Klarscan
The short version
Klarscan does not have a server. There is no account, nothing syncs, and the app never transmits your scans, your PDFs, or the text it recognises anywhere. It is free, with no purchase of any kind, so there is no billing relationship either. Everything else on this page follows from those two facts.
- Account required
- No. The app has no login and no sign-up
- Your documents leave your device
- Never, unless you share them yourself
- Camera permission
- None. The app never asks for it. See below
- Internet permission
- None. The released app cannot open a network connection, because Android never grants it one
- Analytics or trackers
- None of ours. ML Kit reports its own usage and cannot transmit it. See below
- Ads, page limits, watermarks, export paywall
- None of them
This policy covers the app. The website that hosts this page has its own separate policy.
What the app stores, and where
Everything Klarscan keeps is written to your phone's private app storage, in a folder no other app can read. Specifically:
- Page images. The cropped JPEG of each page you scanned.
- The PDF produced for each scan, stored alongside those images.
- Recognised text. The words read off each page, stored in a local database so the archive can be searched. This is the actual content of your documents, which is why none of it leaves the device.
- A search index built from that text, also local. It exists so a search is instant; it holds no information the text does not already contain.
- A title and a date per scan. The title is taken from the first line the app read on the page, and you can rename it to anything you like.
That is the complete list. There is no usage log, no device identifier, no advertising ID, no crash reporting service, and no record of what you searched for.
Deleting a scan removes its images, its PDF, its recognised text and its search entries immediately and permanently. Uninstalling the app removes everything at once. There is no copy anywhere else, which also means there is nothing to restore from. Export anything you want to keep before you uninstall.
Permissions
Klarscan requests no runtime permissions at all. Not camera, not storage, not location, not contacts, not microphone. You will never see a permission prompt from this app.
A document scanner that never asks for the camera sounds like a contradiction. The scanning step does not happen inside Klarscan: it happens inside a scanner supplied by Google Play services, running under its own permissions, which shows you the camera, finds the page edges, and then hands back only the pages you chose to keep. Klarscan receives finished images. It cannot see through your camera, before or after.
The released app also holds no internet permission. Android never grants it one, so any attempt to reach a server fails at the operating-system level, whatever the app, a future update, or a bug might try.
That claim leaves out two things. Sharing still works, because the share sheet hands your file to a different app, and that app has its own permissions. And the scanner and text recognition described next run inside Google Play services, a separate program with its own network access. That is what the next section is about.
The one third-party component
Two features come from Google Play services rather than from inside the app: the document scanner described above, and the text recognition that reads the words off each page. Both run entirely on your device. Neither sends your pages, your images, or the recognised text to Google or to anyone else, and neither requires a network connection to work.
That dependency has a consequence: on a phone without Google Play services, those two features will not run, and the app cannot scan. Everything already scanned stays readable and searchable.
ML Kit also reports on its own usage: which of its features were called, plus version and timing information about the library, never the contents of your documents. Google provides no way to switch this off; two approaches were tried, and the only one that had any effect stopped scanning from working at all. In the released app those reports never leave your device: the app holds no internet permission, so the attempt to send them fails at the operating-system level.
Play services is a Google component and Google's own privacy policy governs it. What this app does with it is bounded by the description above: no account, no upload, no network call.
Children
Klarscan is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect information from anyone, of any age. The app has no mechanism to collect information from anyone, because nothing it stores ever leaves the device.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes, the version and effective date at the top of this page change with it. Since the app has no accounts, there is no way to notify anyone individually, so checking back here is how to stay current. A change that weakened any commitment above would contradict the studio's published principles.
Contact
Questions about this policy or the app: [email protected].