Privacy policy

The short version

MaxShot is an iPhone app that builds recap videos from photos and videos you already have. It has no user account and no servers. Your photos and videos are never uploaded anywhere, and neither is any record of what you did in the app.

I do not collect, store, see, sell, or share your personal information. There is no analytics SDK, no advertising SDK, no crash-reporting service, and no tracking of any kind in the app. Everything below is a description of what happens on your own device, plus the three narrow cases where a small piece of data goes to Apple or Google to answer a specific question you asked.

What the app uses, and why

Your photos and videos

With your permission, MaxShot reads photos and videos from your library so it can select shots, trim clips, and assemble a recap. All of this analysis — including detecting near-duplicate frames, noticing which shots contain people, and finding the best moment inside a long video — runs entirely on your iPhone, using frameworks built into iOS. No image, video, or frame is ever transmitted off the device.

When you export a recap, the app asks for permission to add the finished video to your photo library. That is the only thing it writes there.

Places

Photos you have taken may contain the coordinates of where they were taken. MaxShot reads those coordinates, already stored in your library, to group photos into trips and places. The app does not track your location and does not use your device's live GPS position.

To turn coordinates into a readable place name, MaxShot asks Apple's Maps service. Only the coordinates are sent, never a photo or anything that identifies you. This is covered by Apple's privacy policy.

Identifying a song

If you tap the button to identify music playing around you, MaxShot uses Apple's ShazamKit to listen. A mathematical fingerprint of the audio is sent to Apple to find a match; the audio itself is never recorded, saved, or sent anywhere, and the microphone is used only while you are on that screen. To show artwork and previews for a matched song, the app queries Apple's public iTunes Search service with the song's title and artist.

Speech in your own videos

MaxShot can optionally listen to what is said in your own videos, so that a trimmed clip keeps a whole sentence rather than cutting someone off mid-word. This never runs automatically — it happens only when you tap Listen to what's said, it runs on your device, and the audio is not recorded, saved, or sent anywhere.

Google Photos

Connecting Google Photos is entirely optional; the app's other ways of choosing photos work without it. If you do connect it:

• MaxShot requests a single, narrow permission — photospicker.mediaitems.readonly. This grants access only to the specific items you hand-pick in a picking session you started. It gives the app no ability to browse, search, or list your Google Photos library.
• Only the items you pick are downloaded, and they are downloaded straight to your device.
• Along with each picked item, the app reads only its basic file metadata — filename, capture date, dimensions, and whether it is a photo or a video — which it uses to put your recap in chronological order.
• Anything the app works out from those items — a thumbnail, a near-duplicate feature print, a count of how many faces are in a shot — is computed on your iPhone and stays on your iPhone, exactly like the items themselves. That derived and aggregated information is covered by everything below just as the originals are.
• The access token Google issues is stored in the iOS Keychain on your device. It is never sent anywhere else, because there is nowhere else.
• You can disconnect at any time from within the app, or revoke access at myaccount.google.com/permissions.

Limited Use

MaxShot's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. In plain terms — and this applies equally to the raw items and to anything aggregated, anonymised, or otherwise derived from them:

• What is accessed. Only the photos and videos you hand-pick in a picking session you started, plus their basic file metadata. The app cannot browse, search, or list your Google Photos library, and it never sees an item you did not pick.
• How it is used. Only to provide the import feature you asked for: placing those items into your recap, and analysing them on your own device so the recap is well-ordered and well-trimmed. Nothing else.
• Who it is shared with: no one. It is not transferred or sold to any third party — not to data brokers, not to advertisers, not to any service provider, not to me. There is no server it could be sent to.
• What it is never used for. Never for advertising or ad targeting, never for credit, lending, or any other eligibility decision, and never read by a human.
• AI and machine learning. Google user data is never used to develop, improve, or train any AI or machine-learning model, and it is never transferred to any third-party AI or machine-learning service. MaxShot does analyse imported photos on your iPhone using Apple's Vision framework, built into iOS, to spot near-duplicate shots and to notice which frames contain people. That is read-only inference running locally, whose only output is the shot selection for your own recap: no model learns from it, nothing is retained by Apple or anyone else, and no image, frame, or derivative leaves the device.
• How long it is kept, and how to remove it. Imported items live in the app's private storage for as long as you keep the project that uses them; the app deletes them once no project refers to them, and deleting MaxShot deletes all of them at once. Tapping Disconnect in the app erases the stored tokens immediately and asks Google to revoke the grant; you can also revoke it yourself at the link above. Because nothing was ever sent to me, there is no other copy anywhere to delete.

How your data is protected

The strongest protection here is structural: there is no server. MaxShot has no backend and no account, so there is no database of user data to breach, no employee who could look at your photos, and no copy of anything outside your own device. Nothing can leak from a place it was never sent to.

On the device itself:

• Your photos, videos and projects live inside the app's private container, encrypted at rest by iOS Data Protection and inaccessible to other apps.
• The Google Photos access token is held in the iOS Keychain, hardware-backed and encrypted, marked so that it cannot be read until the device has been unlocked at least once since starting up. It is never written to a file, a log, or a backup we control.
• Every network request the app makes — to Google, to Apple — uses HTTPS. There is no unencrypted traffic.
• Imported photos are downloaded straight to your device and are deleted when you delete the project or the app.

Google user data obtained through the Photos Picker is protected by all of the above, is used only to build the recap you asked for, and is never transmitted to us or to anyone else.

Crash diagnostics

MaxShot records crashes and freezes using MetricKit, which is built into iOS, so that a problem can be understood later. These reports are written to a log on your device only and are never uploaded. Separately, iOS itself may share diagnostics with Apple if you have turned that on in your device settings — that is an Apple setting, under your control, not something the app does.

Children

MaxShot is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect personal information from them. Since the app collects nothing, there is nothing for me to hold or delete.

How long anything is kept, and how to delete it

Your projects, settings, and any imported media live in the app's own storage on your device. Deleting MaxShot from your iPhone deletes all of it. Because nothing is transmitted to me, there is no copy elsewhere to request or erase. If you connected Google Photos, revoking access at the link above removes the app's permission as well.

Your rights

Privacy laws such as the GDPR and the CCPA give you rights to access, correct, delete, and port personal data a company holds about you, and to opt out of its sale. MaxShot holds none: there is no account, no server, and no collection, so there is no data for me to produce, correct, or sell. Your data is on your device, under your control. If you want to exercise a right anyway, or simply check this claim, write to me and I will answer.

Changes to this policy

If the app gains a feature that changes any of the above, this page will be updated and the effective date at the top will change. Material changes will also be noted in the app.

Contact

MaxShot is made by Max Bassett, an independent developer.
Questions about privacy, or anything else: maxrbassett@gmail.com.