Privacy policy
Last updated: 19 October 2026
In short
Colecto does not ask for an account, email or personal data. Your collection schedule and settings are stored on your phone. Only if you turn on family sync does that location’s schedule also go to the Colecto server.
What stays on your phone
Your locations (the names you give them, the town and street), waste types, pickup schedules, what you marked for each pickup (“Bins are out!” or “Not needed”), language, theme and notification preferences. This data is included in your iCloud (iOS) or Google (Android) backup, depending on your phone settings.
Photos scanned with AI
When you scan a schedule or use “Where does it go?”, the photo is downscaled on your phone and sent securely to the Colecto server, which passes it to Google Gemini (the paid API, where Google does not use the data to train models) only to read the schedule or recognise the item. We do not keep the photo after the answer.
Anonymous identifier
To limit the number of AI scans, the app sends a random identifier generated on your phone together with the photo. It is not linked to your name, your Apple or Google account, or any other data.
Location
The drop-off map uses your location only while the screen is open. The server receives coordinates rounded to about one kilometre and looks up places in a copy of OpenStreetMap data. When you pick your town by location, your phone asks the system map service (Apple or Google) for the town’s name, then sends that name and coordinates rounded to about one kilometre to the server, which finds the town in the official INS list (SIRUTA, with coordinates from GeoNames, CC BY 4.0). We do not store your location.
Street lookup
When you look up the official schedule (for example RER Vest in Oradea), the street name is sent to the Colecto server, which reads the public schedule from the operator’s website. For the communes around Oradea, your phone downloads the RER Vest calendar for the chosen town from the Colecto server.
Reports to the operator
The name, address and phone number you enter for a report stay on your phone. The message is only sent when you send it, from your email app, the operator’s form or by phone. Colecto never receives your reports.
Sharing your schedule
The QR code and share link contain only the waste types and pickup days, no personal data. You decide who to send them to.
Family sync
If you turn on family sync for a location, its schedules (waste types, pickup days), the chosen town and street and what was marked for each pickup (“Bins are out!” or “Not needed”) are stored on the Colecto server, at Upstash (Redis), linked only to a random 12-character code. The code is the only key: anyone who has it can see and change the schedule, so share it only with your household. To show how many phones are synced, we keep an anonymous identifier for each (a hash of the phone’s random identifier) and when it last synced. The name you gave the location stays on your phone; we store no names, emails or other data. When you stop syncing, your phone is removed from the list and sends nothing more; a household nobody opens for 400 days is deleted automatically.
Notifications
Reminders, including the picture of the bins on iPhone, are created and scheduled locally on your phone, as is the widget. We do not send push notifications from a server.
Analytics and ads
The app has no ads and uses no tracking services. If this changes, we will update this page first.
Contact
For any question about your data, write to us through the app’s page on the App Store or Google Play.