Cairn Privacy Policy

Cairn is built around a single belief: your private writing should stay yours.

What Cairn collects

Nothing. Cairn does not collect, store, transmit, or share any personal information, journal entries, usage analytics, crash reports, device identifiers, or behavioural data.

What stays on your iPhone

Everything you write in Cairn is stored only in the app's database on your iPhone:

• ●Your journal entries
• ●Mood, tags, summaries, and headlines extracted by Apple's on-device Foundation Models framework
• ●Your streak history
• ●Your settings and preferences

The AI that reads your entries to extract patterns runs entirely on your iPhone, using Apple's built-in language model. Your words are never sent to Apple, to us, or to any third-party server for analysis.

Voice journaling

When you use the microphone to dictate an entry (a Premium feature), audio is processed by Apple's on-device speech recognition. Cairn requests on-device recognition, which forces transcription to happen locally on your iPhone — no audio is uploaded to Apple's servers. Cairn never writes the audio to disk and never retains it after transcription ends. What you keep is only the text that arrives in the editor, which you can edit or discard before saving.

Voice notes on Apple Watch

The Watch's voice-note feature (Premium) records audio locally on the Watch, transfers it to your paired iPhone over Apple's WatchConnectivity framework, and asks the iPhone to transcribe it on-device. The audio file is deleted from both the Watch and the iPhone immediately after transcription. No audio is uploaded to any server. The audio crosses between your two paired devices only.

App lock

The optional app lock (a Premium feature) stores your PIN in the iPhone's Keychain, scoped to this device only. It does not sync to iCloud, and it is wiped if you reset or transfer the device. Face ID and Touch ID, when enabled, are evaluated by the Secure Enclave — Cairn only ever receives a yes/no answer, never your biometric data. There is no cloud recovery: if you forget your PIN, your entries on this device remain readable only with that PIN.

Third parties

Cairn does not embed any third-party analytics, advertising, attribution, or tracking SDKs. There is no Firebase, Mixpanel, Adjust, AppsFlyer, Sentry, Crashlytics, Meta SDK, TikTok SDK, or similar in the build.

The only third party Cairn uses is RevenueCat, exclusively to validate App Store receipts so we know whether you've purchased Premium. RevenueCat receives an anonymous Apple receipt only — never your journal contents, name, email, or device identifiers. RevenueCat's privacy policy: https://www.revenuecat.com/privacy

In-App Purchases

Cairn offers optional Premium subscriptions and a lifetime purchase. These are processed entirely by Apple via the App Store. We never see your payment information. Apple's privacy policy covers App Store purchases: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/

Children's privacy

Cairn is rated 4+ but is not designed specifically for children. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone of any age, because we do not collect data at all.

Your rights under GDPR / CCPA / Irish Data Protection Act

Because Cairn does not collect personal data, there is nothing for us to disclose, delete, or correct. If you want to permanently remove all your journal entries, use Settings → Delete all entries inside the app. This is irreversible and removes the data from your iPhone immediately.

Changes to this policy

If we ever change this policy — for example, if we add a feature that does collect data — we will:

1. ●Update the date at the top of this page
2. ●Surface the change in the app via an update notice
3. ●Require your explicit opt-in for any data collection

We will not silently begin collecting data.

Contact

Privacy questions: Gareth@onliware.ie