CalAround photographs your work calendar and writes the meetings into a calendar on your iPhone. This page says exactly what that touches, what leaves the device, and what does not.
It is written plainly on purpose. If something here is unclear, ask — a privacy policy nobody can follow isn’t one.
The short version
- There is no CalAround account and no CalAround server. Nothing is uploaded to us, because there is no us to upload to.
- There is no analytics, no tracking, no advertising, and no third-party SDK of any kind in the app.
- The one thing that can leave your device is a photo you explicitly choose to scan, and only when you have selected the Claude reader.
- Your calendar data stays on your iPhone and in your own iCloud, exactly as it did before you installed anything.
The photo you scan
This is the part that deserves real care, because it depends on a choice you make.
CalAround offers more than one reader, named on the Scan screen and in Settings every time:
| Reader | What happens to the photo |
|---|---|
| Claude | The image is resized, compressed, and sent over HTTPS to Anthropic’s API to be read. The extracted events come back; the image is not kept by CalAround afterwards. |
| Apple Intelligence (iOS 27) | The image is read on your iPhone. It does not leave the device. |
| Sample data | No photo is read at all. A fixed demo week is returned so you can try the app. |
With the Claude reader, your photo leaves your device. That is worth stating flatly rather than burying: a photo of an Outlook week contains your meeting titles, and usually your colleagues’ names and your employer’s business. If that is not something you want to send to a third party, use a different reader, or don’t scan that week.
Anthropic processes the image under their terms and privacy policy, not ours — see anthropic.com/privacy. Because you supply your own API key, that request is made under your own account with them, and their terms govern it directly. We make no claims on their behalf about retention.
CalAround itself does not store the photograph. It is held in memory for the length of the scan and discarded. What is saved to your device is the result: the events that were read.
Your API key
If you use the Claude reader, you paste your own Anthropic API key into Settings. It is stored in the iOS Keychain on that device. It is never written to a file, never logged, never bundled into the app, and never sent anywhere except to Anthropic’s API in the request header. Remove it in Settings at any time.
Your calendar
CalAround asks for calendar access, and the level it asks for changes what it can do:
| Access | What it allows |
|---|---|
| Write-only | Adding events. iOS does not permit reading events back with this level — including the app’s own — so change detection and conflict checks are impossible, and CalAround can only add. |
| Full | Reading back what it previously wrote, so a rescan can update or remove instead of duplicating, and so clashes with your other calendars can be flagged. |
Whichever you grant, the same limits hold:
- CalAround writes only to a calendar it creates, named Work (Scanned). It never modifies or deletes an event on any other calendar, ever.
- It only acts within the date range the scanned photo actually showed. Events outside that range are untouchable.
- Conflict detection reads your other calendars to compare times. It does not copy, upload, or store their contents — a clash is evaluated and shown, and the comparison is discarded.
You can revoke access at any time in Settings › Privacy & Security › Calendars, and delete the Work (Scanned) calendar in Apple’s Calendar app to remove everything CalAround ever wrote.
Watching your personal calendar
This feature is off by default and opt-in. When enabled, CalAround re-checks for clashes when your calendars change and when you open the app, and can post a local notification when a new one appears.
- It requires full calendar access and notification permission. You will be asked for both.
- Notifications are local — generated on your iPhone by iOS. Nothing is sent to a server to produce them.
- iOS decides when to wake a background app, so a notification can arrive minutes — occasionally hours — after the change. Opening CalAround always checks immediately.
What is stored on your device
- Scan history. The last 20 scans: the events read, when the scan happened, which reader produced it, and what each sync changed. This is what makes Undo this sync possible. It never includes the photograph.
- Preferences. Your chosen reader, conflict threshold, title-privacy rules, and which events you have pinned.
- Your API key, in the Keychain, if you added one.
All of it lives in the app’s own container and is removed when you delete the app. It is included in an encrypted iPhone backup if you make one, the same as any other app’s data.
Title privacy
CalAround can rewrite meeting titles before anything is written to your calendar — so a rule like title contains “1:1” → write “Busy” keeps names off a calendar that may be shared or visible on a lock screen. The rules run on your device, before the write, and what you review in the app is exactly what will land.
This is a convenience, not a security boundary: it changes what is written to your calendar, not what was in the photo you scanned.
Children
CalAround is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect information from anyone. There is nothing to collect.
Changes to this policy
If what the app does changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top moves. Material changes — particularly anything altering what leaves your device — will be called out in the app, not just here.
Contact
Questions about any of this: send a message.