Privacy policy

Who this is

Loupe is made by Olivera Radovanović Preduzetnik Novi Sad, Seljačkih buna 93, Novi Sad, Serbia. Questions about anything on this page go to hello@macloupe.com and are answered by a person.

The app

What it stores, and where

Everything the app knows lives in one SQLite file on your Mac, under ~/Library/Application Support/Loupe/. It holds text extracted from your files, descriptions generated for your pictures, the numeric representations used for searching, and file paths and dates. It is on your disk, it is covered by whatever backup and disk encryption you already use, and deleting it erases everything the app knows without affecting a single document of yours.

What it sends

Two things, in the whole life of the product:

• The model download, once. On first run a helper fetches the model weights from Hugging Face. That request carries no information about you or your files. The largest model — the one that describes photographs — is listed with its size before anything starts, and can be declined on that screen.
• Licence activation, if you buy. The key you were emailed is sent to our licensing endpoint, which asks our payment provider whether it is live and returns a signed licence. A lifetime licence is signed once and never checks again. A monthly subscription renews its lease roughly once a month, so a cancellation eventually takes effect and a customer on a plane is not locked out.

That is the complete list. There is no analytics, no crash reporting, no usage statistics, no feature flags fetched at startup and no update ping. If you would rather verify that than believe it: switch the Wi-Fi off after the first run and search for something. It works.

What it never does

• Upload a file, part of a file, a filename, or a list of filenames.
• Send your searches anywhere. Queries are answered on the machine.
• Open ~/Library, .git, node_modules or the contents of application packages — those are excluded before anything is read.
• Move, rename, tidy, deduplicate or delete a file. It reads, and that is all.
• Ask for an account, a password, an email address or a profile.

Buying

Payments are handled by Lemon Squeezy, acting as merchant of record. They collect what a payment requires — your email address, billing details, and the country used to work out tax — and they send you the receipt and the licence key. We never see your card details. Their privacy policy governs what they hold; this one governs what we do with what reaches us, which is an email address and the fact that you bought something.

We use that address to send your licence and to answer you if you write to us, and for nothing else. It is not sold, rented or passed to anyone beyond the providers named on this page.

This website

No cookies, and nothing stored in your browser. No tracking pixels, advertising tags, session recording or embedded fonts.

One thing is measured: how many people read these pages. That is Cloudflare Web Analytics, which is a script served from Cloudflare and the only code here that does not come from this domain. It records the page opened, the site that linked to it, a country and a device type. It sets no cookie, stores nothing on your device, keeps no identifier that would let anyone recognise you on a second visit, and cannot see you on any other site. We read it to learn which of these pages are worth writing, and for nothing else. There is no consent banner because nothing is stored on your device to consent to.

The distinction worth stating plainly: this is a website counting visits, which is ordinary. The product is not doing it. Loupe itself reports nothing, and the promise above — that nothing about your files ever leaves your Mac — is unaffected by anything on this page.

Our host keeps ordinary web server logs, which include IP addresses, for a short period for security and abuse prevention. We do not read them for anything else and do not combine them with anything.

The contact form

Submitting the form sends your name, email address and message to a small server of our own, which turns it into an email and forwards it to us. No form provider or other third party handles it or keeps a copy. We hold it for as long as the conversation is useful, then delete it. It is not added to a mailing list — there is no mailing list.

Your rights

Where the GDPR or a comparable law applies to you, you have the right to ask what personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to receive a copy of it, and to object to how it is used. In practice the answer is short, because the only personal data we ever hold is an email address and any messages you have sent us. Write to hello@macloupe.com and we will act on it within thirty days.

The legal basis for holding your email address is performance of the contract — we cannot deliver a licence without somewhere to send it. The legal basis for keeping your messages is our legitimate interest in answering you.

Children

This is a tool for finding documents on a computer and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect anything from anyone under 16.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. A change to what leaves your Mac would be a change to the product itself, and would be announced rather than quietly edited in here.