The short version
Silo Scanner collects no data. None.
Silo Scanner is in development. This policy is published ahead of release, on purpose: it states the commitment the shipped app will meet, so it is on file before the first build ever reaches anyone.
No analytics. No telemetry. No account. No personal data. No usage metrics. No error beacons. No advertising IDs. No fingerprinting. No crash reports. No data of any kind will be collected, stored, transmitted, or shared by Silo Scanner about you, your device, or your documents.
Everything Silo Scanner is being built to do — document capture, edge detection and page cleanup, text recognition, library search, and PDF export — runs entirely on your Mac, on-device, using Apple's Vision framework for OCR and a local SQLite database for search. There is no cloud component. There is no server. There is no Silo Scanner account.
What we don't have, and therefore never see
Because Silo Scanner has no server-side component, the following do not exist anywhere in our infrastructure (and our infrastructure consists of: nothing):
- Your name, email, phone, or address.
- Your IP address, device identifier, MAC address, or any other hardware fingerprint.
- The pages you scan, the text Silo Scanner recognizes, the names and organization of your library, or any PDF you export.
- The contents of your Documents, Downloads, Desktop, or any other folder.
- Session timing, feature usage, button clicks, or any other behavioural data.
- Crash reports. Silo Scanner will not implement a crash-reporting SDK.
We will never see any of this because none of it is ever sent. The app will not phone home, ever.
Outbound traffic
No outbound network traffic is planned from Silo Scanner itself. The only network traffic associated with the app will be:
- Mac App Store updates.When Apple ships a Silo Scanner update, the Mac App Store delivers it. This traffic is between your Mac and Apple's servers, governed by Apple's privacy policy. Silo Scanner is not involved.
- Links you click. If you click an external link inside the app (for example, opening this privacy policy), your default browser handles the request. Silo Scanner is not involved.
Unlike OCR products built on cloud APIs, Silo Scanner's text recognition runs through Apple's Vision framework on your own hardware, so no document, page, or recognized text is ever transmitted to perform it. If a future build ever needs to download anything — anything at all — this page will say so, explicitly, before that build ships.
Permissions we request, and why
Silo Scanner will ask only for the macOS permissions required to get pages off your desk and onto your disk, and it never sends anything off your Mac:
- Camera. Requested only if you scan with your iPhone via Continuity Camera, which macOS gates behind the Camera permission. The frames are used to capture pages locally and nothing else.
- Image capture devices.Access to connected scanners and cameras through Apple's ImageCaptureCore framework, used only to pull pages from hardware you plug in or pair.
That is all. Silo Scanner does not ask for Microphone, Location, Contacts, Screen Recording, or Full Disk Access. If you never use Continuity Camera, the Camera permission is never requested.
On-device data you create
The pages you scan, the recognized text, your library and its search index, and your local preferences live on your disk under ~/Library/Containers/com.silosystems.siloscanner/Data/Library/Application Support/Silo Scanner/ (plus any folder you explicitly choose to export PDFs to). They are yours. We do not have access to them. Deleting Silo Scanner removes the app; your documents remain under its container until you delete them manually.
Children's privacy
Because no personal data will be collected from any user, no special treatment is required for users under 13. The same policy applies regardless of age: nothing collected.
Third-party components
Silo Scanner is being built on Apple's own frameworks. None of them receive any data about you from Silo Scanner:
- Apple Vision (on-device text recognition / OCR) — runs locally on your Mac. No Apple server is involved in recognition.
- ImageCaptureCore(Apple's scanner and camera framework) — runs locally to talk to your hardware.
- SQLite / FTS5 (embedded local database and full-text search) — runs locally; the index never leaves your disk.
Changes
If we ever materially change how Silo Scanner handles data — for example, if a future version of the app ever begins to collect anything at all — we will publish an updated version of this page, announce the change prominently in the release notes, and require explicit consent in-app before any new collection begins. The effective date at the top of this document reflects the current policy.
The current policy is: nothing is collected.
Contact
Questions about this policy: admin@ohmslaw.net
For non-private inquiries you can also open an issue at github.com/flowmar47/silo-scanner.