Privacy Policy
Paper Notebook Backup & Search is an app used to scan images of your notes and journals. It uses OCR to extract text from your handwriting. Your data is stored locally on your phone, and on any cloud storage providers that you explicitly opt into using. Although your data is not stored on Paper Notebook servers, scans are uploaded temporarily to Paper Notebook servers for handwriting processing. This occurs once when you scan a page, or import images or PDFs into the app. The app uses accounts to meter scans, and so Paper Notebook servers store metadata used to identify your account.
Your data and metadata are not transmitted or used in any way other than what is described in this document.
What is transmitted to Paper Notebook servers
Paper Notebook’s servers serve the purposes of relaying scanned images to an OCR service, tracking quotas for page scans, and handling in-app purchases. When you scan a page, that image is transmitted to Paper Notebook servers, but is not stored any longer than is necessary for OCR processing. The same applies when you import images or PDFs. Text extracted from scans is sent back to your phone from Paper Notebook servers - and again is not stored any longer than is necessary to relay that data.
Scans are only transmitted at the time when you take the scan, or perform the import. Viewing scans, searching, copying & pasting text, editing scans, or editing scan metadata after taking the scan do not involve Paper Notebook’s servers in any way.
When you log into the app your identity provider sends authentication information to Paper Notebook’s servers.
When you make an in-app purchase your payment processor (Apple or Google) sends purchase information to Paper Notebook’s servers.
What is stored on Paper Notebook servers
Paper Notebook’s servers store metadata necessary to identify your account for purposes of tracking how many scan credits you have purchased, and how many you have used. The servers also store purchase history. Metadata that is stored long-term includes:
- your email address
- your identity provider, and the internal identifier your provider has assigned to you
- logs of dates and times when you have taken scans (to track how many scans you have used)
- logs of purchases including purchased scan credit count, price paid, and which payment processor was used
The email address you supply might be used to contact you for support if necessary - for example to notify you if there was a problem with a purchase, or to warn of account deletion after a long period of inactivity. Your email address will not be used for marketing.
Who else has access to your data
Paper Notebook uses Google Cloud Vision’s OCR service to extract text from scans. This means that Google has temporary access to your scans, and extracted text. As of this writing (2026-07-29) Google asserts that they do not store images or extracted text longer than necessary for processing, and that they do not use this data for training. For details see Google’s Data Usage FAQ.
Where your data is stored permanently
Your data, including scanned images and extracted text, are stored on your phone. You have the option of exporting that data using the in-app “export backup” feature. You also have the option of backing up that data using your choice of the cloud storage providers that the Paper Notebook app supports.
If you choose to use a cloud storage provider to store backups then your data will be transmitted to that provider, and stored according to their privacy policy.