Privacy policy

Lore is a personal journal app for iPhone. It is made and run by an individual developer based in the European Union. There is no company, no data protection officer and no certification behind it — one person builds it, and this page says plainly what the app does with your information.

Lore is currently in beta, distributed through Apple TestFlight. You can reach me about anything on this page at anton.vasilenko00@gmail.com.

What Lore stores

When you use the app, Lore keeps:

• Your account — the email address you sign up with.
• Journal entries — what you write, exactly as you wrote it, with the date or date range it is about and when you wrote it.
• Events — dated things that happened: a trip, a job, a party, a pay rate. With their dates, date precision, tags and details.
• People, places, organizations and personal projects — the entities that recur in your writing, the names and aliases you gave them, and which journal entries and events mention them.
• Tags and properties — how you classify events, and the typed details a tag carries.
• Facts — short statements drawn from your journal entries, each one linked back to the entry it came from.
• Imported content — journal entries and rows you import from an Apple Journal export or from Notion databases, kept with a pointer to their source.
• Images and files you attach to a journal entry or an event.
• Search index data — a numeric embedding of journal entry text, so search can find an entry by meaning and not only by words.

Where it is stored

Lore's database and file storage are hosted on Supabase, in their EU (Paris, eu-west-3) region. Every table carries your user id and is protected by row-level security, so a request authenticated as you can read only your own rows. Files you attach go into a private bucket scoped to your account.

Signing in

Lore signs you in with an email address and password, handled by Supabase Auth. Passwords are stored as hashes by Supabase; the app never stores your password. During the beta there is no open sign-up: accounts are created by the developer on request.

Gmail — optional, read-only

Lore can connect to Gmail so that a trip does not have to be typed in by hand. This is entirely optional. Lore works without it, and it is off until you connect it yourself from Me → Sources.

• The scope is gmail.readonly. Lore can read mail. It cannot send, modify, label or delete anything.
• What it looks for — travel bookings and reservations: flights, stays, trains, car hire, tickets and restaurant reservations, in the date ranges of your trips and in the last twelve months. It is not a general search of your mailbox, and it is not used to profile you.
• Where the reading happens — on your iPhone. The app calls Gmail directly from the device. The access and refresh tokens are kept in the device keychain and are never stored on Lore's server or in its database.
• Email bodies are never stored. For a message that turns out to be a booking, Lore keeps only what it extracted (the kind of booking, the dates, the places and the vendor), the Gmail message id, and one short quote of roughly 140 characters so you can see where a detail came from. Nothing else from the message is saved, anywhere.
• What leaves the device — to decide whether a message is a booking and to pull the details out of it, Lore sends short excerpts through its own server function to a language-model provider. Before anything is sent, booking references, card digits, phone numbers and email addresses are stripped out. The request denies data collection and retention by the provider. These excerpts are used for that extraction only: never for advertising, never for profiling, and never to train generalised models.

Lore's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Disconnecting Gmail

You can disconnect at any time in the app, at Me → Sources → Gmail → Disconnect. Lore revokes the token with Google and stops reading mail. You can also revoke access directly at myaccount.google.com/permissions.

When you disconnect, Lore asks what to do with what it already found — keep it or delete it. Keeping leaves the extracted booking details on your trips. Deleting removes them from your account.

Calendar and Photos

Both are optional and both are asked for by iOS, so you can refuse or withdraw them in the Settings app at any time.

• Calendar — read on the device, to know what a day held when Lore asks you to write about it.
• Photos — Lore reads metadata only: when a photo was taken and, where the photo carries it, roughly where. That is what lets Lore notice a stretch of days away from home and propose a trip. Your photos are never uploaded and never leave your phone, unless you deliberately attach one to a journal entry, in which case it goes to your own private storage described above.

Notifications

Lore's reminders are local notifications, scheduled by the app on your phone. There is no push token, no device registered with a push service, and no server that knows when to notify you.

Language models

Lore uses language models for a few specific jobs: structuring an import, extracting booking details, drafting a trip's day-by-day breakdown, and answering when you ask it something. These calls go through Lore's own server function, which routes them to model providers with data collection and retention denied. Your content is not used to train generalised models.

Two related cases, stated plainly: text from a journal entry is sent to OpenAI's embeddings API to produce the numeric vector that makes search work, and audio in an Apple Journal export is transcribed during import. Lore does not send your journal wholesale to any model — a request carries only what the task needs.

Crash and error reports

Lore uses Sentry (EU ingestion) to report crashes and errors, so bugs can be fixed. A report contains technical information — the error and its stack trace, the app version, the device model and OS version. Lore does not attach journal content to a report, and Gmail message bodies, subjects, senders and tokens are never logged.

What Lore never does

• Your data is never sold or rented.
• There is no advertising in the app, and no ad network in it.
• Your journal is not shared with anyone. There is no sharing feature.
• Your content is not used to train generalised models, by me or by a provider.

Export and deletion

You can export everything from the app: Lore writes your journal entries and events to Markdown and JSON in a folder on your phone, browsable in Files.

To have your account and all its data deleted, write to anton.vasilenko00@gmail.com from the address you signed up with. Deletion removes your rows and your files, and it cannot be undone. You can also ask for a copy of your data, for a correction, or for Gmail-derived data to be removed while keeping the rest.

Legal basis and your rights

If you are in the EU or the UK, the processing described here rests on your consent, given when you create an account and again, separately, when you connect a source such as Gmail — and on the necessity of processing your content in order to provide the app you asked for. You have the right to access, correct, export, restrict and delete your data, and to withdraw consent at any time by disconnecting a source or deleting your account. You can also complain to your national data protection authority.

Children

Lore is not intended for anyone under 16.

This website

mappa.life is the home page for Lore. It has no accounts and no login. If you leave your email address to ask for a beta invite, it is stored by Formspree, which forwards it to me, and it is used to send you an invite and nothing else.

The site uses PostHog (EU hosting) for product analytics, which includes session recording of this website, Vercel Analytics for page views, and a Google Ads tag that records when someone who arrived from an ad joins the waitlist. None of this touches the app or your journal.

Changes

When this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. If a change materially affects how your data is used, beta testers are told by email.

Contact

anton.vasilenko00@gmail.com