Every App Store page has a privacy section. Most people scroll past it. For a vault app it is the most important paragraph on the page, because it is the developer telling Apple, under their own name, what the app sends home.

The categories

Apple asks developers to declare data by type — contacts, photos, identifiers, usage data, diagnostics, purchases — and by purpose. “Data Used to Track You” is the worst case. “Data Linked to You” means they know it is yours. “Data Not Linked to You” is usually analytics. “Data Not Collected” means the developer declares none of the above.

Why most vaults declare usage data

Because they ship an analytics SDK. The SDK sends events: app opened, photo imported, paywall shown, purchase made. It is how conversion is measured and prices are tuned. Keepsafe, for example, appears in an Amplitude case study about optimising pricing with behavioural data. That is normal product practice. It is also a strange thing to find inside an app whose one job is to keep your behaviour private.

How a label ends up blank

Hushfold has no server. Backup goes to your own iCloud, inside your Apple account, which Apple treats as your data, not the developer’s. Purchases are verified on the device by StoreKit; nothing is forwarded. There is no analytics SDK, no ad SDK, no push-notification framework — a build-time check fails the build if any of them is imported. The usage counters you can see in Settings → Diagnostics stay on the phone.

So the manifest that Apple requires, PrivacyInfo.xcprivacy, has an empty collected-data list. The label says “Data Not Collected” because there is nothing to write.

What the label does not tell you

It says nothing about encryption. An app can collect nothing and still store your photos in the clear. For that you have to read further: what algorithm, where the key comes from, and whether the developer could open your vault if compelled. Hushfold’s answers are AES-256-GCM, derived from your password on the device, and no.