Privacy policy

DealBox does not collect anything about you. There is no account to create and no analytics, telemetry, crash reporting or advertising code inside it, and the app never contacts anyone on its own. It makes a request only when you ask it to, and there are exactly two things you can ask (expanded in section 3 below). Your deals are files on your phone, in the same sense that a spreadsheet is.

That is short enough to be suspicious, so the rest of this page says exactly what the app stores, the requests it makes to the internet, and what they do and do not carry.

1. What we collect

Nothing. We operate no service that receives data from the app, so there is no database with your name in it, no log of what you looked at, and no profile of you anywhere. This is not a promise about how we behave with data we hold. We do not hold any.

The app contains no third-party software development kits, so there is also no analytics vendor, advertising network or crash reporter collecting anything on their own account. It is built on Apple's own frameworks and our code.

2. What the app stores on your device

Everything below lives inside the app's own storage on your phone. If you turn on iCloud sharing or iCloud Sync, your deals also travel through your own iCloud account exactly as Sections 7 and 9 describe. Nothing here goes anywhere else.

• The deals you create, including the figures you entered or confirmed, the title of each deal, and when it was created and changed.
• The criteria you set for yourself, which the app calls your DealBox.
• Which deals you have starred.
• Any photo you attach to a deal, stored resized.
• A screenshot you import is not stored. It is read once for its figures and discarded, whether the import succeeds, fails, or you back out. Nothing of the image is kept.
• Your first name, if you choose to type one during setup. It is used for the greeting on the home screen. Leaving it blank is supported and changes nothing else.
• The name of another user you share a deal with, if Apple’s iCloud gives the app one. It lets the app say who made a change instead of “Another user.” The app drops it once that share has ended, and leaves it out of the backup file the app exports. Section 7 says where it comes from.
• The email address or phone number you type when you send a copy of a deal to someone, so the app can show you who you already sent that deal to. Up to 20 per deal; past that, the oldest is dropped to make room for the newest. Each entry also expires three days after you send it, the same window the app gives an invitation itself, whether or not you clear it sooner, and it is left out of the backup file the app exports.
• Display preferences, such as appearance and home screen layout.

All of it lives in the app's container, which iOS keeps separate from other apps. Deleting DealBox deletes everything the app itself holds on this phone. If you turned on iCloud Sync, your deals also live in your own private iCloud storage, independently of the app being installed; deleting the app does not reach that copy, and Section 9 (and the last paragraphs of Section 11) describe how you remove it too. If you ever saved a deal summary as an image, that image sits in your photo library, outside the app's storage entirely; deleting the app does not remove it, and Section 5 says more about it. If you back up your iPhone, this data is part of that backup, under whatever settings you have chosen with Apple. We are not a party to that backup and cannot read it.

3. The requests the app makes, and what they send

The app never contacts anyone on its own. It makes a request only when you ask it to. Without iCloud sharing or iCloud Sync turned on, there are exactly two things you can ask, described below. If you turn on iCloud sharing there is a third, described in Section 7, and if you turn on iCloud Sync there is a fourth, described in Section 9. Both are off until you flip them on.

Reading a listing. If you paste a web address and ask the app to read it, it makes one request, for that one address, at that moment, directly from your phone. If the site redirects that request, it follows the redirect the way a browser would, so the site's own log shows the entries a redirect always produces. It does not crawl, follow links, revisit a page later, or fetch anything you did not ask for.

That request carries:

• The address you pasted.
• A User-Agent header that names the app: DealBox, with a short note that it is fetching one listing page because a buyer pasted its address. It does not claim to be a browser.
• Standard headers stating that it accepts HTML and prefers English.

It does not carry your name, your deals, your criteria, an account, a device identifier or anything else about you.

Sending us a message. Settings has "Report an issue" and "Request a feature." When you write a message there and tap Send, the app sends that message to us. It carries only what you typed, which of the two you chose, and an email address if you chose to add one so we can reply. If you leave the email blank, there is nothing for us to reply to and we will not know who you are. It carries none of your deals, your criteria, your name, or any identifier. Nothing is sent unless you write a message and send it.

One thing you should know. The site you asked the app to read will see your IP address in its own logs, exactly as it would if you opened the page in Safari. The request is sent directly from your device. There is no proxy and no server of ours in between, and it also means we cannot and do not shield your address from the site you chose. This is true of any request from your phone.

If a site refuses the request, that is the end of it. The app reports the refusal and does not retry under a different name.

4. What happens to the page it read

The page is parsed on your device. The app takes the page's own title, its description and the figures it can identify, and puts them in a form for you to check and correct before anything becomes a deal.

The web address itself is then discarded. It is used for the import and thrown away: it is not written into your deal, there is no field in the app that holds it, and it does not appear on anything the app can share. Neither does the name of the site it came from. This is deliberate, and it is enforced by the app not having anywhere to put it rather than by a rule someone has to remember.

5. Photos and screenshots

When you import an image, you can pick one from your photo library through the system photo picker, or paste one from the clipboard. In either case the app receives only the image you chose. DealBox is never granted access to browse your photo library.

Text in a screenshot is recognized on the device, using the text recognition built into iOS. No image is uploaded anywhere, and the image itself is discarded once its figures have been read. Only the figures you then confirm are saved, as part of the deal. If you want to keep the screenshot, keep it in Photos; the app does not hold a second copy.

The app asks for permission to add to your photo library only if you choose to save a deal summary as an image. That permission allows writing that one image. It does not allow reading anything. Once that image is written, it is an ordinary photo like any other: it stays in your library until you delete it yourself, it sits outside the app's own storage described in Section 2, and the app cannot see it, track it or remove it after the fact.

6. Exporting a deal as an image, PDF or text

You can turn a deal into an image, a PDF or a block of text and send it wherever you like through the standard iOS share sheet. This only happens when you choose it, and the app has no say in where it goes after that.

What it produces is written from your deal's own figures. It carries no web address, no site name and no picture taken from a listing.

7. Sharing a deal through iCloud

The app can share your deals with other buyers through Apple's iCloud, if you turn that on. By default, this feature is turned off when you install the app, and it stays off until you flip the switch in Settings. Until you do, nothing about your deals goes through iCloud from this app. The iOS share sheet described in Section 6 is a separate route you can use anytime, and it does not depend on this switch. Sharing means sending one specific deal to a person or a small group you invite. It is not posted publicly, not visible on the web, and not visible to anyone you did not invite.

What sharing does. When you share a deal you pick who to invite, using Messages, Mail or another sharing tool your phone offers. The deal and its photo travel from your phone to the phones of anyone you invited, through your iCloud account and theirs. No copy passes through any server of ours. Apple's iCloud storage acts as the delivery route between the devices, the same way it does for a Note or a Reminder you share with someone. What Apple does with data passing through iCloud is covered by your iCloud terms with Apple, not by this policy.

What kinds of sharing there are. “Send a copy” delivers one snapshot of the deal to each buyer you invited, and after that each copy is independent. “Collaborate” keeps the copies in lock-step so an edit on one phone lands on the others shortly after.

When you invite someone by email or phone number. Some ways of inviting a buyer let you type their email address or phone number into the app so the share is set aside for that person’s Apple ID in advance. When you do this, the app sends only that email address or phone number to Apple’s iCloud servers so Apple can match it to the Apple ID it belongs to. We do not receive that email or phone number, we do not keep a copy of it, and it is used only to route the invitation. If you send a copy of a deal this way, the app itself keeps a separate record on your own phone of who you sent it to, described in Section 2; that is your phone remembering, not anything reaching us. A one-way scrambled form of it is briefly used to address the delivery record described in Section 8; the original email or phone number is never written to that record. If Apple cannot match it, for example because the person does not have iCloud contact sharing turned on, the app tells you so and offers other ways to invite them.

What other buyers can see. Only the deal you chose to share, and only if you invited them. Your other deals, your criteria, your starred list, your display settings, the rate you use for your own numbers, and your name are not sent. The one identifying thing other buyers see about you is the name your iCloud account is under (for most people, this is their real name), because Apple attaches that to a share so the recipient knows who the invitation is from. If you do not want that name to appear, you change it in your Apple ID settings, not here.

What you see about other buyers. The same question in reverse, and the answer is a name. When a change to a shared deal arrives from someone else’s phone, the app asks Apple’s iCloud who is on that share, so it can tell you who made the change rather than only that someone did. It asks only when it does not already have a name, and it records whatever name Apple gives it for that person, kept on this phone and filed under that share. Apple does not always supply one, and when the app cannot tell which person a change came from, it says “Another user” rather than picking one. Someone who has been invited but has not joined the share does not get a name recorded here at all. The name stays on your phone. It is never sent to us, and it is left out of the backup file the app exports, so a file you hand to someone else never carries another person’s name. When a share ends, the app drops the names filed under it the next time it syncs. Turning iCloud sharing off in Settings no longer clears this list on its own: the names stay so a resumed Shared tab can still say who did what without waiting to relearn them, and Section 11 says more about what turning sharing off does now.

What we can see. A shared deal lives in your private iCloud storage and in theirs, and we have no access to either. There is one endpoint in our sharing flow: when the app copies an invitation link, it wraps the underlying Apple iCloud address in one hosted by us so that messaging apps show a DealBox card in the link preview instead of a generic one. When someone taps that wrapped link, their browser sends a request to that endpoint, and the endpoint sends them straight on to Apple. The endpoint receives no deal, no name and no photo, only the wrapped address, and its request logs record what a redirect always records: the requester’s IP address, the wrapped address and the time. It has no cookies, no analytics and no other network traffic. We do not know which deals you shared or with whom. If we ever added anything that watched sharing more closely than this, this endpoint would change first, per Section 12.

8. Notifications about shared deals

If you turn on notifications about shared deals, the app asks iOS for permission to show alerts on your device. From then on your device receives silent updates from Apple’s iCloud when a buyer you share with edits a deal, or when someone new shares a deal with you. Apple sends those updates directly to your device on iCloud’s own network, using the same iCloud account you already use to receive shares. When one arrives, the app posts a local alert on your device with a short description of the change or the sender.

We do not run a notification server, we do not send you push messages, and we do not receive a copy of what your device shows you. The updates travel between Apple’s iCloud and your device, and the alert text is composed on your device from the shared deal it already has and from the other buyer’s name described in Section 7. You can turn these notifications off any time in Settings, and you can revoke the permission entirely in your iOS Notifications settings. Turning them off does not affect sharing itself.

For the very first invitation from someone who has not typed a name into their own copy of the app, that alert may not have one to show yet when it first arrives. Before showing it to you, your device asks Apple’s iCloud whether it can now put a real name to the invitation, the same kind of check described in Section 7’s “What you see about other buyers.” If Apple has a name, the alert shows it in place of “Another user.” If it does not, or the check does not finish quickly enough, you see the alert exactly as it would have shown anyway. This check runs on your device, reaches only Apple, and nothing it learns is kept once the alert is shown.

The alert announcing a new invitation is delivered a little differently. When the sender taps Send, the app writes one small record into a shared area of iCloud that Apple calls the “public” database, filed under an identifier with 128 random bits. The record holds a one-way scrambled form of the email or phone the sender typed — computed on the sender’s device so a matching device can recognize its own, but not reversible to the original email or phone by anyone reading the record — along with the sender’s display name, the deal’s name, whether it is a collaborative share or a copy, the iCloud share address, and a timestamp. Apple delivers a silent push only to devices that recognize the scrambled form as one of their own. Your device posts the local alert and marks the record so the sender sees “Delivered.” The record is deleted as soon as the invitation has been read, accepted or declined, and in every case within three days of being sent.

We name “public” deliberately: a knowledgeable reader inspecting their iCloud traffic would see the word and should know what it means. Apple’s encrypted-fields feature is not available there, so anyone signed in to iCloud who is running the DealBox app can read the record’s fields for as long as it exists, not only the sender and recipient. Reading it does not require knowing the record’s own name, which is never disclosed. Instead, the record can be found by searching for the scrambled form of a recipient’s email address or phone number. That scrambled form comes from a fixed, non-secret formula built into the app, so it does not stop someone with a specific address or number in mind from computing the same scrambled form and finding any invitation sent to it, though it does block a casual match against a plain list of addresses.

A reader who does this can see only invitation metadata: the sender’s display name, the deal’s name, whether it is a collaborative share or a copy, the iCloud share address, and a timestamp, never the deal’s own figures or photo. The share address alone is not enough to join a deal either. DealBox never grants public access to a share, so only the person actually invited can accept it, no matter who else has seen the address. We run no server in this path and keep no logs. The alert fires only when both sharing and notifications are on and the recipient has DealBox installed with an address it is watching for; otherwise the invitation goes through Messages or Mail instead, and nothing extra travels through iCloud.

9. Syncing your own deals across your own devices

If you turn on iCloud Sync, the app mirrors your deals between the iPhones and iPads that are signed in to the same Apple ID you use on this phone. Every deal, every photo, and the preferences that decide how your deal shelf reads (your boxes, tags, favorites, your industry preferences — the industries you added yourself, the built-in ones you have hidden, and the pictures you have chosen for them — and which of the shipped sample deals you kept) travel through your own iCloud private database and no farther. Your other buyers do not see any of this. We do not see any of this either. There is no account with us, and there is no server of ours in the path.

One thing stays put on this phone: the global overrides that tune the app for your own use, like a shelf-wide SBA rate. Those are per-device on purpose, so a rate you are testing on this phone does not repaint the same deals on your other one.

The switch is in Settings under Backup, below Export a backup and Import a backup, and it is off when you install the app. It stays off until you flip it. Turning it on the first time asks Apple whether your other iPhone or iPad has already used this feature; if so, the app offers to merge that data with what is on this phone, or to replace it and start clean. If not, it copies the deals from this phone up to iCloud and you are done. Either path is described on screen before anything is written.

The mechanism underneath is Apple’s CloudKit, the same one that carries a shared deal in Section 7. Under iCloud Sync, though, no share is created and no one else is invited — the deal records live in a separate area of your private database that only devices signed in to your Apple ID can reach. Photos travel as CloudKit assets, one per deal, so a new photo does not re-upload the others. Each edit is timestamped on the device with a clock the app maintains internally, and when two of your devices edit the same deal at the same time (offline, on planes, whatever), the merge is field-by-field: a change to the name on one device and a change to the price on the other both survive, without either one overwriting the other. When two devices edit the SAME field of the SAME deal at the same time, the app tells you and lets you keep either version, or keep both as separate deals. What Apple does with data passing through iCloud in this feature is covered by your iCloud terms with Apple, not by this policy.

Turning iCloud Sync off in Settings offers you two choices, and both are named on the confirmation. “Turn Off and Keep Cloud Data” stops the mirror but leaves your iCloud copy intact, so you can turn the switch back on later and pick up where you left off. “Turn Off and Delete Cloud Data” removes the mirror from iCloud entirely; your deals remain on the phone you are holding, and any other iPhone or iPad you had synced with will remove them the next time it syncs. Neither path affects the deals on the phone you tap the switch on.

If you sign out of iCloud on this phone while iCloud Sync is on, the app tells you at the top of the screen and stops syncing until you sign back in. Your deals on the phone stay. If iCloud runs out of storage, the app tells you in Settings under Backup and holds new edits on the phone until you free up space or add more; nothing is dropped, and the mirror resumes when there is room.

10. What we never do

• We do not sell, rent or share your information, because we do not have any.
• We do not track you across apps or websites, and the app contains no advertising identifiers.
• We do not ask you to sign in to a brokerage, listing site or any other third-party account, and we will not add that.
• We do not sync your deals to a cloud service of ours. There is not one. There are four ways a deal of yours can leave your phone, and all four require your action: you can save a deal summary as an image to your own photo library as described in Section 5; you can export a deal as an image, PDF or block of text through the iOS share sheet described in Section 6; you can turn on iCloud sharing and send a specific deal to other buyers as described in Section 7, which travels through your iCloud account and theirs; or you can turn on iCloud Sync described in Section 9, which mirrors your deals across your own iPhones and iPads through your own iCloud account. None of these four routes touches us.

11. Your control, and deletion

Because nothing reaches us, there is no request you need to send us to see, correct or delete your data. You already hold all of it. Delete a deal in the app to remove that deal from this phone. Delete the app to remove everything the app itself holds on this phone. If you turned on iCloud Sync, your deals also live in your own private iCloud storage, independently of the app being installed; deleting the app does not reach that copy, and this section explains below how you delete it too. If you ever saved a deal summary as an image, that image is in your photo library, entirely outside the app; deleting the app does not remove it, and you delete it from Photos the same as any other picture. If you have an iPhone backup, remove it through your backup settings with Apple.

Rights under laws such as the GDPR and the CCPA generally attach to a company holding your personal information. We hold none, so there is nothing for us to disclose, port or erase. You are welcome to write to us and ask us to confirm that.

To turn off iCloud sharing, use the switch in Settings. Turning it off pauses sharing rather than ending it: this device stops getting notifications and new changes on every share it is part of, and nothing on Apple’s iCloud servers is touched. A deal you had shared with other buyers stays fully live on their end, and they can keep reading and editing it. A deal someone else had shared with you stays fully live on their end too; this device just stops hearing about changes to it until sharing is back on. Turning the switch back on resumes every one of those shares exactly as it was, with the same people on the same deals, and nobody needs to be re-invited. To end a specific share for good instead of pausing all of them, open the Shared tab: tapping “Stop Sharing” on a deal you own makes the people you shared it with lose access, and the deal itself stays as an ordinary deal on this device; a deal someone else shared with you can be left the same way.

To turn off iCloud Sync, use the switch in Settings under Backup. Turning it off gives you a choice, described in Section 9: keep your iCloud copy in place for later, or delete it. Either way the deals on the phone you tap the switch on stay put.

12. Children

DealBox is a tool for people buying a business and is not directed at children. It collects no personal information from anyone, of any age.

13. Changes to this policy

If the app ever does something this page does not describe, this page changes first and carries a new date at the top. The commitment we are making is narrow and specific on purpose: a page this short is easy to check against what the app actually does, and we would rather be held to it.

14. Contact

Questions about this policy, or about a request you saw from the app, go to The Trade Script, LLC. You can reach us from inside the app: Settings > About has “Report an issue” and “Request a feature,” and either reaches us directly. The DealBox support form is also on the web. This same policy is published on the web, linked below.

Site administrators can also read what the fetcher does and how to stop it.