Privacy Policy
LORE, by ELU LABS, LLC · Last updated 28 August 2026
The short version. LORE has no account and no sign-in. Your collection, your notes, and your settings stay on your iPhone and are never sent anywhere. A photograph you submit for identification does leave your phone: it is stripped of its location data, sent over an encrypted connection, identified, and kept by nobody. If you would rather send nothing at all, Identify by Features works entirely offline. The other thing that leaves your phone is anonymous usage analytics — which screens get opened, whether an identification succeeded — and you can turn that off in Profile › Preferences. We do not sell data, run ads, or track you across other apps.
What stays on your device
Your collection. The stones you have saved or discovered, when you added them, and the confidence of any identification.
Your saved photographs. Any picture you keep alongside a collected specimen stays in the app’s own container. A photograph submitted for identification is a separate case, covered below.
Your settings. Appearance, onboarding state, how many free identifications you have used, and which stones you viewed recently.
None of this is sent anywhere. Deleting the app deletes all of it.
How identification works
This changed in August 2026, and the change is worth stating plainly. LORE originally matched photographs on the device itself using Apple’s Vision framework. Tested against real photographs, that did not work — it was close to guessing — so identification now runs through a vision model instead, which means the photograph leaves your phone. Earlier versions of this policy said photographs were never uploaded. For those versions that was true; for this one it is not, and this paragraph exists so that nobody has to find out for themselves.
What happens to the photograph. Your phone resizes it first, which also removes the embedded location and camera information. It is then sent over an encrypted connection to a server operated by ELU LABS, LLC and passed to the vision model that identifies it. It is used to produce your result and is not stored, retained, or used to train anything — by us or by the model provider. Nothing identifying you travels with it: no account, no name, no email address, no device identifier.
If you would rather send nothing. Identify by Features asks you about colour, pattern, optical effects, and a scratch test, then narrows the guide from your answers. It runs entirely on your phone, needs no connection, and is free and unlimited.
LORE covers a finite set of stones. If nothing matches closely enough it says so rather than guessing — and an identification it could not make does not count against your free identifications.
Analytics
LORE sends anonymous product analytics through TelemetryDeck, a privacy-focused analytics service. This is how a small independent app learns which parts of it are actually used and what is worth building next.
What is sent: event names from a fixed list — a screen was opened, an identification succeeded or was declined, the paywall was shown, a purchase completed — along with small typed values such as a stone identifier, a confidence figure, or a product identifier.
What is never sent: your photographs, your collection, your notes, your location, your name, your email address, or any advertising identifier. Analytics and identification are kept entirely separate: a photograph is never attached to an analytics event, and analytics never carry image data. There is no cross-app tracking and no data broker involved.
You can turn analytics off at any time in Profile › Preferences. Turning it off takes effect immediately.
Purchases
LORE+ is purchased through the App Store. Apple processes the payment and tells the app whether a subscription is active. We never see your payment details, and we do not receive your name or email address from Apple.
Camera and photo library
LORE asks for camera access only when you first photograph a stone, and for photo library access only when you first choose an existing picture. Both are used solely for identification. You can refuse either and still use the whole guide.
Children
LORE is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect personal information from them. It has no account system, no messaging, and no user-generated content that anyone else can see.
Your rights
Because LORE holds no personal data on our servers — a photograph submitted for identification is processed and discarded, never stored — there is nothing for us to export or delete on your behalf. Everything personal lives on your device and is removed when you delete the app. Analytics events are anonymous and cannot be traced back to an individual, so they cannot be individually retrieved or deleted.
If you have a question about any of this, write to hello@elulabs.com.
Changes
We may update this policy. Material changes will be reflected here and in the app’s About screen before they take effect.
Contact
Questions about privacy: hello@elulabs.com