Last updated 11 August 2026
Mineralo has no accounts, no advertising and no tracking. Your collection lives on your phone. This page describes the few things that do leave it, and why.
Mineralo is made by ICONS Digital Group BV, Singel 268, 3311 HK Dordrecht, Netherlands. We are the data controller for the processing described here. Reach us at privacy@mineralo.app.
| What | Where it goes | Why |
|---|---|---|
| The photograph you take | Our identification service, and from there to Anthropic | To identify the rock |
| Coordinates of a find | Apple, for reverse geocoding only | To turn a location into a place name |
| An anonymous install identifier | Our identification service | To count daily usage and stop abuse |
| Your App Store subscription receipt | Our identification service | To confirm you are a subscriber |
That is the complete list. Everything else — your collection, your find photographs, your map, your profile picture — stays in the app on your device.
When you identify a rock, that single photograph is sent over an encrypted connection to our service, which passes it to Anthropic, the provider of the vision model that reads it. Anthropic processes the image in the United States.
We do not keep your photographs. The image is held only for as long as the identification takes and is never written to disk on our servers. It is not linked to you, not used to train any model, and not shared with anyone else.
Anthropic processes the image on our behalf under their commercial terms, which prohibit using it to train their models. International transfers rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses.
If you have no signal, identification runs entirely on your device and the photograph never leaves it at all.
Location is optional. We ask only after your first find, never during setup, and the app works fully without it.
If you allow it, the coordinates of each find are stored on your device, inside the app. They are not sent to us and we cannot see them. To show a readable place name such as "Zandvoort, Netherlands", the coordinates are sent to Apple's geocoding service, which is subject to Apple's privacy policy.
Each installation generates a random identifier the first time it runs. It is sent with each identification so we can count how many have been made that day and prevent abuse of the service.
It is not the advertising identifier, it is not linked to your Apple Account or to any other identifier, and it cannot be traced back to you. Deleting the app destroys it; reinstalling produces a new, unrelated one. Usage counts are kept for a short period and then deleted.
Purchases are handled entirely by Apple. We never see your name, your card or your billing address.
When you subscribe, the app sends us the signed receipt Apple issues so our service can verify that the subscription is genuine before granting access. We read only whether a valid subscription exists.
Under the GDPR we rely on performance of a contract for identifying your photographs and verifying your subscription — these are the service you asked for — and on legitimate interests for the usage counting that keeps the service available and affordable.
You have the right to access, correct, delete, restrict or object to the processing of your personal data, and to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority — in the Netherlands, the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens.
In practice there is very little for us to act on, because we hold almost nothing: no account, no photographs, no locations. Deleting the app removes your collection, your photographs and your coordinates from your device permanently, as we hold no copy of them. For anything else, write to privacy@mineralo.app.
Mineralo is suitable for all ages but is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from them.
If this policy changes materially, we will update this page and change the date at the top. Significant changes will also be noted in the app's release notes.