Effective date: July 30, 2026
The short version: Cairn does not have your photographs. It reads them from your own photo library on your own phone and never uploads them anywhere. Your notes, your voice recordings, and your animal's records stay on your iPhone. There are no accounts, no servers of ours, no analytics, no ads, and no sharing.
Cairn is an iOS app developed and operated by Anshul Jain ("we", "us"). It is a private album for the life of a pet.
This is the most important thing to understand about how Cairn works. When you give Cairn permission to see your photo library, it stores a reference to a photograph, not the photograph itself. The picture is read from your own library, on your own device, at the moment it is shown on screen. Nothing is uploaded.
The one exception is deliberate and small. For a photograph you explicitly place into a moment, Cairn saves a reduced copy (about 1024 pixels on its longest edge) inside its own storage on your phone, so your album does not develop holes if you later delete the original from your library. That copy also never leaves the device.
Cairn uses Apple's Vision framework, running entirely on your device, to notice which of your photographs contain a cat or a dog, so it can suggest them instead of making you hunt. This analysis happens on your iPhone and produces suggestions only. Cairn never adds anything to your album by itself: it proposes, and you decide.
Everything you create in Cairn is stored only in the app's local storage on your iPhone. That includes your written notes, your voice recordings, your letters, your animal's profile, and everything in the Vault (weights, visits, vaccinations, medications, and comfort entries). None of it is transmitted to us or to anyone else.
The Vault is a place to keep what your veterinarian gave you. It does not connect to any clinic, any practice management system, or any health record service, and it never sends your animal's information anywhere.
Cairn asks for the microphone only so you can record your animal's own sounds. Recordings are saved as ordinary audio files in the app's storage on your device. There is no speech recognition, no transcription, and no upload.
Cairn writes a short weekly letter about the week you just had, and sometimes a brief title for a day you left untitled. This prose is generated by Apple's on-device intelligence (Apple Foundation Models) or by the app's own built-in templates, entirely on your iPhone. Nothing you write is sent to us or to any third-party AI service. On devices without Apple Intelligence, the built-in engine does this work instead, and the app is fully functional.
Cairn never generates your animal's voice, image, or messages. It does not create pictures, it does not speak as your pet, and it does not invent events. Everything in your album was made by you.
Cairn has no feed, no followers, no profiles, no comments, and no way for anyone else to see your album. There is nothing to invite anyone to. When you choose to export a card, a records PDF, or your Life Book, it goes through the standard iOS share sheet and you alone decide where it goes.
Reminders and weekly letters are local notifications scheduled on your device. Notification text never quotes what you have written. If you mark that an animal has died, Cairn stops sending notifications entirely until you ask it to resume.
Subscriptions and purchases are processed entirely by Apple. We never see your payment details.
Because everything lives on your device, you can export a complete archive of your album from Settings and keep it wherever you choose. On-device data is also included in your iCloud or computer backups if you have those enabled, which is governed by Apple's privacy policy. Deleting the app removes the data from your phone, and we hold no copy of it.
Cairn is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect information from them. Since the app collects nothing at all, there is nothing for us to hold.
Policy updates will be posted here. Questions: anshul.jainsm@gmail.com.