Privacy policy: Offscan: Private PDF Scanner

In short

Offscan is a document scanner that keeps everything on your phone. It has no account, no server, no ads, no analytics and no tracking. On Android it has no internet permission. Your scans, the recognised text and your PDFs leave the phone only when you share, print, email or save them yourself.

What the app stores

On your phone only: the pages you scan or import (images), imported PDFs (a protected PDF is stored without its password after you opened it), the text recognised on each page and a search index of it, your folders, tags, titles, saved signatures, drawings and notes, your settings, and — if you turn the app lock on with a PIN — a salted hash of that PIN, never the PIN itself. Export passwords are never stored.

Permissions

Camera: only for scanning, asked when you first scan. Face ID / Touch ID (iPhone) or fingerprint / screen lock (Android): only when you turn the app lock on; the operating system handles the recognition, the app only learns whether it succeeded. Photos and files come through the system pickers, so the app needs no access to your photo library or storage.

Text recognition and the scanner

Text recognition runs on the phone (Apple Vision on iPhone; Google ML Kit and Tesseract on Android). On Android, Google Play services may download Google's document scanner and the Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Hindi recognition models once; that download is made by Google's component under Google's privacy policy. Offscan sends no document to it.

Exports, sharing, backups

A PDF, image, text or Word file leaves the phone only through the share sheet, Print, Email, "Save to Files" or a folder you pick. Exported files carry the document title, the app name and the export date as metadata, and your tags as keywords; imported photos are stripped of camera and location metadata. The library backup is one ZIP file that you place where you want; it contains your documents in clear.

Phone backups

Android: Offscan is excluded from Google's cloud backup. iPhone: like every app's data, the library is part of your iPhone's iCloud or computer backup when that is on.

Children, ads, sharing of data

No ads, no sale or sharing of data, no data collected from anyone. The app is not directed at children.

Your rights

Everything is on your phone: delete documents in the app, or uninstall the app to remove all its data. There is nothing to request from us because we hold nothing.

Changes

Changes to this policy are published on this page with the date.