Privacy Policy
Cairn runs entirely on your Mac. We do not receive, see, or store your screenshots, voice recordings, transcripts, or searches. There is no account, no server, no telemetry.
1. Controller
Anton Platonov, sole trader, Bologna, Italy (P.IVA 04308291204). Contact: [email protected]. Full legal notice.
2. What Cairn processes and where
When you press the capture hotkey, Cairn records a screenshot (PNG) and a short voice note (WAV). It then processes both locally on your Mac to produce a transcript, OCR text, image tags, and embeddings for search. All of this is stored in the macOS App Sandbox container at ~/Library/Containers/software.cairn.app/Data/Library/Application Support/cairn/.
Legal basis (GDPR Art. 6(1)(b)): processing on your device is necessary to provide the service you installed. We do not receive, store, or otherwise process this data on systems we operate, so in respect of your captures and any derived data, no controller-side processing is carried out by us once the app is installed.
3. What leaves your device
The Cairn application binary contains no networking code, analytics, telemetry, or crash reporting. The only outbound traffic associated with Cairn:
- App Store updates: handled by macOS under Apple's privacy policy, not ours.
- One-time model download: on first launch, Cairn downloads a vision-language model (~1.2 GB) from Hugging Face. The download contains model weights only; no information about you or your device is sent.
4. On-device AI (EU AI Act Art. 50)
Cairn uses on-device AI models — Whisper (OpenAI) for speech-to-text and Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct (Alibaba Cloud) for image description — that run entirely on your Mac. No data is sent to OpenAI, Alibaba, or any other AI provider. Model outputs may be inaccurate; do not rely on them where accuracy matters.
5. No biometric processing
Voice recordings are transcribed locally into plain text. Cairn does not perform speaker identification, voice-printing, or any biometric processing within the meaning of GDPR Article 9(1), the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (740 ILCS 14), or analogous laws.
6. Retention
Your captures stay on your Mac until you delete them. There is no automatic deletion and no server-side copy. To remove all Cairn data, uninstall the app and delete ~/Library/Containers/software.cairn.app/.
7. Your rights
Because Cairn does not transmit or store your data on systems we operate, you exercise rights of access, portability, and erasure directly on your Mac — through the in-app viewer or by deleting the container folder above. We cannot retrieve or delete your data on your behalf.
You may contact [email protected] with questions, or lodge a complaint with your national data protection authority — the Italian supervisory authority is the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali.
8. Children
Cairn is not directed at children under 16 and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone.
9. CCPA / US state laws
Cairn does not sell or share personal information within the meaning of the CCPA/CPRA, VCDPA, CPA, CTDPA, UCPA, DPDPA, or OCPA. There is no personal information to sell or share because Cairn does not receive any.
10. The cairn.software website
The website sets no cookies, runs no first-party analytics, and embeds no third-party trackers, fonts, or scripts. Our hosting provider may keep short-term access logs (IP address, timestamp, requested URL, user agent) for the operational and security purposes set out in its own privacy policy; we do not consult those logs to profile visitors and we do not combine them with any other data.
11. Changes
If we change Cairn's behavior in a way that affects this policy, we will update the version and date at the top of this page and announce material changes in-app before the new behavior ships. Changes that affect promises in the Privacy Pledge — for example, any feature that would send data off your device — also require a Pledge version bump and a one-time in-app notice before the new behavior takes effect.