Privacy Policy
The short version. Loam has no accounts and no sign-up. To identify a plant, your photo is sent from the app to the Loam server, forwarded to identification providers, and discarded. Loam stores no images, anywhere.
Photos you submit
When you identify or diagnose a plant, the photo travels from your device to the Loam server and is held in memory only for the duration of that request. It is forwarded to exactly these third parties, which process it to produce a result:
- Pl@ntNet (Inria / Cirad / IRD / CNRS / INRAE consortium, France) — plant identification.
- Kindwise (FlowerChecker s.r.o., Czech Republic) — plant identification (plant.id) and plant health assessment.
- Anthropic (Anthropic, PBC, United States) — reviews the candidate species list to write the explanation. Photos are sent to Anthropic only when image review is enabled for low-confidence results; by default Anthropic receives species names and scores, not the image.
Loam does not store photos on its servers, does not log them, and has no photo storage of any kind. Photos you save to My Plants or the journal stay on your device (and in your personal iCloud if you enable sync).
Location
If you allow location access, an approximate latitude and longitude is sent with the identification request to pick the regional flora. Location is never embedded in the photo and is not stored.
What the server keeps
- A random install identifier, generated on your device, used only to enforce the daily identification allowance. It is not linked to you, your Apple ID or your photos.
- Anonymous identification events: the confidence band, whether the engines agreed, the top score, the response time and which engines ran. No image, no location and no install identifier is written to these records.
- Care cards for plant species, which contain no personal data.
Purchases
Loam Pro is sold through Apple. Apple handles payment; Loam receives a signed receipt to confirm your subscription and never sees your payment details.
Your data, your choice
Everything you save in the app can be exported (CSV or JSON) and deleted from the app at any time. Deleting the app deletes its data from your device.
Children
Loam is rated 4+ and collects no personal information from anyone.
Changes and contact
If this policy changes, the new version is published here with a new effective date. Questions: support email to be announced.