Lore Privacy Policy

Effective date: November 3, 2026

1. Introduction

Lore ("Lore", "we", "us", or "our") is a personal journaling application that helps you create written journal entries from your photos and your spoken or typed answers, with the assistance of artificial intelligence. This Privacy Policy describes the categories of information that Lore handles, how that information is used, the third-party service providers that process it on our behalf, how long it is kept, and the choices available to you.

Lore stores your journal locally on your device and in your personal iCloud account. When you use Lore's AI features, portions of your journal content are transmitted to Lore and to its service providers so that the requested feature can be provided, and Lore retains text logs of these interactions for the periods described in Section 6. This policy describes how Lore handles your information.

2. Information We Collect

Lore collects the following categories of information when you use its features:

• Journal content. When you create an entry, Lore sends the content needed to complete the requested operation. This includes the photo you choose to interview about, any voice recording of your spoken answers, the interview transcript, and the resulting entry text. Photos and audio are processed only to service the request and are not stored on Lore's servers. Text logs of your AI requests and responses, which may include your transcript, your entry text, and any name you have provided, are stored as described in Section 6 (Data Retention) and are used to provide, operate, and improve the app and the quality of its AI responses.
• Location information. When a photo you interview about includes location metadata, Lore's app converts that metadata on your device into a general place name, such as a city or region (for example, "San Francisco"). Lore may include that general place name in an interview request so that the questions can relate to where the photo was taken. Lore does not receive your device's GPS coordinates. A per-photo location displayed on the in-app map remains on your device and in your personal iCloud account and is not transmitted to Lore's servers or to any service provider.
• Account and device identifiers. Sign in with Apple provides Lore with a unique, app-specific account identifier that is used to secure access to Lore's backend service. Lore also generates a random identifier on your device that is used to group your activity within our analytics, together with an optional display name if you choose to provide one. These identifiers are not used to identify you outside of Lore.
• Friends profile and connections. If you choose to use Lore's friends features, Lore stores the display name you enter and, if you add one, the profile picture you upload. Your profile picture is re-encoded to remove its metadata and is stored privately; it is shown only to you, to people you are currently friends with, to someone who opens your invite link, and to the people described below who can find your profile without being your friend. Lore also stores a reusable invite code for your profile, which you can reset at any time, and a record of which Lore profiles you are connected to and which profiles you have blocked. Your display name and profile picture are checked automatically for prohibited content before they are saved, as described in Section 4. If you send someone a friend request, or someone sends you one, Lore stores who asked whom and when until the request is accepted, declined or cancelled, or one of you blocks the other; it keeps no history of past requests. Your display name and profile picture can also be seen by some people who are not your friends: someone you have a friend request with (either way), and anyone who can see a comment or sticker you left on a shared entry (the entry's author and the author's friends). Those people also see which of their own friends you are friends with (up to three names and a count), but never your shared entries, their titles or images, or how many you have. If you choose a username, Lore stores it with your friends profile. People who can see you on Lore see it on your profile and beside your name on your shared entries, comments, tags and friend requests. Unless you turn off Let people find me by username (it is on by default), anyone signed in to Lore who searches for the beginning of your username can find you, and they see your username, display name, profile picture and which of their own friends you are friends with, and can send you a friend request; people you have blocked, or who have blocked you, cannot. Turning the switch off removes you from search at once. Search never shows your shared entries, and Lore does not record what anyone searches for. Your username is checked automatically for prohibited content before it is saved, like your display name.
• Entries you share with friends. Entries remain private by default. If you explicitly choose Share with friends, Lore stores a curated copy containing the displayed title, body, highlights, date, general place label, optional song details, and up to five flattened still images. Lore does not include the transcript, precise coordinates, tags, emotion/personality fields, editing history, prompts, sticker placement data, or video bytes. The images are re-encoded without source metadata and kept in private storage. The complete proposed copy is checked automatically for prohibited content before it is saved. It remains available to your current friends until you unshare it, delete your friends profile, or delete your account. Lore checks the current friendship for every feed and image request; it does not provide a public media address, and removing or blocking a friend ends their access on subsequent requests. Only your current friends can see what you share; Lore shows no view counts and no list of who viewed it. Your friends can put stickers on the photos of an entry you share (see Stickers on shared entries below); they are drawn over your images and never change your private entry or its copy. Lore keeps an identifier for each shared image so a sticker stays on the right photo when you edit the entry. If you choose to tag friends when you share an entry, Lore stores which of your current friends you tagged (their friends profile, never a name from your journal); everyone who can see the entry sees them, except someone in a block relationship with them, a tagged friend can remove themselves and can get a notification, and the tags are deleted when you unshare, when the friendship ends or either of you blocks the other.
• Comments. If you comment on a shared entry, Lore stores the plain text of your comment, which entry it is on, and when. If you like a shared entry, Lore stores that you liked it, which entry it is on, and when; people who can see the entry see how many likes it has. A heart reaction you left with an earlier version now counts as a like; the other reactions from that version stay stored but are not shown, and are deleted with the entry, the friendship or your account. A comment may also carry one of your own stickers (a cut-out you made in Lore, which may show a face) or one photo you choose from your library. The image leaves your phone: it is re-encoded without its original metadata (a photo is also downscaled on your phone, and its location and camera data are never sent), checked automatically for prohibited content together with your text before it is saved, and stored privately on Lore's servers so that only the people who can see your comment can load it. Each comment is checked automatically for prohibited content before it is saved, as described in Section 4. A comment is shown, with your display name and profile picture, to everyone who can see the entry: its author and the author's current friends, including people who are not your friends. A block in either direction hides you from each other. Comment counts only include what the viewer is allowed to see. The entry's author can get a notification when you comment (see Notifications). Lore keeps no record of who read them.
• Stickers on shared entries. If you put one of your stickers (a cut-out you made in Lore, which may show a face) on a photo in an entry a friend shared, the sticker image leaves your phone: it is re-encoded without its original metadata, checked automatically for prohibited content before it is saved (Section 4), and stored privately on Lore's servers together with which photo it is on, its position, size and rotation, and when you placed it. Everyone who can see that entry (its author and the author's current friends, including people who are not your friends) sees your sticker with your display name and profile picture, except someone in a block relationship with you. Anyone who can see it may save a copy of your sticker to the sticker library on their own device; Lore keeps no record of that, and removing your sticker later does not remove copies already saved. The entry's author can get a notification when you add one.
• Notifications. If you use Friends and allow notifications, Lore stores a push token for each device you use, which build of the app it belongs to, and your notification choices, linked to your friends profile. Lore uses Apple Push Notification service to tell you when someone accepts your friend link or friend request, sends you a friend request, tags you in an entry they shared, or comments on or adds a sticker to an entry you shared. A notification shows a name (or, for several new stickers, how many), never the text of your entry or of their comment. Lore keeps a record of each notification it tried to send (who, about which entry, and whether it arrived, never its text) for 7 days, and forgets a device that hasn't opened Lore for 90 days. Signing out, deleting your friends profile, or deleting your account removes your tokens.
• Finding friends from your contacts. If you use Friends, you can add your phone number so that people who have it in their contacts can see that you're on Lore. Lore doesn't verify the number, never shows it to anyone, and stores it only as a keyed one-way code that can't be turned back into the number without a separate secret key. If you choose Find friends from contacts and allow access, the app sends the phone numbers of the contacts you allowed to Lore's server, which checks them against the numbers people have added and tells you which of your contacts are on Lore and which are already your friends. Lore doesn't store those numbers, the names in your contacts, or the results, doesn't put them in logs or analytics, and never contacts anyone in your contacts. Inviting a contact opens a message that you send yourself.
• Reports and moderation. If you report an entry, a comment or a sticker someone placed on a shared entry, Lore stores the reason you chose, the optional note you wrote, which shared entry, comment or sticker and which profile you reported, and when. The report does not copy the shared entry, the comment or the sticker. Lore reviews reports by hand and records the outcome (dismissed, content removed, author suspended, or content no longer available) and when it was reviewed. If Lore removes a shared entry or suspends a friends profile, it records that action and a short reason on its servers. Report notes are never sent to our analytics provider or written to application logs, and the person you reported is not told who reported them.
• Usage information. Lore collects information about how you interact with the app, such as which screens you open and which features you use, in order to understand and improve the product.
• Diagnostic information. If the app encounters an error or crash, Lore sends a diagnostic report, which includes technical details such as a stack trace, to our analytics provider so that we can identify and fix problems. These reports do not include your journal content.
• Technical information. When your device communicates with Lore's backend service or with our analytics provider, technical information is processed as part of that communication, such as your IP address, device model, operating system version, and app version. Our analytics provider may derive an approximate, coarse location (for example, at the level of a city or region) from your IP address. This is standard analytics infrastructure and is not derived from your device's precise location.
• Operational information. For each AI operation, Lore records technical metadata such as the model used, processing time, token counts, error status, and estimated cost, which Lore uses to operate, secure, and improve the service and the quality of its AI responses.

3. How We Use Your Information

Lore uses the information described above in order to:

• provide the app's core features, including generating interview questions, transcribing your voice answers, and writing your journal entries;
• generate optional visual content, such as stickers, when you enable that feature;
• operate, maintain, and secure the service;
• monitor and improve the quality of Lore's AI responses and the app as a whole;
• diagnose errors and crashes; and
• comply with applicable law and respond to lawful requests.

Lore does not sell your personal information. Lore does not use your personal information for advertising, and does not track you across other companies' apps or websites.

4. Service Providers

Lore engages the third-party service providers listed below to process information on its behalf. These providers may process information to provide their services to Lore, to maintain security, to prevent abuse, to comply with law, and for other purposes permitted by their agreements with Lore. Lore requires its service providers to protect your information in a manner consistent with applicable law and this policy.

• OpenAI. Processes your photos, audio, transcripts, and entry text in order to provide Lore's AI features. OpenAI states that data submitted through its application programming interface is not used to train its models unless the customer explicitly opts in. OpenAI may retain API data for up to 30 days by default for abuse monitoring, subject to limited exceptions described in its data-retention policies, and its retention may also depend on the specific API feature and configuration used. If you use Lore's friends features, OpenAI also checks submitted profile names, profile pictures, the still images in proposed shared-entry copies (their text is not sent for this check), and the text of new comments and any sticker or photo attached to them, and stickers placed on shared entries, for prohibited content. Lore's moderation audit records bounded field/image measurements (such as character counts, image dimensions, and an image fingerprint) and category verdicts, not the submitted names, text, URLs, filenames, or image bytes, and Lore does not send moderation inputs or results to its analytics provider.
• Google. When the optional and experimental generated-stickers feature is enabled, Lore sends image data derived from your photos, together with text prompts, to Google's Gemini models through Google's generative-language API in order to create sticker images. Google's processing and retention of that data are governed by the terms and data policies applicable to that API. The sticker images returned to Lore are stored temporarily as described in Section 6 and are then deleted. This feature is off by default.
• Neon. Hosts Lore's database and its private object storage. The database holds the AI request logs described in Section 6, your friends profile, connections, blocks, the curated copies of entries you share, comments, likes, stickers placed on shared entries, pending friend requests, reports, moderation records, and your notification choices, push tokens and notification delivery records; the private object storage holds friends profile pictures, the still images of shared entries, comment images, and sticker images placed on shared entries. Neither is publicly addressable.
• Apple. If you use Friends and allow notifications, Lore sends each notification to Apple Push Notification service, which delivers it to your device. Apple receives your device's push token and the notification, which contains your friend's name and a fixed phrase, never the text of an entry or a comment.
• Fly.io. Runs Lore's backend service, which receives your requests over encrypted connections and relays them to the providers above.
• PostHog. Our product-analytics provider. PostHog receives usage and diagnostic information, your device identifier, your display name if you provided one, and technical information such as your IP address, device model, operating system version, and app version. PostHog also receives text copies of the requests submitted to and the responses returned by Lore's AI features, which Lore uses to monitor and improve the quality of its AI responses. These text copies may contain personal or sensitive information that you included in your transcripts or journal entries. PostHog does not receive your photo files or your audio files. For the friends features PostHog receives only counts and outcomes (for example, that a friend request succeeded or a report was filed and its reason category), never names, shared-entry or comment text, report notes, invite codes, which people are connected, or anything about your contacts or your phone number. Lore does not enable session recording, and PostHog does not capture screenshots or recordings of your screen.

5. Information We Do Not Collect

• Precise location. Lore does not receive your device's GPS coordinates. As described in Section 2, a photo's location metadata is converted on your device into a general place name before anything is sent to Lore. (Separately, as described in Section 2 and Section 4, our analytics provider may derive a coarse, city-level location from your IP address as part of standard analytics infrastructure.)
• Your complete journal library. Lore does not maintain a server-side copy of your complete journal library. Your photos, transcripts, and entries are stored on your device and in your personal iCloud account. Individual curated copies you explicitly share with friends and text included in AI requests and responses may be stored as described in Sections 2, 4, and 6.
• Contact details. Lore does not collect your email address or mailing address and does not request your name or email address from Apple during sign in. Lore stores a phone number only if you add one for Friends, and then only as the keyed code described in Section 2.

6. Data Retention

• Text logs of your AI requests and responses, which may include your transcript, entry text, and any name you provided, together with the account and device identifiers and the operational metadata associated with those requests, are retained on Lore's servers for up to 365 days, measured from the date of each interaction, after which an automated process deletes them.
• Generated sticker images, when created, are stored on Lore's servers for up to 7 days and are then automatically deleted.
• A sticker you place on a shared entry is retained until you or the entry's author remove it, the author removes that photo or unshares, deletes or has the entry removed, you or the author end your friendship or block each other, Lore removes it under the community rules, or you or the author delete your friends profile or account. Removing its image from storage may be retried automatically for a short time if storage is temporarily unavailable.
• A friend request is retained only while it is pending: accepting, declining or cancelling it, a block between you, or either of you deleting your friends profile or account deletes it.
• Your friends profile — your display name, profile picture, invite code, connections, and blocks — is retained on Lore's servers until you delete your profile or your account, as described in Section 7. It is not subject to the 365-day window above, because it is the identity you chose to present rather than a log of an interaction.
• A curated entry copy you explicitly share with friends is retained until you unshare it, delete your friends profile, delete your account, or Lore removes it under the community rules. Unsharing makes it unavailable immediately; deleting its private images from storage may be retried automatically for a short time if storage is temporarily unavailable.
• A comment is retained until you remove it, the entry's author deletes it, the entry is unshared, deleted or removed, you or the entry's author end your friendship or block each other, or you or the author delete your friends profile or account. A like is retained until you take it back, and is otherwise deleted in all of those same cases except the author's removing it. Re-friending someone does not restore comments or likes deleted when the friendship ended. A sticker or photo attached to a comment is deleted with the comment; removing it from storage may be retried automatically for a short time if storage is temporarily unavailable.
• A phone number you add for Friends is kept until you remove it, delete your friends profile, or delete your account. Phone numbers from your contacts are not kept.
• A record of each notification Lore tried to send is deleted after 7 days. A device's push token is retained until you sign out, delete your friends profile or account, or the device has not registered with Lore for 90 days.
• A report is retained until Lore reviews it. Once reviewed, the report and its note are deleted 90 days after the review. Reports you submitted are deleted with your friends profile or account.
• When you delete your account, Lore keeps a one-way hash of your Sign in with Apple account identifier for at most 30 days, solely to reject sign-in sessions that existed before the deletion on any of your devices. It cannot be reversed into your identifier and is deleted automatically.
• Deleted information may remain in our service providers' backups until the recovery period each provider documents has passed. Lore cannot erase it from those backups immediately.
• The information sent to PostHog, including the text copies of AI requests and responses, is retained by PostHog for up to approximately 30 days.
• Data processed by OpenAI is retained by OpenAI for up to 30 days by default, subject to the exceptions and configuration described in Section 4.
• Information stored on your device and in your personal iCloud account is retained until you delete it.

Provider processing and deletion may be carried out asynchronously and may take a short time to complete.

7. Data Deletion and Your Choices

You may delete your data at any time by opening the app and selecting Settings, then Delete my account and data. When you do so, Lore deletes the information it holds on its servers, including your AI request and response logs, any generated sticker images, and your friends profile, including your profile picture, shared-entry copies with their comments and stickers, your own comments and the stickers you placed, your likes, the reports you submitted, your friend connections, pending friend requests and blocks, your phone number, and your push tokens, notification choices and notification records; signs you out of Lore on every device; initiates deletion of your associated analytics information held by PostHog; initiates revocation of Lore's Sign in with Apple authorization; and erases the app's local data on your device, which then propagates to your personal iCloud account.

You may instead delete only your friends profile, from the friends settings. That removes your display name, username, profile picture, invite code, friend connections, pending friend requests, blocks, shared-entry copies with their comments and stickers, your own comments and the stickers you placed, your likes, the reports you submitted, your phone number, and your push tokens, notification choices and notification records from Lore's servers, and your friends stop seeing your shared entries at once. It keeps your private journal, your AI request logs, and your account. Reports other people filed about your shared entries, comments or stickers are kept, without any link to your deleted profile, until they are reviewed and their retention period ends.

Deleted information stops being available the moment Lore confirms the deletion. Some of these deletions, particularly removing stored images and those carried out by our service providers, are completed asynchronously and may not occur immediately. If an automated deletion cannot be completed at the time, Lore will complete or investigate the request through its support process. You may contact us using the details in Section 13 for confirmation or assistance.

Photos already saved to your device's system photo library, and any copies held in your own iCloud backups, are controlled by you and are not deleted by this request.

8. Friends Community Rules

The friends features are for people 13 and older. Shared entries and profiles must follow Lore's friends community rules, which prohibit clearly severe content such as sexual content involving minors, explicit pornography, graphic gore, credible threats, severe targeted harassment or hateful threats, and content encouraging suicide or self-harm. Lore may remove a shared entry or suspend friends access for content that breaks those rules; suspension does not affect your private journal, and you can still delete your friends profile or account. You can report a shared entry, a comment or a sticker, remove a friend, or block someone (including someone who isn't your friend but whose request, comment or sticker you can see) at any time.

9. Children's Privacy

Lore is not directed to children under the age of 13, and Lore does not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe that a child has provided personal information to Lore, please contact us using the details in Section 13 so that we can take appropriate action.

10. Security

Lore transmits information to its backend service and service providers over encrypted connections, and limits the information it transmits to what is needed to provide the requested features. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and Lore cannot guarantee absolute security.

11. International Users

Lore is operated from the United States, and the information described in this policy is processed in the United States and in the locations used by the service providers listed in Section 4. If you use Lore from outside the United States, you understand that your information is processed in the United States, where data-protection laws may differ from those in your location.

12. Changes to This Policy

Lore may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make material changes to the information we collect or to the retention periods described here, we will update this policy and revise the effective date shown above.

13. Contact

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, want to report a safety concern about the friends features, or would like to make a request regarding your information, please contact us at nelsonlou04@gmail.com.