Privacy Policy

Who we are

Lumora Research is published by Lumora Systems Pty Ltd, a company registered in Australia. In this policy, "we", "us", and "Lumora" mean Lumora Systems Pty Ltd, and "the app" means the Lumora Research iOS app.

What the app stores

When you take a measurement with a Lumora sensor, the app saves it on your device. Depending on the permissions you grant, a saved reading may include:

• Fluorescence measurement data read from the connected sensor.
• The date and time of the reading.
• A photo of the sample, if you choose to take or attach one.
• The organism and any notes you enter.
• Location, weather, atmospheric pressure, ambient light, and compass heading, if you allow the app to collect environmental context.

All of this is stored only in the app's local database on your device. Lumora has no servers that receive it, no ability to read it, and no copy of it. If you delete the app, this data is deleted with it. It is included in your device backups only if you have iCloud or local backups enabled — that is between you and Apple, not us.

What leaves your device

The app makes three kinds of outbound network request. None of them is linked to you or your identity, and none of them carries your measurements. The first two go to third parties rather than to us; the third is the diagnostics described in the next section.

• Weather and place names (Apple). If you allow location access and enable environmental context, the app sends the coordinates of a reading to Apple's WeatherKit and geocoding services to retrieve the weather conditions and place name at that point. This is handled by Apple under Apple's privacy policy. Weather data is provided by Apple Weather.
• Species lookup (GBIF). When you search for an organism, the text you type is sent to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (gbif.org), a public, non-commercial biodiversity database, purely to return matching species names. We do not send your identity, your location, or your measurements with it, and neither we nor GBIF uses it to profile you.

Anonymous diagnostics

The app reports crashes and a small amount of usage information so we can find out that something is broken without waiting for someone to email us. This is processed on our behalf by PostHog, on servers in the United States.

What is sent:

• Crash reports — where in the app's own code it stopped, plus the device model and iOS version, so we can reproduce and fix it.
• Named events, and nothing else about them: that a reading was recorded, that a calibration was built, that a batch was created, that data was exported. We record counts and yes/no facts, such as whether a reading had a calibration applied, not what was measured.
• The connected instrument's model, firmware version, and serial number, so we know which hardware and which firmware are in the field. The serial is a number burned into the sensor's chip at the factory. It identifies a unit of hardware, not a person.
• An approximate country and city, worked out by PostHog from the network address your device connects from, so we know which regions our instruments are deployed in. This describes the network you are on — often an institution or a mobile carrier — not where you took a measurement, and it is never more precise than a city.

What is never sent:

• Your fluorescence measurements, cell densities, or any other reading data.
• Your photos, notes, species names, or the names you give batches and calibrations.
• The coordinates saved with your readings. The GPS position of a measurement stays in the app's local database and is never sent to us or to anyone else. The approximate region described above comes from your network address, not from your readings and not from your device's location services — it is collected even if you never grant the app location access at all.
• Your name, email, or any identifier that points back to you. There is no account to attach a report to, and we never ask the service to build a profile for a user.

Diagnostics are tied to a random identifier generated on your device when you install the app. It means we can tell that forty crashes came from four devices rather than forty, and nothing more. It is not linked to you, it is not shared with anyone, and it is not used for advertising or tracking across other apps or websites.

You can turn it off. Open the app, go to Profile → Privacy, and switch off Share Diagnostics. It stops immediately, without restarting the app, and nothing further is sent for as long as it stays off. Everything else in the app keeps working exactly as before.

What we do not do

• We do not require an account and do not collect your name, email, or contact details in the app.
• We do not use any third-party SDK that receives your readings, photos, notes, or locations. The one third-party service the app talks to about itself is the diagnostics described above, and it never receives any of those.
• We do not create a profile of you. Diagnostics are not tied to a name, an email, an account, or an advertising identifier, because none of those exist in the app.
• We do not track you across apps or websites, and we do not serve advertising.
• We do not sell, rent, or share your data. We do not have it to sell.

Permissions the app asks for, and why

• Bluetooth — to connect to your Lumora sensor, trigger measurements, and read results back. This is required for the app to function with hardware.
• Camera — to photograph the sample you are measuring, and to estimate ambient light levels. Optional.
• Photos — the app does not request access to your photo library. To attach an existing image to a reading it uses the system photo picker, which hands the app only the specific photos you choose. Optional.
• Location — to tag a reading with where it was taken and to look up local weather. Optional.
• Motion & Fitness — to read the barometer for atmospheric pressure. Optional.

Every permission except Bluetooth is optional, and the app works without them — you simply get less environmental context attached to a reading. You can change or revoke any permission at any time in the iOS Settings app, under Lumora.

Sharing calibration files

The app can export a calibration as a .lumoracal file so you can share it with colleagues. Sharing is entirely under your control: the file goes wherever you send it, and it does not pass through Lumora. Calibration files contain measurement data, not personal information.

Your data, your control

Because your data lives on your device, you control it directly. You can delete an individual reading in the app, delete all readings at once from the Profile screen, or delete the app to remove everything. We cannot delete your readings for you, because we do not hold them.

The one thing we do hold is the anonymous diagnostics described above. Because those carry no identifier that points to you, we have no way to find "your" diagnostics in order to delete them, and no way for anyone else to either. If you would rather we held none at all, switch off Share Diagnostics in Profile → Privacy and none will be sent again.

Children

Lumora Research is a scientific instrument companion app intended for researchers, growers, and educators. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, of any age.

Changes to this policy

If we ever change how the app handles data — for example, if we add an optional cloud sync or an account system — we will update this policy and the app's App Store privacy details before that change ships, and we will note the change here.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or about privacy in Lumora Research, can go to [email protected]. We are based in Australia and this policy is governed by Australian law, including the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).