to a set number of requests per minute.
• Photographs are never stored, so a breach of our database cannot expose them.
• The database is reachable only with credentials we hold. Its provider encrypts stored data by default; that is the provider's control, and we have not independently verified it.

No system is perfectly secure, and we will not claim otherwise. If a data breach occurs that is likely to result in serious harm, we will notify affected users and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner as required by the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme.

10 Your rights

You may ask to see personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, or complain about how we have handled it. Write to nick.patterson@origae.dev and we will respond within 30 days.

Be aware of what we can and cannot find. Because there are no accounts, we hold nothing that connects an assessment or a scale weight to a person. If you ask for "your data", the honest answer is usually that we cannot identify any, not that we are refusing. If you give us the assessment code from your phone, we can delete that assessment before its 30 days are up. Scale-weight records carry no code we can match to you, so they cannot be picked out for deletion.

11 Children

CattleScale is a tool for livestock producers and is not directed at children. Its App Store age rating of 4+ describes its content, not its audience. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16, and there is no account through which a child could give us any.

12 Scale weights you send us

After an assessment, the app lets you enter what the animal actually weighed on a scale. This is optional. It is how the estimate gets better, and it is the one piece of data we keep for good, so here is exactly what a record contains:

• The weight you typed.
• The numbers our server produced for that assessment: the estimated weight and range, the method used, the model's confidence, how many photographs and which scale references were used, and the sex, breed and rough age the model reported.
• The date and time we filed it.
• A 16-character scrambled label made from your IP address using a secret key. It lets us throw out one batch of bad submissions without discarding the whole dataset. It cannot be turned back into an address, by us or anyone else.

No photograph, no name, no install number and no purchase number is in the record.

By sending a scale weight you agree that we may keep that record indefinitely and use it, with the others, to test and improve the weight estimate, and that we may publish accuracy figures worked out from the whole dataset. Those figures are totals and averages; no single record is published. If we ever want to share the records themselves with anyone outside Origae, for example a research group, we will say so in this policy first.

13 Changes to this policy

We will update the date at the top when this changes. If a change materially affects how your photographs are handled, which AI company reads them, or where data is stored, we will say so in the app rather than quietly editing this page.

14 Contact and complaints

Origae, trading as CattleScale
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
nick.patterson@origae.dev

If you are unhappy with how we handle a privacy question or complaint, you can take it to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au.