Privacy

What I collect

LookyHere sends me nothing automatically. There is no account to create, no analytics, and no advertising. I run no server for the app to send anything to. The only third-party code in the app is ZIPFoundation, a small open-source library that zips and unzips your backups, entirely on the device.

iOS may provide crash, hang, and performance reports for the app. LookyHere stores selected diagnostic fields locally. It removes free-form crash exception messages and their substitution arguments, along with known fields describing your region or use of location, cellular, and wifi. Reports the app cannot read are discarded. Settings → About → Export Support Files creates a zip with scrubbed reports, page counts, app and iOS versions, and storage status. The same filtering is applied to older reports during export. Your pages and attachments are not included. LookyHere never uploads the bundle automatically: you decide whether and where to share it, including whether to email it to me.

Apple does some reporting of its own. If you've turned on Share With App Developers (Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements), Apple passes me crash reports and statistics about how the app is used, aggregated or in a form that doesn't identify you. That's Apple's system and your switch, not code in LookyHere.

Where your notes live

Your pages are stored as Markdown files, images, and attachments on your device, and in your own iCloud Drive when iCloud Drive is enabled for LookyHere. This lets your pages sync to your other devices. The app can only see its own folder in iCloud Drive, not the rest of your files. That data is covered by Apple's privacy policy, and I can't see any of it.

When iCloud Drive is off for LookyHere, your library and backups stay in the app's storage on this device. The app's cache is always local. System integrations and exports you choose are described below.

Backups live in the same place. The app keeps zipped copies of your pages in a Backups folder sitting right beside them, on whatever schedule you pick in Settings and as many copies back as you choose. So if your pages are in iCloud Drive your backups are too, and if they're local the backups are local. A backup is a full copy of everything you've written, including pages you've archived. You can see them in the Files app, and delete any of them yourself.

If you'd like that folder end-to-end encrypted, turn on Advanced Data Protection in your Apple Account settings. LookyHere doesn't need to know either way.

Intelligence features

LookyHere's AI features (fact extraction, summaries, emoji suggestions, quick-note parsing, photo text scanning, and search expansion) run entirely on your device using Apple's on-device models. Your notes and photos are not sent to any server for processing, not to Apple's Private Cloud Compute, and not to me.

One switch turns all of it off. Settings → Intelligence disables every intelligence feature. Your notes, reminders, search, Markdown files, and backups keep working.

Siri is a separate thing, and worth separating out. So that you can ask a question in your own words instead of a memorized phrase, the app publishes your pages to the system as things Siri can reason over. That handoff happens on the device. But once you ask Siri something, you are using Apple's software under Apple's privacy policy, not mine. If you would rather turn off Siri alone, Allow Siri and Search on the Your Privacy screen stops that arrangement.

Permissions the app may ask for

Contacts. Only when you choose to link a contact to a person page, and only to copy that contact's name, photo, phone, email, and birthday onto the page. Once they're on the page, the phone number and email go into the device's own search index along with the rest of it, so that searching a number turns up the person it belongs to, while Spotlight is enabled. Copied contact details become part of the page and follow the same storage and optional iCloud sync settings as your other saved content. They are not sent to me by the app.

Photos and Camera. Only to attach a photo you pick or take, or to scan a document or some text. Photos stay in your shoebox.

Location. Requested at a coarse accuracy, and only while the app is open. It's used to show how far away a saved spot is, to sort the Near Me list, and to point place search at roughly where you are. Your location is never written to a file and never sent to me.

Notifications. Used only to deliver the reminders you set yourself. Worth knowing: a reminder shows the page's name, so you can tell which one it is, and that name can land on your Lock Screen where someone else might see it. What you actually wrote on the page never appears there.

Not the microphone. Worth saying out loud, because the app leans on Siri: LookyHere never asks for your microphone and has no code that could record you. When you talk to Siri, Siri is doing the listening, and the app is only handed the result.

Maps

Place pages lean on Apple Maps, and that is the one part of the app that reaches out. The map tiles, Look Around, and the search you type when you add a spot are all Apple's. So the coordinates you save and what you type into spot search go to Apple, under Apple's privacy policy, the same as they would in the Maps app. They never come to me, and there is no server of mine for them to come to.

What the app shows outside itself

Four parts of iOS can surface your pages outside the app: Spotlight search, widgets, the share sheet, and Siri and Shortcuts. To make those work, LookyHere hands the system things like page titles, reminders, checklist text, notes, and, on a person you've linked to a contact, their phone number and email. Siri gets your pages as things it can reason over, which is what lets you ask for something in your own words. None of that goes to a server of mine. The handoff to iOS happens on the device; using Siri follows Apple's privacy settings and policy.

Each one has its own switch in Settings under Your Privacy. Turning Spotlight off deletes its entries. Turning widgets off publishes an empty snapshot and shows that widgets are off. Show Pages in Share Sheet controls page suggestions, including the recent destination: turning it off hides those suggestions, while LookyHere remains in the Share Sheet so you can save a new Item. Turning Siri and Search off removes the app's indexed entities and its actions politely decline.

Getting your data, or getting rid of it

There is nothing for me to hand over. I hold no copy of anything you write, so there's no request to file, no export for me to prepare, and no account to close. Where a privacy law gives you the right to see, correct, or delete what a company holds about you, the answer here is that you are already holding it.

Getting rid of it works differently depending on where your pages live, so it is worth knowing which case you are in. Settings → Files says which.

If your pages are in iCloud Drive, deleting the app leaves them there on purpose. They're your notes, and throwing them out should be your decision, not a side effect. To get rid of everything, delete the app and then delete the LookyHere folder in the Files app. Your backups sit inside that same folder, so they go with it.

If they're only on this device, they live inside the app, so deleting the app deletes your pages and your backups along with it. Export a backup somewhere else first if you want to keep any of it.

This website

lookyhere.app is a handful of static files. No cookies, no analytics, no tracking pixels, and no scripts of any kind: view the source and there's nothing to find. It's hosted on Amazon S3 behind CloudFront. AWS processes requests to deliver the site, but I haven't switched on access logging or any other measurement, so I genuinely don't know who visits or how many.

If I stop working on this

It's a personal project, so it's a fair question. There is no user database to sell or transfer, because there isn't one. If I ever hand LookyHere to someone else or stop entirely, your notes stay exactly where they already are: plain Markdown files in your own iCloud Drive or on your device, readable by anything that opens text. Whoever picked it up would get the code, not your pages. A new owner could change this policy for what the app does next, but nothing can reach back and collect what you've already written.

Children

LookyHere does not collect personal information from anyone, including children.

Changes

If this policy ever changes, I'll post the updated version on this page.

Contact

If you have a question about any of this, email me.