Privacy policy

Last updated: 13 November 2026

In short

Etala has no account, no sign-in and no Etala server. Your lists are on your device and in your own iCloud. We (the people who make Etala) never receive them and cannot see them.
There is no analytics, no advertising, no tracking and no third-party SDK in the app.
To do its job the app talks to a few outside services directly from your device: Apple (iCloud and the App Store), the shops whose pages you save, two shop-logo services, and Google when you choose to search. Each is described below.
The only information about you we ever receive is what you choose to send us, for example by email.

Who is responsible

Etala is made by Slipstream Dev. For anything in this policy, email support@etala.app.

What Etala stores, and where

Everything you put in Etala (items, their links, notes, photos, prices and price history, target prices, tags, lists and settings) is stored on your iPhone. If you are signed in to iCloud, the app also keeps a copy in your own iCloud account, in Apple's CloudKit private database, so your lists appear on your other devices and survive a new phone. That copy is between you and Apple: we have no access to it. It counts towards your iCloud storage, and Apple's handling of it is covered by Apple's privacy policy (apple.com/legal/privacy).

A few things stay on the device only: shop logos the app has downloaded, the list of people you have blocked, and the browsing data of the in-app shopping browser (see below).

Shared lists

You can share a list with people you invite, using Apple's iCloud sharing. There are no public links: only people the owner invites can join.

What the people on a list see. Everything on the shared list: each item's title, link, note, photo, shop, price, priority, timeframe, availability, price history and whether it has been bought. They also see your name as iCloud shows it to them; Apple's sharing screens handle that.
Where it is stored. A shared list lives in the list owner's iCloud, and is synced through Apple to the devices of the people on it. It stays there until the owner deletes it or stops sharing it.
What stays private. Your own target price and tags on a shared item are never shared. They stay in your own iCloud private database, and no one else on the list can see them.
Price checks. Any participant's device may check the price and stock of a shared item at the shop and record the result on the list, for everyone.
Ending it. When the owner stops sharing, the list goes back to being the owner's private list and disappears for everyone else. When you leave a shared list, or it is deleted, your own target prices and tags on its items are deleted too.
Photos from others. If you have turned on Apple's Sensitive Content Warning or Communication Safety, photos other people add are checked on your device, and flagged ones are blurred until you tap to show them. Nothing is sent anywhere for this.

If you report a shared list or item (see "Reporting" below), your email app opens a message to us; nothing is sent until you send it.

What the app sends over the internet

Etala has no server of its own. These are all the places the app connects to, and what they receive. Each of them, like any website, also sees your device's IP address and the technical details of the request, and handles them under its own privacy policy. None of these requests include your lists, your Apple Account or any identifier for you.

Apple iCloud, to sync your lists and shared lists. Apple also sends the app silent notifications when a shared list changes, so it can fetch the change.
The shops whose pages you save. To read an item's price and stock, your device loads the item's page directly from the shop, just as a browser would, together with the product's photo and sometimes the shop's icon. A plain page load identifies itself as Etala. Some shops only show a price to a full browser; for those, while the app is open, it loads the page in a hidden browser that identifies itself as a standard iPhone web browser. Either way the app keeps no cookies between checks, so a shop cannot link one check to the next. This happens when you add an item, when you refresh, and in the background when iOS allows it. It is never done by a server.
Shop logos. To show a shop's logo, the app may ask Logo.dev (logo.dev) or Google's public favicon service for the logo of the shop's web address (for example ikea.com). Only that address is sent: no item, no list, no cookies. Logos are kept on the device so each shop is asked about rarely.
Google, only when you choose to search. "Compare elsewhere" opens Google Shopping in a browser inside the app, searching for the item's barcode number or, if it has none, its brand and name. Searching the web for a gift idea or a scanned barcode opens Google in Safari with just that idea or number. The in-app browser keeps its own cookies (such as your Google consent choice) between visits, separate from Safari; "Clear browsing data" in its menu deletes them. The app only reads the page's address and title in that browser, never what you type or the page's contents. Google's handling is covered by Google's privacy policy (policies.google.com/privacy).
Safari, when you tap to buy or open an item's page. From then on you are on the shop's website, under its own terms and privacy policy.
The App Store, to show the price of Etala Premium, to buy it, and to check on your device that you own it.

Apple Intelligence and the camera

Features such as tag suggestions, gift ideas, reading a product's name and estimating a price from a page's text use Apple Intelligence, which runs on your device. When you scan a barcode or read a product's name from a photo, the camera image is processed on your device too. None of this is sent to us or to anyone else.

Notifications and background checks

Target-price, back-in-stock, cheaper-elsewhere and shared-list activity alerts are created on your device and shown as local notifications. They are not sent through any server of ours. Background price checks run when iOS gives the app time, and you can turn them and each kind of alert off in Settings in the app or in iOS.

Backups and exports

If iCloud Drive is on, once a day, when you leave the app after making changes, the app saves a copy of your lists to iCloud Drive › Etala › Backups. It keeps the last 7, plus one a month for 6 months, and deletes older ones. These files are in your iCloud Drive, not ours, and they stay even if you delete the app. You can also export a backup file yourself, and restore from a file, under Settings › Backups. What you do with an exported file is up to you.

Affiliate links

Some shop links may earn Etala a small commission when you buy, at no cost to you. It never changes the price you pay or which shops we show.

How it works: when you open a shop's page to buy, and that shop runs an affiliate programme Etala has joined, the app adds Etala's affiliate ID to the link as a parameter (for example ?tag=…). There is no redirect service in between and no click tracking of our own: only the shop sees the visit, and it tells us, at most, that a sale came from Etala. Links you save or share are never changed, and a link that already carries someone else's ID keeps it. At the moment no affiliate programmes are active, so no links are changed.

Etala Premium

Etala Premium is a one-time purchase made through Apple's App Store. Apple takes the payment and handles your payment details; we receive only Apple's standard sales reports, which do not tell us who you are. The app checks that you own Premium on your device, with Apple.

No analytics, no tracking, no ads

The app contains no analytics, crash-reporting, advertising or tracking code, does not read your advertising identifier, and does not follow you across other apps or websites. Nothing is sold. If you have chosen to share crash reports with developers in iOS Settings, Apple may pass us anonymous crash reports under Apple's own terms.

This website

This website sets no cookies and has no analytics or third-party scripts. If you switch between light and dark, your choice is kept in your browser's local storage, on your device; it is never sent to us. The site is hosted by Cloudflare, which processes each request (including your IP address) to deliver the page and may keep short-lived technical logs under its own privacy policy (cloudflare.com/privacypolicy). Our own code records only the page address that was requested and, when an App Store button is pressed, which button it was. These records contain nothing about you.

Email you send us

If you email us for help, or to report a shared list, we receive your email address and whatever you write. A report from the app is prefilled with the list's and item's IDs, the owner's iCloud record ID and the app version, and nothing else from the list; we cannot see list contents, so describe what is wrong. We use your email only to answer it and deal with what you raised, and keep it no longer than needed for that.

Children

Etala is not directed at children, and it collects no information from anyone, children included.

Deleting your data

Because your data is in your hands, you delete it yourself:

Delete items and lists in the app. A deleted list is removed from your iCloud too.
Leave a shared list from its menu, or, as its owner, stop sharing or delete it.
Deleting the app removes what is on that device. The copy in your iCloud stays, so it comes back if you reinstall. To remove it, go to iOS Settings › [your name] › iCloud › Manage Account Storage (the exact wording differs between iOS versions).
Delete backups in the Files app, under iCloud Drive › Etala › Backups.
Clear the in-app browser's cookies with "Clear browsing data" in its menu.

Legal basis

For readers in the EU, UK and similar regimes: we do not collect or hold your lists, so for most of what this policy describes there is nothing for us to process. Where we do handle personal information, it is:

Email you send us, which we handle to answer you and to act on reports (our legitimate interest in supporting the app and keeping shared lists safe, and, where you ask about something you bought, our agreement with you).
Website requests, which Cloudflare processes for us to deliver the site and keep it secure (our legitimate interest).

Apple, Google, Logo.dev and the shops receive requests directly from your device when you use the features above, and are each responsible for what they do with them. Some of them process information outside the European Economic Area, for example in the United States.

Your rights

You have the right to ask for a copy of personal information we hold about you, to have it corrected or deleted, to restrict or object to how we use it, and to take it with you. Since we do not hold your lists, you exercise most of these directly: everything is in the app, in your iCloud and in your backups, where you can export, change or delete it at any time. For anything we do hold, such as an email you sent, write to support@etala.app and we will answer within a month. You can also complain to a data protection authority, in particular the one in the country where you live or work.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top will change and the new version will be published here. If a change affects what the app sends or to whom, it will be published before the version of the app that does it.

Contact

Questions about privacy: support@etala.app.