Privacy policy
Applies to the Paper Lens Android app and to lkutils.uk · Last updated 10 August 2026
The short version.
- Paper Lens collects nothing about you and transmits nothing anywhere.
- It does not declare Android's internet permission, so it cannot open a network connection at all.
- Your scans stay on your device, in a folder you chose.
- Text recognition runs on your phone, using a model inside the app.
- There is no account, no analytics, no advertising and no crash reporting.
- This website sets no cookies and runs no analytics.
Everything below is the long version of those six lines. It is written to be checked, not to be skimmed past — if any part of it stops being true, the app does not ship until this page is corrected first.
1. Who is responsible
Paper Lens and this website are made by Lalit Khokhar, trading as lkutils, based in India. In this policy, "I" means that person, and "the app" means the Paper Lens application for Android.
That makes me the data fiduciary for anything covered by India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 — a role that, as the rest of this page explains, has almost nothing to do, because the app collects no personal data at all.
For anything to do with privacy, including a question about this policy, write to hello@lkutils.uk.
2. What the app collects
Nothing. The app collects no personal data, creates no identifier for you or your device, and sends no data off your phone.
This is not a promise about intent. Android requires an application to declare the
INTERNET permission in its manifest before it is allowed to open a network
connection, and Paper Lens does not declare it. An app without that permission cannot
transmit anything, however it is written and whatever it is asked to do.
3. Permissions the app asks for
| Permission | What it is for | When it is asked for |
|---|---|---|
| Camera | Photographing the documents you scan. The camera is used only while the capture screen is open. | On the capture screen, with the reason shown before the system dialog appears. |
That is the complete list. In particular, the app does not request internet or network access, storage permissions, location, contacts, the microphone, phone state, accounts, or your advertising identifier.
Refusing the camera is a supported way to use the app rather than an error. Importing images you already have still works, and you will not be asked again on every launch.
4. Where your documents are kept
When you first run the app you choose where your scans should live. There are two options and you can move between them at any time; moving copies your scans across, verifies every one of them arrived, and only then removes the originals.
- A folder you choose. Your scans are ordinary JPEG files with a plain text description beside them, in a folder on your device that you picked. They can be opened by any app you give storage access to, they survive uninstalling Paper Lens, and they are readable without it.
- Storage private to the app. Your scans are visible only to Paper Lens and no other app can read them. They are permanently deleted if you uninstall the app.
Either way the files are on your device. Cloud folders such as Drive or Dropbox are deliberately not accepted as a scan location, because that would turn every save into a network request without you being told.
The app also keeps working files of its own on your device: rendered previews in its private cache, an index of your library so that searching is instant, and your settings. All of it is local, and all of it can be rebuilt from the folder above.
5. Keeping scans out of your gallery
When the scans folder is created, the app writes a .nomedia marker into it.
Without that marker, Android's media index would list every scan, which would put your
passport, tax forms and medical letters into your photo gallery — and any gallery app that
syncs would then upload them. Files you deliberately export are your decision and are not
hidden this way.
6. Text recognition
Paper Lens reads the text on your pages so you can search inside your scans. This runs entirely on your phone, using Google's ML Kit text recognition with the model bundled inside the app — there is no model download and no network call. ML Kit is a library compiled into the app, not a service it talks to.
The recognised text is written to a file beside the scan it came from, and to the app's own search index on your device. It is never transmitted, and it is deleted when you delete the document.
7. Exporting, sharing and backups
- Exports — PDFs and image files are written where you chose, on your device, when you ask for them.
- Sharing — when you share a scan, Android's own share sheet hands a copy to the app you pick. What that app then does with it is governed by its policy, not this one. Paper Lens grants read access to that one file and nothing else.
- Backups you make — the archive feature writes your whole library into a single zip file, wherever you tell it to. It goes nowhere on its own.
- Android's automatic cloud backup is switched off for this app. Nothing it stores can be copied into a Google account backup, which is exactly the sort of quiet upload this app exists to avoid.
8. Google Play
Paper Lens will be distributed through Google Play. Google collects information about installations, purchases, crashes and Play Store activity under its own privacy policy, independently of this app and outside my control. What I receive from Google is aggregated and statistical — for example a count of installs, or an anonymised crash cluster — and it does not identify you.
Paper Lens is free. There are no in-app purchases and no payment processing inside the app.
9. This website
lkutils.uk is static HTML. It sets no cookies, runs no analytics, embeds no third-party fonts, scripts, images or trackers, and has nothing for you to consent to. Your browser is asked for exactly the files that make up the page you are reading.
The site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages. As with any web host, Cloudflare processes the technical information your browser sends in order to deliver the page and to protect the site from attack — your IP address, the page requested, your browser's user agent and the time of the request. This happens at the network level, I do not use it to build any profile of you, and I do not combine it with anything else. Cloudflare's handling of it is described in its privacy policy.
The site's source code is public on GitHub, so the claims in this section can be checked rather than believed.
10. When you email me
If you write to hello@lkutils.uk, I will have your email address, your name if you sign it, and whatever you chose to tell me. That address is forwarded to a personal mailbox. I use it to answer you and to fix what you reported, and for nothing else: no mailing list, no marketing, and it is never passed to anyone.
If you ask to be told when Paper Lens is released, your address is kept for that one message and then deleted. Ask me to delete it sooner and I will.
Please do not attach a scanned document to a support email unless I have asked for one and you are content for me to see it. Almost every bug can be diagnosed without it.
11. Children
Paper Lens is a general-purpose utility and is not directed at children. Since it collects no data from anyone, it collects none from children either.
12. Third-party components inside the app
| Component | What it does | Does it send anything? |
|---|---|---|
| ML Kit text recognition (bundled model) | Reads text from a scanned page, on the device | No. The model is inside the app; nothing is fetched or uploaded. |
| AndroidX, Jetpack Compose, CameraX, Room | Google's standard Android libraries for interface, camera and local storage | No. |
There is no analytics SDK, no advertising SDK, no crash-reporting SDK and no attribution SDK in the app. Adding one would require declaring the internet permission, which would make this page untrue, which is why it will not happen quietly.
13. Google Play Data Safety
These are the answers given on the Play Data Safety form, reproduced so you can hold them against this page.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Does the app collect or share user data? | No |
| Is data encrypted in transit? | Not applicable — no data is transmitted |
| Can users request that data be deleted? | Not applicable — nothing is held. You delete your files yourself, on your device |
| Photos and videos | Used on the device, not collected, not transmitted |
| Files and documents | Used on the device, not collected, not transmitted |
| Location, contacts, identifiers, financial or health information | Not accessed at all |
14. Your rights
India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 gives you rights over personal data held about you: to obtain a summary of what is being processed and who it has been shared with, to have it corrected, completed or updated, to have it erased, to nominate someone to exercise those rights if you die or become incapacitated, and to have a grievance answered.
Because the app collects nothing, there is in practice nothing to exercise those rights against except an email you have chosen to send me. For that, write to hello@lkutils.uk and I will tell you what I hold and delete it on request. There is no account to close and no export to request, because there is no copy of anything of yours anywhere but your own device.
Since the app is distributed worldwide, this is also worth saying plainly: if you are in the UK or the EU, the UK GDPR and the EU GDPR give you equivalent rights, and the answer is the same one — nothing about you is collected, processed or transferred, so no cross-border transfer of your data ever takes place.
Grievances and complaints
Complaints about how data is handled come to me first, at hello@lkutils.uk. I am the person who answers them; there is nobody else in the way. Please allow a few days for a reply.
If you are not satisfied with the answer, you may complain to the Data Protection Board of India, established under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. If you are in the UK you may complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, and if you are in the EU, to your national data protection authority.
15. Security
With no network, no accounts and no server, most of the ways an app leaks data do not exist here. What remains is the device itself: your scans are protected by your phone's lock screen and its own file encryption, and — if you keep them in a folder of your own choosing — by nothing else against other apps you have granted storage access to. If that matters to you, the app-private storage option exists for exactly this reason. Paper Lens does not currently encrypt scans separately from the device, and does not claim to.
16. Changes to this policy
If the app ever changes in a way that affects this page — the clearest example would be adding optional, opt-in diagnostics, which would require the internet permission — this page is updated in the same release, with the date at the top changed and the change said plainly rather than absorbed into a paragraph. It would be off by default, and it would ask first.
Older versions of this page can be read in the site's public commit history.
17. Contact
hello@lkutils.uk — read by the person who wrote the code.