The cards you scan are not yours to upload

The argument nobody in this category makes

When you scan a business card, the personal data being processed is not yours. It is a name, a direct line, a work email and often a mobile number belonging to someone who handed you a piece of paper at a meeting. They consented to you having it. They did not consent to a third-party company in another jurisdiction holding it, indexing it, or building a social graph out of it.

A cloud card scanner makes that decision on their behalf, silently, every time you press the shutter. An app that sends nothing to its own maker is the only architecture where scanning someone’s card does not hand their data to a company they have never heard of. This matters more under Japan’s APPI and Taiwan’s PDPA than generic privacy marketing does, and no cloud competitor can copy it without rebuilding their product.

What Kardhaus does and does not do

• Scanning and text recognition run on your device, using the OCR built into iOS. Turn on airplane mode and scan a card — it still reads and saves.
• From version 1.1, on iOS 27, AI recognition sends the photo of the card it is reading to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute. Nothing about your cards reaches us. Details below.
• From version 1.2, on iOS 27, a follow-up draft you ask for is written by Apple’s Private Cloud Compute too — from the name, title and company on the card and your notes on the meeting, never a phone number, email, address or photo. Nothing is sent until you tap to generate one.
• Cards are stored on your device, and synced through your own iCloud private database if you want them on your iPad too. We are not a party to that sync and cannot read it.
• There is no account. No email required to use the app, no password, no profile, nothing to breach.
• No ads, no tracking, no account — and nothing that measures how you use the app. No Firebase, no Mixpanel, no crash or attribution SDK, no advertising identifier, no App Tracking Transparency prompt.
• From version 1.2, your purchases can be recorded by RevenueCat. It is on for a new install and off for everyone who was already here, with a switch either way in Settings › Privacy. It receives the purchase and an anonymous ID for the install; it never receives a card, a card photo, your name or an email address. Details below.
• No ads and no ad identifiers, on any tier.

Where the recognition actually runs

Two layers. First, the OCR built into iOS reads the card on your iPhone and fills the fields it can prove from the text. That part never changes. Then a second pass — AI recognition — works out which line is a department and which is a job title, and keeps a Chinese name and a Latin name attached to one person.

Where that second pass runs depends on the version. Up to 1.0.x, and on iOS 26, it runs on the phone with Apple Intelligence. From version 1.1, on iOS 27, it goes first to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, together with the photo of that one card. Apple built Private Cloud Compute so that what is sent is used only for that request, is not stored, and cannot be accessed by anyone — Apple included. When it is not available — no connection, an iPhone that is not eligible, or Apple’s usage limit for Private Cloud Compute reached — Kardhaus uses Apple Intelligence on the device, and failing that, the built-in recognition. The card is saved either way. Once your free AI recognitions are used up without Pro, AI recognition does not run at all: the built-in recognition reads the card on your iPhone, and nothing goes to Private Cloud Compute.

One more thing goes to Apple, in every version: the address printed on a card is looked up in Apple Maps, so the card can sit on the map. Nothing goes to us: there is no account system, and the app has nothing of ours to call.

From version 1.2: follow-up drafts, when you ask for one

Version 1.2 can draft the message you send after a meeting. It is the third and last thing on the list, and it happens only when you tap to generate a draft — the app shows you what goes where before the first one. On iOS 27 the draft is written by Apple’s Private Cloud Compute first; failing that, by Apple Intelligence on the device, and failing that, from built-in templates.

What goes, for one draft: the name, title, department and company on that card; the venue name of your latest meeting (never its street address), its date, what kind of meeting it was and your note on it; up to six of the card’s tags; your impression of the person, up to 400 characters; short excerpts of up to two earlier drafts you marked as sent; the hint you typed; and your own name, title and company, so the message can come from you. What never goes: phone numbers, email addresses, postal addresses, tax IDs, websites and photos — and if you typed one into a note or a hint, it is removed before anything is sent. Your sign-off is added on the device after the draft comes back. Drafts are kept with the card, on your device and in your own iCloud if sync is on. None of it reaches us.

Version 1.1 had no setting to switch Private Cloud Compute off, which is why this page said so plainly. From version 1.1.1 there is one: Settings › Apple Intelligence in Kardhaus. It is on by default. Turn it off and nothing goes to Private Cloud Compute — AI recognition stays on the device, and from 1.2 follow-up drafts are written by the on-device model or from templates.

From version 1.2: RevenueCat, and the switch for it

Version 1.2 adds a third destination, and it is not for your cards. The purchase itself can be recorded by RevenueCat, a company that keeps in-app purchase records for app developers. It is on for a new install and off for anyone who finished setting Kardhaus up before 1.2 — if you are already here, nothing changes unless you change it. The switch is “Send purchase records to RevenueCat” in Settings › Privacy, and it takes effect the next time the app starts. With it off, the RevenueCat code never starts and makes no request at all: buying and restoring run on Apple’s StoreKit, exactly as in 1.1.

With it on, RevenueCat receives the purchase (which product, and Apple’s transaction for it), a randomly generated anonymous ID for the install, the app and iOS version, the device model, your first languages, your App Store country, and whether the purchase was a sandbox one. That purchase record sits on its servers, on Amazon Web Services in the United States. It never receives a card, a card photo, any text read from a card, your name, an email address, an account — there is no account — this device’s identifier, an advertising identifier, or anything about how you use the app.

Why it is there at all. Kardhaus is entered in Shipaton, RevenueCat’s hackathon, and the rules require the app to use the RevenueCat SDK to power at least one in-app purchase. That is the whole reason, and it is why there is a switch instead of a silent dependency. Whether Pro is unlocked is still decided by Apple’s own signed transaction record on the phone, so the app works offline, Family Sharing is unaffected, and if RevenueCat is unreachable the purchase goes through anyway.

The promise, and this is us keeping it. If Kardhaus ever sends card data to anyone other than Apple, this page names them before that update ships. RevenueCat receives purchases, never cards — so the card promise itself is intact, and RevenueCat is named here before 1.2 goes on sale rather than after.

Siri AI, and where Kardhaus sits beside it

iOS 27 arrives on 14 September 2026 with Siri AI — in Apple’s words, “an entirely new version of Siri powered by Apple Intelligence.” Nothing here is an argument against it. It is an argument about scope, and Apple has stated the scope itself: Siri AI ships in beta, is “available in English to start”, and will “not be initially available in the EU” on iOS.

That is the honest way to ship a general assistant, and it is also why a lot of people updating on Monday will find this particular part is not for them yet. Card recognition is not a general assistant. It is one narrow job, it was finished before the keynote, and it works the same in every country the App Store serves. It reads Chinese, Japanese and English cards today — Korean-only lines are the exception, filled in by hand from the card photo. No beta, no waitlist, no region.

The distinction is not quality, it is reach. Both stand on Apple Intelligence: from Kardhaus 1.1 on iOS 27, AI recognition uses Private Cloud Compute, the cloud Apple built so that what is sent is not stored and cannot be accessed, Apple included — and from 1.2 so do the follow-up drafts you ask for. What never happens is a card reaching us — the app sends nothing to Kardhaus.

How this compares

Common questions