Privacy

Last updated 12 November 2026

Lumarium is a Mac app made by one person, myself, Alek Holt. The short version: the app works on your Mac, collects nothing about you, and only goes online for the few things listed below.

The waitlist

When you join, we keep three things:

• your email address;
• which form you used (the top or the bottom of the page);
• if the link you followed carried one, a short tag naming where it was posted, for example “reddit”. It tells us which posts people respond to, and it is not tied to any profile.

They are kept in a private list on Cloudflare, which hosts this site, and used for one thing: to email you when Lumarium is available. We don’t sell, rent or share them, or add you to anyone else’s list.

This site sets no cookies and runs no advertising or cross-site trackers. It counts visits as a single number per day and per link tag, so we can tell how many people who saw a post signed up; nothing about you is kept with that count. Like any website, our host’s servers briefly see your IP address to deliver the page; we don’t keep it.

The app

• Your settings stay on your Mac. Wallpaper choices, tuning, greeting layouts and any photos you turn into wallpapers are stored in the app’s own folders on your Mac.
• No analytics or tracking. The app doesn’t report what you use, how long, or anything about your Mac.
• Your cursor and windows. The wallpapers react to where your pointer is and where windows are dragged. The app reads only positions and sizes, never what is in a window or what you type, and none of it leaves your Mac.
• Coming back to your Mac. The welcome-back greeting notices you have returned by how long the Mac has been idle. That stays on your Mac too.
• Feedback. “Report a problem” and “Suggest a wallpaper” open your own mail app with a message to hello@lumarium.app, filled in with the app and macOS versions. Nothing is sent unless you send it.
• The licence. When the paid version launches, it will check its licence key online once to activate. This page will say exactly what that check sends before it ships.

Weather in your greeting

The welcome-back greeting can show the weather, but only if you put a weather fill-in ({weather}, {temp} or {conditions}) in one of its lines. Without one, the app never asks for it. With one:

• If you type a city, it is sent to Apple’s geocoding service to find where it is.
• If you choose “My location”, macOS asks your permission first. You can turn it off any time in System Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services.
• The forecast comes from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute (MET Norway). Only the coordinates are sent there, rounded to about ten metres, and no name, email or identifier goes with them. The last reading is kept on your Mac so the greeting works offline.

Weather data is provided by MET Norway under the Norwegian Licence for Open Government Data and CC BY 4.0.

Accounts

Lumarium works fully without one: use it as a guest and everything stays on your Mac. An optional free account, to keep your tuning and greeting layouts across Macs, is planned. Before it launches, this page will list exactly what an account stores, where, and how to delete it.

How Lumarium is made

Lumarium is designed and directed by Alek Holt, and much of it was developed with the help of AI tools, including Anthropic’s Claude: its code, its shaders, and some of its writing.

The wallpapers themselves are not AI-generated images or videos. Each one is a small simulation, written as code and run live on your Mac’s graphics chip. The app does not use AI on your Mac, and it never sends your data to any AI service.

Your choices and contact

• Every email we send has an unsubscribe link.
• To see, correct or delete what we hold about you, write to hello@lumarium.app and we’ll do it within 30 days.
• Lumarium isn’t directed at children under 13, and we don’t knowingly collect their information.
• If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. Anything that changes what we collect will be announced before it takes effect.