Uncursive Privacy Policy

Version 1.0 — effective 1 September 2026
Published at https://uncursive.com/privacy

This policy covers the Uncursive app for iPhone and iPad, the website uncursive.com, and the emails you send us. It is written to be read. Where a sentence has to be legal, it still says what it means. For people in the United Kingdom it is also our notice under the UK GDPR.

1. The short version

Uncursive has no account, collects no data, and carries no tracking of any kind. On its own, the app sends nothing about you to us. An on-device model reads your pages entirely on your device; Private Cloud Compute, where the app offers it, sends a page to Apple's Private Cloud Compute service, which Apple says it built to read the page and not keep it — you choose which under Reading Model, and the app tells you where a page goes at the point where you choose. Downloading an on-device model fetches it from Apple the first time you need it, and again if you remove it or iOS removes it to free up space. Your documents are plain files you can see in the Files app, and they are included in your normal device backup.

Two things can leave your device through the app, and both start with you: a page you convert with Private Cloud Compute goes to Apple (section 5.1), and a page you report goes to us by email (section 6). Everything else the app does stays on your device. Features of iOS that you use inside the app — Writing Tools, dictation, sharing, backup — are Apple's and run under Apple's terms (section 4). Apple's opt-in crash reports are section 5.4.

The app collects nothing, and its App Store privacy label is Data Not Collected. What we hold about you is only what you email us yourself (section 6).

2. Who is responsible

The person responsible for the processing described here (the "data controller" under the General Data Protection Regulation, the GDPR, and the UK GDPR) is:

We have no data protection officer. Write to the email address above for anything in this policy.

3. What Uncursive does not do

• It has no account and no sign-in, and it never asks who you are.
• It contains no analytics, no advertising, no tracking, and no third-party code that collects, transmits, or reports anything about you.
• We run no server that the app talks to. The app has nowhere of ours to send your pages, your text, or anything about you.
• The app itself connects only to Apple: the App Store, Apple's asset delivery for model downloads, and, only if you chose it, Private Cloud Compute. Links in the app open in your browser, the App Store, the system's mail sheet, or the Settings app, which then connect on their own.
• We never use your pages or your text to train a model.
• It never tries to work out who wrote a page. Uncursive reads what the words say; it does not identify or verify anyone by their handwriting, and it creates no biometric template.
• We never sell or rent personal data, and we pass it to nobody except the providers this policy names, who handle it for us, and, where a matter needs it, our own professional advisers (a lawyer or an accountant, bound to confidentiality), the bank or payment service that carries a refund, and a court, conciliation board or authority dealing with the matter. Beyond that we hand something over only if a law that binds us, or a court or authority with power over us, orders it; then we hand over the minimum ordered, and we tell you, unless the law or the order forbids it. If someone ever takes over Uncursive (EULA section 17), what you sent us passes to them only with every promise in this policy.

One thing that is not about you, said here so it cannot be mistaken for something that is. To find out how well Uncursive reads handwriting, we tested it on pages that other people had posted publicly on the web, collected before the app shipped. None of those pages reached us through Uncursive, in a report, or in an email sent to us, and nothing you convert in Uncursive will ever join them. If you think your own handwriting might be in that set, the handwriting test set says what it holds, why, and how to have your page taken out.

4. What happens on your device

Everything Uncursive works with stays on your device unless you choose otherwise. The app has no way to send us a page; the only route to us is the email you write with Report Page (section 6).

• The camera. Uncursive asks for the camera only to photograph pages. Importing a photo or a PDF goes through the system picker, so the app never needs access to your whole photo library.
• Your pages and your text. The photos you take or import, and the text Uncursive reads from them, are stored as ordinary files on your device: a PDF of your pages and, once any page is converted, an editable text document. You can see them in the Files app. They are included in your normal device backup, and if you keep that backup in iCloud, Apple handles it under Apple's terms.
• The free-page count. Uncursive keeps the number of free pages you have used in this device's keychain, which is not synced anywhere and may survive deleting the app; it holds a number and nothing else. The internal identifiers of the pages it counted, which name no content, are kept with the app's own data: they go into your device backup like your documents and are deleted with the app.
• The diagnostic log. Uncursive writes short technical messages to your device's system log, as every app does. They contain no page content and none of the text Uncursive read from a page or you typed into one. The log stays on your device unless you send it somewhere yourself, for example in a diagnostics report to Apple.
• Apple's text features in the editor. The text editor is a standard iOS text field, so Apple's Writing Tools, dictation, and the keyboard's own features are available in it, as in any app. If you use them, iOS — not Uncursive — handles the text you select or speak, under Apple's terms and your device's settings; some of these features send that text to Apple's servers, or to a third-party service you have turned on in your device's settings. Uncursive itself sends nothing through them, and you can turn them off in your device's settings.
• Hidden text in a PDF you share. Each page of a PDF from your Uncursive library carries, invisibly, that page's text as it stands in your text document — your corrections and anything you typed included — together with technical details about how the page was read, such as an internal page identifier, which part of the page each block of text was read from, the name of the reading model that read each part of the page, the version of Uncursive that read it, and, on one of its pages, a technical fingerprint (a hash) of your text document, which lets a copy be matched to it but reveals nothing of its content. A page Private Cloud Compute has read only in part also carries, while the rest is unread, the words read so far and the part of the page each came from (they are not yet in your text document), which parts of the page are still unread and why (Apple declined to read them, or Apple's limit had been reached), and your answer to reading those parts on your device (the on-device model you picked, that you declined, or that you have not answered yet). A page you imported from a PDF also carries a copy of that page as it was imported. The saved text is also laid invisibly over the page image, so that it can be selected and searched. The file as a whole names the version of Uncursive that last wrote it, and carries the standard technical structure every PDF file has. Sharing the PDF shares all of that along with the page images. Uncursive never sends a PDF anywhere on its own.

5. What Apple processes when you use the app

Four things in Uncursive involve Apple. In each of them, Apple processes data under Apple's privacy policy and Apple's terms, and we receive nothing from Apple that identifies you. For people in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland, the Apple company responsible is Apple Distribution International Limited in Ireland, and Apple's privacy policy says how Apple moves personal data out of those areas.

5.1 Private Cloud Compute (only if you choose it)

Uncursive reads your handwriting with a reading model that you choose. Nothing is converted until you have chosen one. Where the app offers the model it lists as Private Cloud Compute and you choose it, the app sends the image of each page you convert, in strips, to Apple's Private Cloud Compute service, together with the app's fixed instructions for reading a page and nothing else of yours. The service reads the page and returns the text. The page leaves your device and goes to Apple. The on-device models send nothing.

The app tells you this where you make the choice, and the first time you pick this model on a device it asks, in so many words, for your consent to send the pages you convert, including what they say about your health, your beliefs or your politics; it tells you there that you cannot consent for anyone else, so pages that show other people's private matters belong on an on-device model. You can change the choice at any time in Settings; a page being read then stops before its next strip. What has already reached Apple, including a strip already on its way when you switch, cannot be called back.

What Apple says about it: Private Cloud Compute is built so that your data is used only to answer your request, is not stored after the response is returned, and is never available to Apple, even to staff with administrative access. That is Apple's promise, made in Apple's published description of the service and Apple's terms; we cannot verify it ourselves. Apple does not tell us where, or in which country, a given page is read. Apple limits how much it reads for each person. We never see the page or the text.

Who is responsible for what: we decided that Uncursive offers this model, what the app sends, and that nothing is sent until you choose it; for those decisions we are the controller. What happens to the page once it reaches Apple is decided by Apple under Apple's terms and privacy policy for Apple Intelligence; for that part Apple is a separate controller. We never hold the page, and we cannot see it, get it back, or delete it.

Our legal basis for sending a page you convert is that you asked for that conversion with that model: it is part of the service you licensed from us (GDPR Article 6(1)(b)). Because a page can show sensitive things about you, such as your health, your beliefs, or your politics, the confirmation the app asks for the first time you pick this model is your explicit consent to sending such pages (Article 9(2)(a)); it lasts until you pick an on-device model in Settings, and you can withdraw it that way at any time. If a page shows other people's details, you cannot consent for them and neither can we; we send such a page because converting it is what you asked for and Apple's service is built to keep nothing (Article 6(1)(f), our interest in providing the conversion you requested). Keep pages that show sensitive things about other people on an on-device model. If you are under 16, use an on-device model; this choice needs a consent that only an adult, or your parent, can give.

5.2 Model downloads

To use an on-device model, the app downloads it from Apple's servers the first time you need it, after showing you the size and asking you to confirm — and again if you remove it or iOS removes it to free up space. The app adds nothing of yours to the download request; like any download, Apple's servers see your device's network address. Apple's terms govern that.

5.3 The App Store and the Unlock

Apple handles the download of the app and the purchase of the Unlock, including your payment and your receipt. The app asks Apple whether the Unlock is owned by the Apple Account signed in to the App Store on this device — bought by you or shared with you through Family Sharing — and whether Apple has revoked it. It keeps only that answer, on the device, and sends nothing about it anywhere. It never receives your name, your email address, your Apple Account details, or your payment details, and neither do we.

5.4 Analytics and crash reports from Apple

If you have chosen in your device's settings to share analytics with app developers, Apple may give us aggregated usage statistics and crash reports for Uncursive through Apple's developer tools. The app contains no crash-reporting code of its own; Apple collects these reports from your device under Apple's privacy policy and passes them to us only in aggregated form or in a form that does not identify you, in Apple's words. A crash report contains technical details such as the device model, the operating system and app versions, the time of the crash, a technical trace of where the app stopped, and a per-device code that Apple says it anonymizes and resets when the device is erased. Uncursive puts nothing of your pages or your text into them, Apple gives us nothing in them that names you, and we do not try to work out who a report came from. We read them to find and fix faults. You can switch the sharing off at any time under Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements on your device.

6. What you send us

This is the one place where we hold personal data about people who use Uncursive or write to us, and it happens only when you send it.

6.1 Report Page

If a page fails to convert, the app offers Report Page. It opens an email to us in Mail, inside the app, from your own mail account, addressed to , with an image of the page attached and the details written out: why the conversion failed, which part of the page it failed on, and the versions of iOS or iPadOS, your device model, Uncursive, and the reading model you chose (its internal name and, for an on-device model, its installed size). Because it comes from your mail account, it also carries your email address, whatever name your mail app attaches, and your mail app's usual headers. The first line of the email says what the report is for. You see the email and the image before you send it, and nothing is sent unless you tap Send. The image is drawn by the app from the stored page and carries no location data. If Mail is not set up, the app offers a share sheet with the same text and image, for you to send to from an app of your choice; what reaches us then depends on the app you pick.

Before you send a report, check that the page shows nothing you do not want us to see; a page can hold other people's details too. Please do not send us a page that shows anyone's health information. If one reaches us, we delete the image as soon as we have read the failure details.

• What we use it for: to find and fix the fault you reported, and to test the fix.
• Legal basis: answering a support request is part of the licence between us (GDPR Article 6(1)(b)). The page image may show sensitive information, so the email's first line says what the image is for; sending it is your explicit consent to our using the image for that (Article 9(2)(a)), and you can withdraw it by asking us to delete the page.
• What we never do with it: publish it, share it, add it to any test set or collection, or use it to train a model. We do not send a page to any other company or person, except as section 3 allows.
• Who else sees it: your own email provider, and ours. Our mailbox is OVHcloud's Zimbra email service, run for us by OVH Hosting Limited in Dublin, Ireland, under the data processing agreement that is part of our contract with it; it stores our mail in OVHcloud's European data centres. OVHcloud group companies in Canada and the United Kingdom, countries the European Commission recognises as protecting personal data adequately, may support the service. If OVHcloud's spam filter misfiles your email and we move it out of the spam folder, OVHcloud may pass that email to the company that supplies its spam filter, to improve the filter. We use Claude, an AI assistant provided to us by Anthropic Ireland, Limited in Dublin, Ireland, to read and sort the text of the emails we receive and to draft our answers, under Anthropic's commercial terms and the data processing agreement they include. Anthropic runs the service on cloud infrastructure that can be outside the European Economic Area, including in the United States; the European Commission's standard contractual clauses in that agreement cover the data leaving the European Economic Area. Under those terms, Anthropic does not use what we send it to train its models and deletes it within thirty days, unless its safety systems flag the content as misuse, when it may keep it longer. We do not send it the page image. Email is not end-to-end encrypted, so treat a report like any email.
• How long we keep it: we keep the page image only until the fault you reported is fixed and the fix has shipped, and never longer than ninety days; then we delete it, including any copy we kept to test the fix. We keep your email address, your email, and the technical details for one year after we last wrote to each other, so that we can answer a follow-up, then delete them. We keep an email, or a page image, longer only while a dispute or a legal obligation requires it; if you ask, we tell you why, unless the law forbids it. Ask, and we delete sooner, unless a dispute or a legal obligation still needs it.

6.2 Other emails

If you write to with a question, a complaint, or a request under this policy, we use what you send only to answer you and to deal with the matter — under the licence between us where you use Uncursive (GDPR Article 6(1)(b)), under our legal obligations where you exercise a right or make a consumer complaint (Article 6(1)(c)), and otherwise under our legitimate interest in answering the people who write to us (Article 6(1)(f)). We keep the correspondence for one year after the matter is closed, or longer only while a legal obligation or a dispute requires it. A consumer complaint and our answer to it we keep for three years, as Hungarian consumer protection law requires. The same mailbox and the same assistant apply.

6.3 Keeping it safe

We keep what you send us in that mailbox, whose managing OVHcloud account is protected by two-factor sign-in, and on our own devices, which are encrypted and protected by a passcode. If that mailbox is ever breached, we tell the people affected and the data protection authority as the GDPR requires.

7. The website

uncursive.com is a static site. It sets no cookies of its own, runs no analytics, and embeds nothing from third parties. It is delivered for us by Amazon Web Services: the files sit in Amazon S3 in the United States (the us-east-1 region) and reach you through Amazon CloudFront, from the Amazon edge location nearest you. We keep no access logs: the request logging Amazon offers is switched off, so no record of your visit — your network address included — is kept for us. Amazon handles each request only to deliver the page, as our processor under the data-processing addendum in our contract with Amazon, which includes the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses for data leaving the European Economic Area. Our interest in running the site this way is keeping it available and secure (GDPR Article 6(1)(f)), and we do not use anything about a visit to identify anyone.

8. Your rights

For the data we hold — which is only what you sent us — you have the right to ask us what we hold about you and to get a copy; to have it corrected; to have it deleted; to restrict what we do with it; to receive it in a portable form; and to object to processing based on our legitimate interest. Where processing rests on your consent, you can withdraw the consent at any time, without affecting what was done before. Email us at ; we may ask you to confirm that the request comes from the address we hold. We answer within one month; if a request is complex we may take up to two months more, and we tell you within the first month if so.

For the sending of a page to Apple (section 5.1), your rights run against us: stop it by picking an on-device model, and ask us anything about it. For what Apple does with the page, and for everything in sections 5.2 to 5.4, your rights run against Apple, through the channels in Apple's privacy policy. For data on your own device (section 4), you already hold it: the files are yours to edit or delete in the app or in the Files app. The free-page count you cannot edit; it holds a number and nothing else.

If you think we have handled your data unlawfully, you can complain to the Hungarian data protection authority, to the authority of the country where you live, or, in the United Kingdom, to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk), and you can go to court. The Hungarian authority is:

9. Things the law asks us to say

• You never have to give us anything. If you do not send a report, we cannot fix that page, and that is the only consequence.
• Uncursive makes no decision about you. It turns handwriting into text that you check and edit, and nothing in it has a legal or similar effect on you.
• Uncursive's reading models are artificial intelligence in the sense of the EU's AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689). Reading handwriting you chose to convert, for you to check, is not a high-risk use under that regulation.
• If a page you send shows another person, we cannot tell them we have it, because we do not know who they are; we delete it on request from anyone it shows, unless a dispute or a legal obligation still needs it.
• If you live in Hungary, you may also bring a claim against us before the court of your own place of residence, and you can ask the NAIH to investigate or to open a formal procedure.

10. Children

Uncursive is a general tool and is not made for children. It collects nothing from anyone. A child's pages stay on the device like everyone else's unless Private Cloud Compute is chosen; that choice needs a consent a child under 16 cannot give alone, so a child should use an on-device model, and a parent who sets up a child's device can choose one in Settings. If an email tells us that the sender is under 13 — or under 16 where that is the age in your country — we answer it once if it needs an answer, then delete it and anything attached, unless the law requires us to keep it. A parent or guardian can ask us at any time to delete what a child sent us or, while we still hold it, to learn what it was; we ask for enough to confirm who they are before we answer.

11. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, we publish the new version with its effective date at https://uncursive.com/privacy. If a change means the app starts sending us anything it did not send before, the app tells you before it sends anything new. We do not use what you gave us under an older version for a new purpose without telling you first.

12. Language

This policy is written in English. Where we publish a translation, it says the same thing; if you find a difference, tell us and we will fix it, and until then we hold ourselves to the version you read.

Apple, iPhone, iPad, iCloud, and App Store are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries and regions. Apple Intelligence is a trademark of Apple Inc. Uncursive is an independent product and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc.