Privacy

T-scan · last updated 19 August 2026

T-scan reads a Magic card through your camera and tells you what it is worth. This page says exactly what it keeps, where, and for how long. It is short because the app does little.

What stays on your phone

• The cards you scan. Your list lives in your phone's local storage. It is not uploaded anywhere unless you turn on sync (see below).
• The card catalogue, downloaded once over Wi-Fi so the app can recognise a card with no network connection.

What the camera does

Frames are read on the phone. Nothing is uploaded while you point the camera at a card and the code at the bottom is readable.

When that code cannot be read — a damaged card, a reflection, a bad angle — the frame is sent to our server so the card name can be read there. That image is not stored: it is read and discarded.

Your account

Signing in is handled by Clerk. The only thing T-scan reads from your account is your email address, to know whose collection is whose. We never see your password.

Sync with T-deck

If you turn sync on, the cards you mark as owned or wanted are sent to T-deck, which is our own service and uses the same account. Turn the switch off in Settings and nothing leaves the phone. Turning it off never deletes anything.

When you tell us we got it wrong

If you tap “Not this card”, we record one line on the server: the card the app had proposed, the text it had read from the bottom of the card, the time, and the random identifier the app generates for itself. That is how a wrong reading gets fixed — every recognition bug found so far came from exactly that text.

It also sends one photo of that card — the crop inside the yellow guide, nothing around it — so the reading can be compared with what was actually printed. It is the only moment a photo leaves your phone.

No name, no email, no card other than the one you rejected, and no photo at any other time. Tap nothing and nothing is recorded.

What we do not do

Deleting everything

Settings → Delete account, inside the app. It deletes your account, and it cannot be undone. What happens to the list on this phone depends on whose it is, and the app tells you which of these three happened:

• Your cards on this phone are gone.
• Your cards are gone. Another account's cards are still on this phone: they are not yours to delete, and signing in with that account brings them back.
• Your account is gone. Some cards on this phone were never linked to an account, so they are still here — we cannot tell whose they are, so we did not delete them.

If sync with T-deck is on, the app deletes your data there first — collection, decks, saved versions, notifications and your account row — and only then deletes your account. The order matters, and this is what it buys you:

• If the deletion on T-deck goes through, the app tells you how many rows were removed, then deletes your account and clears what belongs to you on this phone.
• If the app cannot reach T-deck, or cannot confirm what happened there, it stops before touching your account. Your account and the list on this phone are both still here, and you can simply try again — deleting is safe to repeat.
• If your T-deck data is deleted but the account itself cannot be, the app says so and tells you how many rows were removed there. Your account is still yours: try again, or write to the address below. In this one case the app also clears the pending uploads and stops sending anything to T-deck, so that what was just deleted there is not sent back up on its own. Your card list on this phone is left alone. If all of that worked, you can turn sync on again in Settings whenever you want, and your cards are uploaded again from scratch. If this phone is out of space, the app cannot finish tidying up: turning sync on again may then not upload your cards, and the app says so instead of promising the upload. In that same case it may not even manage to record that sync is off — it says that too, and asks you to turn it off yourself in Settings before you reopen the app, because otherwise some of the cards you just deleted can be sent back up the next time it starts. Whenever the app says it could not finish, write to us and we sort it out by hand.

Sync off means nothing is sent to T-deck now. If you used sync before, your data is still there — turning sync off never deleted it — so write to the address below to have it removed.

Children

T-scan is not aimed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect anything from them.

Changes

If this page changes, the date at the top changes with it.