Skincare Is Intimate Health Telemetry
Most wellness applications treat bathroom shelf items as generic e-commerce products. In reality, a person's skincare roster is sensitive biometric telemetry. Scanning tretinoin indicates medical acne management; adding hydroquinone indicates hyperpigmentation or melasma treatment; toggling pregnancy flags indicates a reproductive event before even close relatives are told.
Centralized user databases create an unnecessary surface for subpoena, corporate acquisition, and data brokerage.
The Zero-Database Architecture
Miko does not have a user table with your email or name on it — because there is no cloud database. Your products, sensitivities, and life-state answers reside in an encrypted SQLite database stored in your iOS sandbox.
Conflict detection and weekly routine generation are pure algorithmic functions evaluated locally by your phone's processor using the onboard active database.
Architecture Principle: The most secure cloud database is the one you never build. Miko functions entirely on your device.
The Single Stateless Exception: Label OCR
The sole network interaction in Miko occurs when you point your camera at a physical packaging label. The cropped image is transmitted over TLS to a stateless optical character recognition (OCR) model to extract the raw text of the 32 INCI names.
The image and text are not tied to any user identity, are not logged into a profile, and are purged after parsing. Your shelf roster and pregnancy status are never transmitted across the network.