Privacy policy
This product reads your documents, so a vague policy would be worthless. Below is every piece of data that exists, where it is, and what touches the network.
Nothing about your files ever leaves your Mac — not their contents, not their names, not a count of them. The app makes exactly two kinds of network request in its life: it downloads its models once, and it checks a licence key if you buy one. There is no account, no analytics and no telemetry, and this website sets no cookies.
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_modulesor 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. No analytics. No tracking pixels, advertising tags, session recording, embedded fonts or third-party scripts of any kind. The page makes one request for HTML, one for CSS and one for JavaScript, all from this domain, and then stops. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to — it would be strange to claim the product touches no network on a page that phones home.
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 through a third-party form provider to our inbox. We keep 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.
Questions people ask about this
Does Loupe upload my files?
No. No file, no part of a file, no filename and no list of filenames is transmitted anywhere, at any time. Reading, indexing and searching all happen on your Mac, and search continues to work with the network switched off.
What data do you collect about me?
From the app: nothing. There is no account, no analytics, no crash reporting and no telemetry of any kind. If you buy a licence, our payment provider holds the email address you gave them so they can send your receipt and key. If you use the contact form, we hold the name, address and message you typed until the conversation is over.
Does this website use cookies?
No. There are no cookies, no analytics, no tracking pixels, no advertising tags, no embedded fonts and no third-party scripts. Nothing is stored in your browser, and there is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to.
What does the app connect to?
Two things, and neither one involves your files. On first run a helper downloads the models from Hugging Face. If you activate a licence, the key you were emailed is sent to our licensing endpoint to be checked and signed; a lifetime licence never connects again, and a monthly one renews its lease about once a month.