Effective 4 November 2026. Published by Harold Sachs.
Examine Metadata collects no personal data. It has no internet permission, so Android does not let it connect to anything: it cannot send your photos, their metadata or anything else to us or to anyone. It has no accounts, no ads, no analytics and no crash reporting.
What the app reads. The app opens only the photos you give it, by choosing them in the app or sharing them to it. It reads them on your phone to show what they contain. It asks you for one permission, access to the location in your photos (ACCESS_MEDIA_LOCATION), because Android otherwise hides that location from apps. The app uses it only to show you where a photo was taken.
What the app stores. A clean copy is written to the app's private storage on your phone. It is deleted when you close the photo, or the next time the app starts, if Android closed it first. A copy you shared is kept a little longer, so the app you shared it with has time to read it: it is deleted the next time Examine Metadata starts, once it is more than an hour old. If you tap Save to Photos, the copy is saved in your Pictures folder, where it stays until you delete it. The app also keeps a few counters that choose which headline to show next and how many photos you have sanitized for free, and the names and times of copies it handed out, so it knows when to delete them. None of this is included in cloud backups or copied when you move to a new phone.
What leaves the app, and only when you ask. When you share a clean copy, it goes to the app you choose, under that app's own privacy terms. When you tap Open in Maps, the photo's coordinates go to your map app, which may look them up online and keep them in its history. When you send a problem report, your email app sends what you wrote, the app version, the Android version and the phone model to us. We use them only to answer you and fix the problem.
Your original photos are never changed.
The app is not directed at children and collects nothing from anyone.
If this policy changes, the new version will be published in the app and on its store page with a new effective date.