Privacy Policy
Last updated 23 September 2026
The short version
PS Alt Text writes alt text for the images in your Shopify store. To do that it needs your store's product and file data, and it keeps a record of what it described.
- It holds no data about your customers. The app never asks Shopify for customer, order, or email permissions, so it cannot read them even if it wanted to.
- The only personal data it stores is one email address — your own, so there is a way to reach you about your account.
- No tracking. No analytics, no advertising, no third-party scripts on this page, and no logging of your IP address.
- Your images are sent to an AI provider to be described, and are not used to train anyone's models.
Who we are
PS Alt Text is operated by PS Apps LLC, 2108 N St, Ste N, Sacramento, CA 95816, United States. For the purposes of the UK and EU General Data Protection Regulation, we are the data controller for the merchant account data described below.
Where we handle data belonging to your store — your products, files and the alt text we generate for them — we act as a processor on your instructions, and you remain the controller.
Questions about any of this: support@psapps.app.
What we collect, and why
Everything below is collected because the app cannot function without it. We do not collect anything for marketing, profiling or resale.
| What | Why | Kept for |
|---|---|---|
Your store's .myshopify.com domain |
Identifies your account and every job run for it | Until you uninstall |
| Your contact email address, read from Shopify at install | So we can reach you about your own account — a failing subscription, a deprecation, an incident. We do not send marketing. | Until you uninstall |
| Shopify access tokens | Authenticate every API call the app makes as your store | Until you uninstall |
| Your settings — language, style, length, custom instructions, scan schedule and timezone | Produce alt text the way you asked, at the time you asked | Until you uninstall |
| Plan and image-credit balances | Meter your allowance and bill correctly | Until you uninstall |
| A generation log — image reference, the alt text produced, the outcome | Powers the Logs tab, and lets us answer a question about last month's usage | 60 days |
| Scan history — counts and timestamps per scan run | Shows progress and stops two scans racing each other | Until you uninstall |
| Queued webhook payloads, which for product events contain the product record Shopify sent | Work is queued and retried rather than done during the request, so the payload must persist until the job finishes | 1 day after success, 7 days after permanent failure |
What we do not collect
This is worth stating precisely, because it is enforced by the permissions the app holds rather than by our good intentions. PS Alt Text requests only these Shopify scopes:
read_products, write_products,
read_files, write_files, read_locales
There is no customer scope, no order scope and no email scope in that list. Shopify will not return that data to an app that has not been granted it, so we hold:
- No customer names, addresses, email addresses or phone numbers
- No orders, carts, or payment information
- No IP addresses or browser user-agent strings — we do not record them at all
- No analytics, advertising or behavioural tracking of any kind
Shopify sends every app three mandatory privacy webhooks, two of which concern shoppers. Because we hold nothing about your customers, we acknowledge those two and there is nothing for us to return or erase. See Deleting your data.
How your images are described
Generating alt text means sending an image to an AI provider. Specifically:
- We send the provider the Shopify CDN link to the image and the provider fetches it. The image is not copied onto our servers.
- For images attached to a product, we also send a trimmed extract of that product's record — up to 8 KB of the product JSON Shopify gave us — so the description can use the product name and context. Media-library scans send no such context.
- We send the instruction compiled from your settings, including any custom instructions you wrote.
The generated text is written back to your store and recorded in the log described above. Our AI provider does not use data submitted through its API to train its models.
Who else processes your data
| Provider | What they handle | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify | Your store itself. Also processes billing — we never see your card details. | Per Shopify's own policy |
| Google (Gemini) | Receives images and product context to generate descriptions | United States |
| Fly.io | Hosts the application and its database | United States |
We do not sell or share your data with anyone else, and there are no advertising or analytics providers in this list because the app uses none.
Where your data is held
All data is stored in the United States, where we and our hosting provider are located.
If your store is in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, using PS Alt Text therefore involves transferring your data to the United States. We rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses as the legal basis for that transfer, together with the equivalent UK and Swiss addenda. Write to us at support@psapps.app for a copy of the clauses we rely on.
Our legal basis (UK/EU GDPR)
- Performance of a contract — for everything needed to run the app you installed: your store domain, tokens, settings, credit balances and the generation itself.
- Legitimate interests — for keeping your contact address so we can tell you about problems with your account, and for the generation log that lets us support and bill you accurately. We think you would reasonably expect both from a paid app.
- Legal obligation — for records we must keep for tax and accounting.
Cookies
PS Alt Text sets no advertising or analytics cookies, so there is no consent banner. Two strictly-necessary cookies exist:
- A session cookie recording which store you are signed in as, signed so it cannot be forged, expiring after 24 hours. It holds no personal data.
- A short-lived security token used once during install to prevent a forged authorization request.
Inside the Shopify admin the app authenticates with a Shopify-issued session token instead, and sets no cookie at all.
Security
All traffic is encrypted in transit with TLS. The database is not reachable from the public internet — it accepts connections only over our host's private network. Access to production is limited to the operator.
In the interest of an accurate description rather than a reassuring one: the Shopify access tokens we hold are stored unencrypted within that private database. If you uninstall the app, the token is invalidated by Shopify and deleted by us as described below.
If you believe you have found a security problem, please write to support@psapps.app.
Deleting your data
Uninstall the app and your data is erased automatically. When you uninstall, Shopify marks the app removed and, 48 hours later, sends us a redaction request. On receiving it we permanently delete, in a single operation:
- Your store record, including your contact email and access tokens
- Your entire generation log
- Your scan history
- Any queued or completed jobs belonging to your store
These are hard deletions, not flags — the rows cease to exist. Backups are retained on a rolling basis and any copy within them ages out with the backup.
Your rights
Depending on where you are, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, export or restrict the processing of your personal data, to object to processing based on legitimate interests, and to lodge a complaint with your data protection authority.
Deletion is automatic on uninstall, as above. For anything else, write to support@psapps.app and we will respond within 30 days. We handle access and export requests manually — the app has no self-service export — so please tell us what you need and we will assemble it.
We do not charge for this and will not ask you for anything beyond what is needed to confirm you control the store in question.
If you are in the United States
State privacy laws such as the California Consumer Privacy Act generally govern personal information about consumers rather than about businesses, and PS Alt Text deals only with merchants acting in a business capacity. We nevertheless apply the rights above to everyone who asks. We have never sold or shared personal information, and we do not process it for targeted advertising or profiling.
Children
PS Alt Text is a business tool, is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 16.
Changes
If we change this policy we will update the date at the top of the page. For a change that materially affects how we handle your data, we will email the address we hold for your store before it takes effect.
Contact
PS Apps LLC
2108 N St, Ste N, Sacramento, CA 95816, United States
support@psapps.app