haku
Haku — Privacy Policy
Effective 2026-08-26
Haku is a camera app. Your photos are yours, and Haku is built so that nothing about them — or you — ever reaches us or anyone else.
What Haku collects
Nothing. Haku has no accounts, no analytics, and no advertising. The app never transmits anything about you or your photos.
Haku makes network requests only in the Community page of Recipes, and nowhere else in the app:
- Fetching the public list of community-shared recipes, its vote counts, and the photographs their authors chose to show them on. These are files in a public repository, downloaded the way a browser downloads a page; nothing is sent with them beyond what any download carries.
- Voting, when you tap the thumbs-up on a recipe: the recipe's name is sent and nothing else. No account, no identifier, nothing about you or your phone.
- Submitting, and only when you tap Submit on a recipe you chose to offer: the recipe's settings, the name you asked to be credited, the line you wrote about it, the tags you picked, and the one to three photographs you selected. Those photographs are rendered fresh from your originals for the purpose, which means they carry no location, no camera details and no other metadata - the original never leaves your phone. It all goes to a small relay of ours that files it for review, and is published only if it is approved.
Never visiting that page means Haku makes no requests at all.
Send Nearby moves a photograph directly between two phones standing together, over the same device-to-device radio AirDrop uses. Nothing touches the internet, no server is involved, and it only runs while the Nearby screen is open on both phones - iOS asks for local-network permission the first time, and that permission covers exactly this.
The relay that files a submission counts requests briefly by network address, in memory only, so that nobody can flood the review queue. It is not stored, not written to a log and not attached to anything; it is gone the moment the relay restarts.
Why the App Store label says "Data Not Collected"
Apple's privacy label describes data a developer collects - taken off your device and kept somewhere they can reach it afterwards. The only thing in Haku that transmits anything you wrote or photographed is offering a recipe to the community, and Apple's own rules treat that as optional disclosure rather than collection when all four of these are true. They are:
- It is never used to track you, and never for advertising or marketing. Haku has no advertising, no analytics and no third-party SDKs of any kind.
- It is optional and occasional rather than part of using the app. You can shoot, edit, export and share for as long as you like and never send anything; most people never will.
- You choose exactly what goes, every time. The recipe, the note, the tags and the one to three photographs are each picked by hand, and the app tells you before you choose them that sending publishes them.
- The name you asked to be credited is shown beside them before you send, because being published under your own name is the whole point of offering a recipe.
We keep nothing about the person who sent it. There is no account, no identifier and no record of who you are - only the recipe and its pictures, published under the name you chose. If you would rather something you sent came down, write to support@hakufilmcamera.app and it will be removed from the list; a public repository keeps its own history, which is why the app says so before you pick a photograph.
What stays on your device
- Photos, videos and edits. Originals, RAW files, recordings, edit recipes and thumbnails are stored in the app's private container on your device, in your iCloud/system Photos library if you choose a storage mode that uses it, or both. Haku never sees them anywhere else.
- Sound. Recording a video captures audio through the microphone, which is written into that video file and nothing else. Haku does not listen at any other time, and declining the microphone permission records silent video rather than no video.
- Location. If you grant location access, the current location is embedded in each photo's EXIF metadata — the same field every camera writes — so Photos can place your shots on a map. It is written into your own files and nowhere else. Decline the permission and everything else works unchanged.
- Settings and film looks. Your preferences, custom setups, recipes and any LUT files you import are stored on your device only.
- Home Screen widget. Haku keeps small copies (under 500 pixels) of your twelve most recent photographs, and the names of their recipes or looks, in a container shared only between Haku and its own widget, on this device - so the widget has something to show the moment you add it. Deleting a photo removes its copy. Nothing in it leaves your phone.
Sharing
When you share a photo, a video, a recipe or a film look, it goes only where you send it — AirDrop, Messages, or whatever you choose in the share sheet. Haku adds nothing and tells no one.
Offering a recipe to the community is described above: it is sent only when you tap Submit, and only what is listed there. If the relay cannot be reached, Haku falls back to copying the recipe to your clipboard and opening the submission page in your browser, where posting it is between you and GitHub under your own account.
Haku points outward in a few places, and each one simply opens your browser: Fujifilm's public download page for their film-simulation LUTs, a download link an author supplied for a film look their recipe needs, the page where a recipe's votes live, and your mail app if you choose to report a problem. Nothing is sent when you tap any of them.
Third parties
There are none. No SDKs, no trackers, no analytics services.
Changes
If a future version of Haku ever changes any of this, this policy will change with it, and the change will be visible in the App Store listing before you update.
Contact
support@hakufilmcamera.app