A Better Health AppYour data rights
Last updated 3 August 2026 · UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018
Health data is a special category under UK GDPR — the most protected class there is. This page sets out the lawful basis for holding it, what rights you have, and how to use them. The privacy policy describes what is stored; this page is about your control over it.
Who is responsible
A Better Health App is the data controller for the information you put into it. It is an independent product, not a company with a data protection officer, and requests are handled by a person rather than a department — which in practice means a faster answer than the law requires.
Contact: privacy@abetterhealthapp.com
Lawful basis
Processing of your health data rests on your explicit consent under Article 9(2)(a). You give it when you create an account and choose what to track, and — this is the part that matters — you can withdraw it at any time, in whole or in part.
Consent here is granular rather than all-or-nothing. Each category — food, symptoms, sleep, medication, mood, and the rest — can be switched off individually. Switching one off is a genuine withdrawal: it stops being collected, stops appearing in any score or summary, and stops being sent to any analysis. It is not merely hidden from view.
What is processed, and why
| Data | Why | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Food, symptoms, sleep, medication, mood you log | To show you your own record and its patterns | Explicit consent |
| Height, weight, age, sex | To scale nutrition targets to you rather than to an average | Explicit consent |
| Apple Health data you connect | Sleep, heart rate, steps and workouts, if you choose to connect it | Explicit consent |
| Passkey credential | To sign you in | Contract — the service cannot work without it |
| Product barcodes and nutrition you contribute | A shared catalogue so others' scans succeed | Consent, per contribution. Contains nothing personal. |
There is no analytics, no advertising identifier, no tracking SDK, and no profiling for marketing. Your data is not sold, shared or used to train any third party's model.
Automated decision-making
The app produces scores and written summaries automatically. These are not decisions with legal or similarly significant effects under Article 22 — nothing is granted or refused to you on their basis. They are descriptions of your own diary, and every one of them can be opened to show the arithmetic behind it.
The written summaries are generated by a model running on your own device (see nerdy stuff). Your diary is not transmitted to produce them.
Your rights
- Access
- Everything held about you is visible inside the app, in full, without asking anyone — Settings → All data shows every table and every row.
- Portability
- Export the lot as a single machine-readable file whenever you want. No request, no waiting period.
- Rectification
- Edit any entry at any time. Corrections are recorded rather than overwriting history silently, so the record stays auditable.
- Erasure
- Delete your account and everything in it. Because each person has their own database, erasure means that database is destroyed — not a row marked deleted in a shared table. You will be offered an export first, and asked to confirm by typing, because it cannot be undone.
- Restriction and objection
- Switch off any category to stop its processing while keeping the rest. Switch off server-side processing entirely with on-device-only mode.
- Withdraw consent
- At any time, without giving a reason, and without losing access to what you have already recorded.
Most of these need no request at all — they are buttons in the app, which is the point. Where you do need to ask, the legal deadline is one month and the intention is considerably sooner.
Retention
Your data is kept until you delete it. There is no automatic expiry: a health diary loses its value if it silently discards last year, and the trends depend on history. Delete your account and it goes, including from backups within 30 days as the backup rotation completes.
Where it is stored
Data is held in the UK and EEA. Where any processor is used outside that area, transfers rely on UK adequacy regulations or the International Data Transfer Addendum. Apple Health data connected on your device is processed by Apple under its own terms before it reaches this app.
Security
A separate database per person, with its own credential. Passkeys rather than passwords, so there is no password to breach. The service that shows you your data is structurally incapable of writing to it, and the service that writes cannot read anything back. Encrypted in transit and at rest.
Breaches
A breach affecting your data would be reported to the Information Commissioner's Office within 72 hours where required, and to you directly and promptly where there is a high risk to you.
Complaints
Raise it with privacy@abetterhealthapp.com first — it will be answered. If you are not satisfied you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.