Privacy Policy
Last updated: October 16, 2026
TabCam scans guitar tabs, reads them into text, records you playing along, and shares them. It runs as an Android app, an iOS app and a web app at tabcam.nu01.com. TabCam is made and run by Julio Faerman, an individual developer ("I", "me"). This policy says what TabCam does with your information.
In short: TabCam needs an account: you sign in with Google, or on iPhone and iPad with Apple too. What you capture is stored in your own private cloud folder so it's on all your devices, and is shared only with the people you choose and with whoever you give a capture's link. There are no ads and no tracking, and your data is never sold. The only analytics are the anonymous diagnostics Google's ML Kit, which reads tabs and faces on your device, may send Google.
Signing in
Without signing in, the app shows only a welcome screen with the sign-in buttons: nothing can be captured, read or shared, and nothing is sent to me. (The one exception is opening a capture's link someone gave you, below.) To use TabCam you sign in with your Google account, or, in the iOS app, with Sign in with Apple.
What is collected
| Data | Why |
|---|---|
| From Google: your account's name, email address, profile photo and account ID. From Apple: your name and email address (Apple's private relay address, if you choose to hide yours) and Apple's user ID | To show who is signed in (Profile tab), to give you your own cloud folder, to let people share captures with your email address, to link your Google and Apple accounts to one TabCam profile, and to check whether you have TabCam Premium. Your email address and account IDs are stored on my servers; your name and photo are only shown in the app. |
| Your captures: scanned pages, photos, videos, audio recordings, the takes you record in Cam (video with sound), PDFs and other files, links, and their titles, artist names, text tabs and settings | To sync them between your devices, back them up, and show them to the people you share them with. |
| The email addresses of the people you share a capture with, and their role (can edit or read only) | So those people can open the capture when they sign in with that address. No email is sent to them. |
| Your TabCam profile: a random ID, the accounts linked to it (their email addresses and IDs) and when they were linked | So each of your sign-ins reaches the same captures. |
| Transcriptions of your pages, and the song and tab you check with Fix (TabCam Premium only) | To fill in and correct the text tab of your captures. |
TabCam does not collect your location, contacts, phone number or browsing activity, and does not use advertising identifiers. The diagnostics Google's ML Kit may send are described below.
Camera, microphone, photos and files
TabCam asks for the camera to scan tabs and to record you in Cam, and for the microphone to record sound with Cam's takes. It opens your photo library or files only to add the items you pick, and doesn't read anything else from them. Cam's takes are saved in the capture, and sync to your cloud folder like its other videos.
Reading tabs, and your face
- On the phone: the Android and iOS apps read tabs on the device with Google's ML Kit text recognition (and, on Android, ML Kit's document scanner). The images are not sent anywhere for this.
- Head gestures: while you record yourself playing along (Cam), TabCam can turn the tab when you nod. For this, it finds your face in the camera's picture on your device: in the Android and iOS apps with Google's ML Kit face detection, and on the web with Google's MediaPipe face landmarker, running in your browser. On the web, Cam downloads MediaPipe's code from jsDelivr and its face model from Google when it opens; the camera's picture is not sent with those downloads or anywhere else. Only the angle of your head is used. Nothing about your face is saved, sent anywhere or used to identify you. You can switch head gestures off in Cam.
- ML Kit's diagnostics: in the Android and iOS apps, Google's ML Kit may send Google diagnostic and performance data about how its features work (such as how long they take and whether they fail) with a device or installation identifier. It's not linked to your account or your captures, and it never includes the camera's picture, your face or your tabs. Google uses it to measure and improve ML Kit; see Google's ML Kit terms.
- TabCam Premium: pages that sync to your cloud folder are also transcribed by TabCam's OCR service, running on Amazon Web Services (AWS Lambda). The page is read there and the text is saved next to it in your folder. Fix sends the song's name and your tab's text (not the page's image) to Anthropic's Claude, which searches the web for the song's published tab and proposes corrections; nothing changes until you accept them.
Where your data is stored, and who processes it
- Amazon Web Services hosts TabCam's cloud: your captures and transcriptions in a private Amazon S3 bucket, your profile, the sharing grants, the capture links and the Premium account record in Amazon DynamoDB, the keys that encrypt your captures in AWS KMS, sign-in credentials through Amazon Cognito, and the sharing and OCR services on AWS Lambda. All of it is in the AWS US East (N. Virginia) region, in the United States, encrypted at rest and sent only over HTTPS. Amazon CloudFront, which serves TabCam's site, also delivers your captures' files to the apps: it keeps copies of them in its locations in the United States, Canada, Europe and Israel, for up to a year for pages, photos and videos (which never change) and not at all for a capture's details or its transcriptions. Only links signed for you, or for someone you share a capture with, open them, and each signature lasts an hour.
- Google provides sign-in with Google, and ML Kit. Google's privacy policy applies to your Google account: policies.google.com/privacy.
- Apple provides Sign in with Apple in the iOS app. Apple's privacy policy applies to your Apple ID: apple.com/legal/privacy.
- Anthropic runs Claude, used by Fix for TabCam Premium (above), through its API.
- Links you add, YouTube videos included, open outside TabCam: in a new browser tab, or on a phone in your browser or the app for them (such as YouTube). The one exception is Cam: when you choose a link there to play along with, TabCam shows it in a frame on that screen (a YouTube video in YouTube's privacy-enhanced player, from youtube-nocookie.com). Either way, the site you open, and its own privacy policy, take it from there.
- rbacr, my access-control service at rbacr.nu01.com, is asked whether your verified email address has TabCam Premium. You can also redeem a Premium voucher on its page.
- Substack and Stripe: TabCam Premium is a subscription on Substack, paid through Stripe. You subscribe on Substack's site, under its own privacy policy, and TabCam never sees your payment details; only your subscriber email address and the subscription's status reach rbacr, to grant Premium.
If you're outside the United States, your data is transferred to and stored in the United States, and cached by CloudFront as above.
On your device
The phone apps keep your captures in the app's own storage. The web app keeps captures only in memory. Both keep copies of the files they download from the cloud, up to 512 MB, in a cache (the phone app's cache folder; the browser's storage for the site), for as long as the files themselves say, so they aren't downloaded again; signing out or deleting the account empties it. The web app remembers your sign-in (your name, email, photo address and Google's sign-in token) in the browser's local storage until you sign out. The iOS app keeps a Sign in with Apple session (your name, email and Apple's sign-in token) in its private storage until you sign out or it expires. Signing out keeps your captures on the device; uninstalling the app removes them from it.
Sharing
- Share copies the capture's link. The link contains a secret key, and anyone who has the link can open that capture, read only, without signing in, and sees your changes to it. A link can't be turned off yet: it works until you delete the capture or your account. Give it only to people you want to see the capture. Apps you paste it into (chat apps, for example) may show a preview with the capture's title, artist and what it holds.
- Share with people gives the people you add, by email address, access to that capture, to edit or read only. They see your email address as its owner. You can remove them at any time; they can also leave it.
How long data is kept
- Your captures stay in your cloud folder until you delete them, or delete your account. Deleted or replaced files are kept for 30 more days, so a mistake can be undone, and then removed.
- Transcriptions are deleted with their pages.
- Sharing grants last until the owner removes them or the person leaves the share.
- The profile, sharing and Premium records are backed up for up to 35 days.
- The cloud services' logs, used to fix problems, are deleted after 30 days. They record account IDs and what was done, not the content of your captures, and the OCR service's logs leave out email addresses.
Deleting your data
- Deleting a capture in the app deletes it from your cloud folder and your other devices. A small record that it was deleted (its ID and dates, no content) stays, so your other devices delete it too.
- Delete account, in the app's Profile tab (also in the web app, from any browser), deletes your TabCam account and the data stored for it: your captures and their transcriptions in the cloud and on that device, your sharing grants, your profile and your Premium account record, and CloudFront's copies of your files. If you signed in with Apple, it also revokes TabCam's Apple sign-in tokens, so TabCam leaves your Apple ID's list of apps using Sign in with Apple. Copies in the 30-day file history and 35-day backups expire on that schedule. It doesn't cancel a Premium subscription, which you manage where you bought it.
- You can also ask me to delete your data, or for a copy of it, by email (below).
- To remove TabCam's access to your Google account, visit myaccount.google.com/connections; to your Apple ID, Settings → your name → Sign in with Apple on your iPhone or iPad.
No ads or tracking
TabCam contains no advertising, no crash-reporting services and no trackers, and no analytics of its own (ML Kit's diagnostics, above, go to Google). Your data is never sold or used for advertising, and is shared with nobody except the service providers above, the people you share with or give a link to, or when required by law.
Security
All connections use HTTPS. Each signed-in user gets temporary credentials that reach only their own cloud folder, and a shared capture is opened with credentials for that capture alone (read only, for a link). Stored data is encrypted at rest. No system is perfectly secure, but TabCam is built to keep your data to yourself and the people you choose.
Children
TabCam is not directed to children under 13, and I don't knowingly collect their personal information. If you believe a child has signed in, contact me and I'll delete the data.
Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete or receive a copy of your data, and to object to its use. Most of it you can see, change and delete in the app; for anything else, contact me.
Changes
If this policy changes, the new version will be posted on this page with a new date at the top.
Contact
Julio Faerman, the developer of TabCam: privacy@nu01.com