The handwriting test set

Published 1 September 2026
Published at https://uncursive.com/handwriting-test-set

This page is not about the Uncursive app, and nothing on it describes what the app does with your pages. The app has no account, sends nothing to us, and collects nothing — that is the Privacy Policy, and it is unchanged by anything here. Its App Store privacy label reads Data Not Collected, and that is true: no page in the set described below came from the app, from anyone using it, or from anyone who has ever written to us. No page you convert in Uncursive will ever join this set.

What follows concerns people whose handwriting we collected from public websites, before the app shipped, in order to test how well it reads.

We publish this page because the General Data Protection Regulation says that when someone collects information about you from somewhere other than you, they have to tell you — and where telling each person individually would take disproportionate effort, they have to publish the information instead (Article 14(5)(b)). That is what this is.

1. What was collected

Photographs of handwritten pages, and what those pages say.

We hold 1,027 images that people posted publicly to five subreddits — r/handwriting, r/Journaling, r/Handwriting_Analysis, r/PenmanshipPorn and r/commonplacebook — collected in August 2026, one page from each of 1,027 different people. That is the whole set.

For each page we hold the image, the name of the subreddit, the account name it was posted under, and a link back to the original post. For most pages we also hold one or two machine-made transcriptions of what the page says, and for a small number a corrected transcription made by hand.

2. Where it came from

Public sources only: the five subreddits named above. Nothing came from a private account, a direct message, or anywhere that required a login to see. Nothing was bought from anyone, and no third-party archive of Reddit was used — each image came from Reddit's own image host.

3. Why

Uncursive turns handwriting into text, and we make claims about how well it does that. Those claims should rest on a measurement rather than a hope. Measuring needs real handwriting from many different people, because a model that reads one person's writing well tells you nothing about the next person's, and the published handwriting benchmarks are old enough that the models being tested may already have been trained on them.

These pages are used to score reading models. They are never used to train one. No page here has been or will be used to teach a model to read or to write; that separation is written into our development rules, and the pages are stored apart from any material that could be used for training. No page is published, and no image is passed to anyone. When we report a result we cite a link, never the picture.

The traffic runs one way. These pages tell us how a model performs; nothing about them reaches a person using the app, and nothing a person writes in the app reaches this set.

4. The legal basis

Article 6(1)(f) of the GDPR — our legitimate interest in knowing whether the product works, weighed against your interests. That balancing is written down, and if you ask we will explain the reasoning that applies to your page.

Some pages, particularly diary pages, may say something about the writer's health, beliefs, politics or private life. The GDPR treats that as a special category needing its own basis. Where the writer photographed and posted the page themselves, Article 9(2)(e) covers it: the person made that information public deliberately. Where that does not hold — where the person who posted a page did not write it, or where a page mentions somebody else's private matters — we have no basis, and we remove the page rather than keep it. Tell us and we will remove it at once.

5. Who else has seen these pages

• Amazon Web Services stores the images for us, in Frankfurt, under a data processing agreement. Amazon does not look at them.
• Apple read 200 of the pages once each, through Private Cloud Compute, as part of the measurement. Apple states it does not keep what it reads there.
• A provider of large language models, in the United States, received 21 of the pages at the end of August 2026, sent by automation of ours that should not have sent them. We stopped it, deleted every copy we could reach, and asked that provider to delete theirs. The account's model-training setting was switched off before this happened and stayed off throughout, so the pages were not used for training. Ask us and we will tell you which provider it was, and whether your page was one of the 21.

Nobody else. No page has gone to a handwriting-recognition company, and none has been published anywhere.

6. How long we keep them

While the set is still being used to measure reading models, and no longer. We review that at least once a year and delete the set when the work it supports ends. A page we are asked to remove goes immediately, along with its transcriptions and everything derived from it.

7. Your rights, and how to use them

You can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, to correct it, to delete it, to restrict what we do with it, or to receive it in a portable form. You can object to our using it at all — and because our basis is legitimate interest, an objection means we stop unless we can show compelling grounds that override your rights, which for a test set we will not try to do. In practice: if you ask us to remove your page, we remove it.

Write to with Handwriting test set in the subject, and the link to your post. Please do not attach the page — we already have it, and sending it again only makes another copy.

You need no account with us. Because the pages are pseudonymous, the one thing we do check is that the request comes from whoever controls the account that posted the page: a message from that account, a comment added to the post itself, or an edit to the post naming us all work. That check exists to stop somebody removing a stranger's page, and it is the only hurdle. If you cannot do any of those because the account is gone, tell us and we will find another way. We answer within one month.

Nothing here makes any automated decision about you, and nobody is profiled, scored, identified or contacted. We do not try to work out who anyone is.

8. Complaints

If you think we have handled your information wrongly, tell us first — the address above. You can also complain to the Hungarian data protection authority:

If you live elsewhere in the European Economic Area or in the United Kingdom, you can complain to your own country's authority instead.

9. Who is responsible

There is no data protection officer. One person runs this.