Wardrobe App Privacy: What Your Closet App Knows About You

You're uploading photos of your clothes, entering your measurements, logging what you buy and what you wear. That's body-adjacent data mixed with spending habits and daily routines — about as personal as a digital footprint gets. Before you hand that data to an app, ask exactly where it goes and how it is used.

What wardrobe apps typically collect

Most wardrobe apps need some data to function. You can't catalog your clothes without photos, and you can't plan outfits without knowing what you own. That part makes sense. But many apps collect far more than what's necessary to help you get dressed in the morning.

Here's what's commonly gathered, and what to think about with each category.

Photos of your clothes

Every wardrobe app starts here. You photograph each garment, and the app stores those images. The question is where and how. Some apps keep photos only on your device. Others upload them to remote servers for processing — background removal, color detection, category tagging. Once a photo leaves your phone, you're trusting the company's servers (and their security practices) with images that often include your home, your body, and metadata embedded in the file.

That metadata matters. A photo taken on your phone typically includes EXIF data: the date, your GPS location, your device model. Unless the app strips that data before storage, your "closet photo" is also a timestamped map pin of where you were standing.

Body measurements and avatar data

Some apps ask for your height, weight, bust, waist, and hip measurements. Others create a 3D body avatar using your phone's camera. This is deeply personal data, and most people would not share it publicly. If a breach happens, that data is out there permanently.

Shopping history and purchase receipts

Apps that connect to your email or allow receipt scanning can build a detailed picture of your spending: where you shop, how much you spend, how often you buy, and what brands you prefer. This is valuable behavioral data, and it's exactly the kind of information that advertisers pay for.

Location data

Some wardrobe apps request location access. The stated reasons vary — weather-based outfit suggestions, nearby store recommendations, or shipping address autofill. But location data is one of the most sensitive categories of personal information. It reveals where you live, where you work, and your daily patterns. For a clothing app, this level of access is hard to justify.

As a reference point, Apple's App Store privacy labels show which apps collect location data and whether it's linked to your identity. Alta Daily, one of the more popular wardrobe apps, lists location as collected data linked to the user's identity. So do contacts, search history, browsing history, and identifiers.

Browsing behavior and search history

What you search for inside a wardrobe app — "black ankle boots," "summer wedding outfit" — is tracked by most apps as usage data. Some go further and track your browsing behavior across the app: which items you tap on, which outfit suggestions you view, how long you spend on shopping recommendations. This data feeds recommendation algorithms, but it also builds a behavioral profile.

Device identifiers and contacts

Device identifiers let apps (and their ad partners) track you across different services. Contact list access, meanwhile, enables social features — "find friends who use this app" — but it means every phone number and email in your address book gets uploaded to someone else's server. These are categories where the benefit to you is minimal but the data value to the company is significant.

The monetization question

Many wardrobe apps are free, and that business model affects incentives. Building and maintaining an app costs real money — servers, development, design, support. If a company is offering something for free with no clear business model, the revenue has to come from somewhere.

For most free wardrobe apps, that somewhere is affiliate commissions. The app recommends products, you tap through to a retailer's site, and the app earns a percentage of whatever you buy. This is a legitimate business model, but it creates a structural incentive that's worth understanding. When an app makes money every time you shop, its interests aren't perfectly aligned with helping you wear what you already own.

An app built around affiliate revenue is incentivized to show you things to buy, not to help you rediscover the clothes already in your closet. The "suggestions" you see may be driven less by what suits your wardrobe and more by which retailers pay the highest commissions. This model is common and legitimate, but it rewards shopping activity more than wardrobe reuse.

If a wardrobe app is free and you can't figure out how it makes money, the answer is almost certainly your data or your shopping behavior. Neither is automatically bad, but you should get to decide whether that tradeoff works for you.

What to ask before choosing a wardrobe app

You don't need a computer science degree to evaluate an app's privacy practices. A few practical questions can tell you a lot.

• Where are my photos stored? On your device only, or on the company's servers? If they're on servers, where are those servers located, and what security measures are in place? Can you export your photos if you leave?
• Does the app work offline? If every interaction requires a server connection, that means every piece of data is being transmitted. An app that works offline is keeping more of your data on your device.
• Is there a privacy policy — and can you actually read it? A readable privacy policy is a signal that the company respects your time and your intelligence. If the policy is 8,000 words of legal jargon, that's a choice they made.
• Does the app link data to my identity? Apple's App Store privacy labels tell you this directly. Look for what's listed under "Data Linked to You" versus "Data Not Linked to You." The difference matters.
• Can I delete my account and data completely? Not just deactivate — actually delete. And how long does deletion take? Does the company retain backups?
• Is the app free? If so, how does it make money? Subscription models mean you're the customer. Ad-supported or affiliate-driven models mean you're at least partly the product. Neither is inherently wrong, but you should know which one you're signing up for.

You can check any iOS app's privacy practices on its App Store page under "App Privacy." On Android, look for the "Data safety" section on Google Play. These labels aren't perfect, but they're a starting point.

How Tessuta approaches this

I'm building Tessuta, so I'll be transparent about the choices I'm making. I’m sharing these choices so you can compare them with other apps.

Tessuta is designed around minimal data collection. The app collects only what's needed to show you your wardrobe and help you plan what to wear. No contacts, no location, no browsing history sold to third parties.

Photos are stripped of EXIF data before storage — location coordinates, device details, timestamps all get removed. Your closet photos are just closet photos, nothing more.

There are no public profiles. No followers, no social graph, no "see what your friends are wearing." Tessuta is private by default. Your wardrobe is visible to you and no one else.

There's no affiliate revenue model. I'm not building a shopping recommendation engine. Tessuta will be supported by a straightforward subscription — you pay for the app, and the app works for you. That alignment matters to me.

You can export your data and delete your account completely. Your wardrobe is yours. If you want to take it somewhere else or just be done, that should be simple.

If you're interested in the specifics, Tessuta's full privacy policy is written to be readable, not to bury the important parts.