Privacy Policy

Who we are

Cardkept is run by Gonçalo Gomes, a sole trader in the UK, trading as Cardkept. He decides how your information is used and is responsible for it under UK data protection law (the “controller”). Questions or requests about your information: email help@cardkept.app.

What we collect

Your email address, to sign you in.

What you choose to add: your name, handle and profile picture; your cards, their condition, grade, where you keep them, what you paid and when; your notes, stories and photos; the PRO Scans (3D scans) you save to your cards (the pictures the scan makes of the card and the look you choose for it); your wishlists; the packs you open and the hits you log from them; and your currency preference.

If you use Friends: the friends you add, the requests you send and answer, the people you block and the reports you make.

Your phone’s region setting, read once to pick a starting currency. We never ask for your location.

What you tell us when you email us for help.

What we don’t do

No advertising, no analytics or tracking tools, and we never sell your data. Nobody else can see your collection, your photos, your wishlists, your pack openings or your milestones, except a card you share as a link yourself, whose page also shows your profile picture and collector level, and the PRO Scans, with the details you let them see, that the friends you accept can see (below). Your openings are counted, without your name, in each set’s totals (packs opened, hits pulled), and those totals are only shown once a set has 200 packs from 10 people, so no one opening can be picked out.

Why we use it

To run the app you signed up for: your account, your collection and everything in it, reading a card from a photo you scan, prices in your currency, and the cards you choose to share. This is the main reason, and the law calls it performing our contract with you.

Because we have a legitimate interest in keeping Cardkept working, safe and fair: counting scans so a monthly limit can apply, keeping a record of what each scan read, answering your emails, and counting pack openings without names for each set’s totals; and keeping Friends safe: checking a PRO Scan is a real card before friends see it, turning away offensive handles and names, and looking at reports.

When the law requires it, for example to answer a lawful request from the authorities.

Where it’s kept

Your account and everything you add are stored with Supabase, our database and storage provider, on servers in London. Photos and PRO Scans sit in private storage that only your account can open, and the friends you accept, for your PRO Scans and the story photos you let them see; a PRO Scan is saved to the card you choose, and deleting that card deletes it. Before a photo of a card is uploaded, your phone makes it smaller (at most 2,000 pixels on its long side) and makes a small preview of it for your lists.

Your photos and PRO Scans also have a private backup copy with Cloudflare, in Western Europe, that only we can open. It exists so they can be put back if they’re ever lost by mistake. When you delete a photo, a card or your account, the backup copy is deleted too, within about a month.

So the app opens straight away, it keeps a copy of your collection, its prices, your places and the list of sets on your phone, and the card pictures, photos and PRO Scans you’ve looked at (up to 250 MB, the oldest removed first). That copy stays in the app’s own storage on your phone, isn’t sent anywhere, and is deleted when you sign out. A PRO Scan you’ve saved is also kept in the app’s storage until it has finished uploading, so a lost signal or a closed app never loses it; it goes up the next time you’re signed in, and is then removed from there.

To fetch prices we ask our price provider about cards, and read TCGplayer’s public daily price list through TCGCSV, never anything about you. Currency rates come from the European Central Bank’s public data; nothing about you is sent.

Card pictures load straight from public card catalogs (TCGdex, pokemontcg.io and its successor Scrydex, and pokemontcgapi.com), from TCGplayer’s image server (for most Japanese cards, for special versions like Poké Ball Pattern and Staff cards, for cards added from TCGplayer’s catalog, and for other cards no public catalog has a picture of), from our price provider’s image server, and from our own storage (set logos, and a few card pictures we keep copies of, some of them from PikaQian, which each carry a link to PikaQian’s page for that card). Like any web page, those servers see your phone’s internet address when a picture loads, and nothing else.

Report a bug (Me) writes an email for you in your own Mail app: what you typed, the app version and your iPhone software. It is only sent if you send it, and nothing is sent by the app itself.

Emails you send to help@cardkept.app are forwarded by Cloudflare to our Gmail inbox, kept by Google.

Emails from Cardkept (a code when you forget your password or change your email, and a notice to your old address once your email has changed) are sent through Resend, an email delivery service. Resend receives your email address and that one email, sends it, and keeps a record of it for 30 days. We only email you when you ask for a code or when your sign-in details change; we never send marketing emails.

Some of these companies are based outside the UK: Supabase in Singapore (your data itself stays on its London servers), Cloudflare in the United States, Google in the United States, Resend in the United States, RevenueCat in the United States, and Ximilar in the European Union. Where your information leaves the UK, it’s protected by the safeguards UK law requires, such as the UK’s approved contract clauses or the UK-US data bridge.

Trying Cardkept before you sign up

If you scan a card while you’re getting started, before you’ve made an account, Cardkept makes a guest account to hold it. A guest account has no email, name or password, and only the phone that made it can open it. Your PRO Scan, its pictures and the card it added are stored in it privately, as in any account, and its front photo is read to identify the card as described below. Before a guest account’s first card is identified, Cloudflare Turnstile checks that the request comes from a person’s phone and not an automated program. It looks at technical details of the phone and its connection, such as its internet address, never your photos, and Cloudflare uses them only for this check, not for advertising. When you make your account, everything in the guest account becomes yours. If you tap Start over, or choose to log in to an account you already have, the guest account and everything in it are deleted straight away. A guest account you never make into an account is deleted, with everything in it, after 30 days without being used.

Reading a card or slab from a photo

When you use ID scan (with a photo you take or one you pick from your library), or scan a graded slab (part of Cardkept Pro), the app sends each photo, made smaller, through our server to Ximilar, the card-reading service that recognizes the card or reads the slab’s label. We don’t send your name, email or anything else with it, and the photo isn’t added to your collection or kept by us; we keep a record of what was read, not the picture. Ximilar uses the photo only to read the card. It has told us it doesn’t keep it permanently, doesn’t use it to train its models (we haven’t agreed to that), and processes it on servers in the EU. Its own terms and privacy policy also apply. PRO Scan sends its front photo this way too, cut down to the card and made smaller, to work out which card it is; the rest of a PRO Scan never uses this. If you’d rather no photo is sent, search for the card by hand instead of scanning it.

Cardkept Pro purchases

If you subscribe to Cardkept Pro, Apple takes the payment and we never see your card or payment details. We use RevenueCat, a company that manages in-app subscriptions, to check your purchase with Apple and tell our server that your account is Pro. We send it your Cardkept account ID (a random code, not your name or email); it receives your App Store purchases and their status (which plan, when it renews, ends or is refunded), and technical details such as your device and internet address, as any service does. It uses these only to run subscriptions for us. Its own privacy policy also applies.

We keep a record of whether your account is Pro, which plan it is and until when, for as long as you have an account.

Sharing a card as a link

When you share a card as a link, anyone with the link can open a web page at share.cardkept.app showing that one card: its PRO Scan, the card’s details, its condition or grade, its market price, your @handle, your profile picture and your collector level (worked out from how many packs you’ve logged, never the openings themselves) and its story if you include it (what happened, when, where and your note, with its photos; never who it came from). It never shows what you paid, the cards you traded, your Favorite or Sell or trade marks, or anything else in your collection. The picture a pasted link shows is made on your phone when you share and kept with the card’s pictures (a few links shared earlier also have a short video of it). The page is run on Cloudflare, which keeps a copy of the card’s pictures so the page opens quickly; like any web page, it sees the internet address of whoever opens it. You can switch a link off at any time by pressing and holding the same Share button: the page stops showing the card straight away, and its pictures are deleted from Cloudflare within a day.

Friends

Friends you accept can see your name, handle and profile picture, and your PRO Scans (unless you turn off Share PRO Scans with friends), each opened the way your own copy screen shows it: the card, its condition or grade, its market price, your Favorite and Sell or trade marks, its story (with its notes and photos), what you paid and where you keep it. In Profile, under Friends can see, you can keep any of those except the market price from friends; a hidden part shows as Private. They never see your wishlists, your pack openings, your email, your collection’s value or a card without a PRO Scan. Someone you send a request to also sees your picture. Anyone who types your exact handle sees your name, your handle and whether you’re a Cardkept Pro member, never your picture or anything else, and nobody can browse or search for people by name.

We keep who your friends are, the requests between you, who you’ve blocked (never shown to them) and the reports you make or that are made about you (who reported, what, the reason you gave and what we did), so Friends can work and be kept safe. Reports are read only by Cardkept.

Our website

cardkept.app uses no analytics, ads or tracking. To show prices in your currency, it uses the country your connection comes from, as our host Cloudflare tells it, and doesn’t keep it. If you pick a region at the top of the page, the site remembers it in a small cookie on your device so it can keep showing that currency; the cookie holds nothing else, isn’t shared, and you can clear it from your browser at any time.

Camera and photos

The app asks to use your photo library only when you choose a picture, and the camera only when you scan a card. It uses only the pictures you pick. A PRO Scan’s photos and its ten seconds of tilting are worked on by your phone alone, except a smaller copy of its front photo, sent to identify the card as an ID scan is (above); the tilt’s video is never kept or sent anywhere, and the PRO Scan is uploaded only if you save it to one of your cards.

Children

Cardkept is for people aged 13 and over. We don’t knowingly keep information about anyone younger. If you think a child under 13 has an account, email help@cardkept.app and we’ll delete it. Friends is private by default for everyone: nobody can browse for people, only someone who knows your exact handle can send you a request, and only the friends you accept see your PRO Scans.

How long we keep it

Everything you add is kept until you delete it or your account. Deleting your account deletes everything in it straight away, photos and PRO Scans included; a shared card’s pictures leave Cloudflare within a day. Our backups, kept only to recover from a fault (including the backup copy of your photos and PRO Scans), can hold a copy for up to about a month before it’s overwritten or deleted; if we ever had to restore one, we’d delete your account from it again. Pack openings already counted in a set’s totals stay in those totals, without your name. Your friends, requests, blocks and reports are deleted with your account; a report is also deleted if the account it’s about is. A guest account where no account was made is deleted, with everything in it, after 30 days without being used. Emails you send us are deleted once they’re no longer needed to help you.

Your rights

You can change or remove what you’ve added at any time, and delete your account and everything in it yourself, in Me → Profile → Delete account.

You also have the right to ask for a copy of your information, to have it corrected or deleted, and to object to or limit how we use it. Email help@cardkept.app and we’ll answer within a month.

If you’re unhappy with how we’ve handled your information, please tell us first. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk), the UK’s data protection regulator.