privacy
Loam is a drawing game for a few friends. It has no advertising and nothing to sell, so the short version is that it keeps what it needs to work, records how the app itself is being used so that a fault can be found and fixed, and stops there.
What Loam stores
Who you are. Signing in goes through Clerk, our authentication provider, using Sign in with Apple. Loam’s own database keeps an identifier from Clerk, the display name you choose, the avatar you drew when you started, your device’s time zone — so the daily prompt arrives in your morning rather than ours — and when your account was made and set up. Your email address is held by Clerk, not by us.
That you are old enough. Loam is for adults, so the first run asks your device to confirm you are 18 or over. What is kept is that the check was passed and when — not your age, and not your date of birth.
Who you draw with. The people you are drawing with, and the invitations sent and accepted between you.
What you draw. Drawings you submit, and the record of strokes that lets them replay. These are visible to the people you draw with and to nobody else. Loam has no feed, no public profiles, and no way for a stranger to find you.
Stickers. When you submit a drawing, your phone also cuts it into a sticker, and the sticker goes up with the drawing so that it can reach the person the day was about and come back to your own phone after a reinstall. The same happens to your avatar. Loam records who holds which sticker, which ones you have pinned in the Messages tray, and any sticker you have asked somebody for or been sent. Your phone keeps its copies in the shared storage the Messages extension can read.
Notifications. If you allow them, a device token so a notification can reach you. There are four kinds — the day’s prompt, a friend asking to be drawn, somebody asking you for a sticker, and somebody sending you one — and each arrives at most once a day. A notification can carry a friend’s display name in the sentence you read. Loam records whether Apple accepted it, and, among the usage records below, that an open of the app began from a notification rather than from the home screen — not which one.
How the app is used. Loam records which screens you open, what you tap, how long things take, and when something fails. Each of those is one short line — the name of a screen, the name of a button, a number of milliseconds — and it is tied to your Loam account, so that a fault can be traced back to the person who hit it and fixed rather than guessed at. Alongside it goes which version of the app you are running, what kind of device it is and who made it, which version of iOS, how big the screen is, the device’s language and time zone, and a random identifier the app made up for the device, because a bug is usually only on some of those.
Crashes. When the app crashes, or hits an error it should not have, it sends the error, where in the code it happened, and the last stretch of things you did before — the same screen and button names as above. An error message is not written for anyone to read, so anything in one that looks like an email address, a token, or an image, and any field that carries a name, is stripped out on your phone before it is sent. When Loam’s own servers fail they report the same — the error, where in the code it happened, and your Loam identifier when the request was yours — and those errors are written to carry none of those things in the first place.
Both of those go to PostHog, the service Loam uses to read them, and to nowhere else. Their privacy policy covers what they do with it while they hold it. Loam’s servers also keep ordinary logs, on Railway, which carry identifiers and errors and nothing you drew or typed.
What Loam does not store
There is no location data, no contact list access, and no advertising identifier. Loam does not ask for any of them.
The records described above are held to the same line. None of them carries a drawing, a prompt, a display name, an email address, an invitation code, or anything you typed. They are identifiers, names of screens and buttons, and numbers. A service like PostHog would ordinarily work out a rough location from the internet address your phone connects with; Loam switches that off on every single thing it sends, so no location is worked out and none is stored.
Tracking, and Do Not Track
Loam does not follow you around other apps or websites, and never has. What is recorded above is Loam watching itself, not you elsewhere: it is never joined to anything from anybody else’s app or website, never used to advertise, and never handed to a data broker. Because there is no cross-site tracking here, there is nothing for a Do Not Track signal to switch off — so Loam does not respond to one. Nobody else is given anything to track you with either.
How long it stays
Drawings and their strokes are kept for as long as your account exists. That is what makes the archive an archive; a drawing from a year ago is meant to still be there.
The usage and crash records are kept for twelve months and then deleted, whether or not anybody ever looked at them.
The sticker tray on your phone follows what you can see. A drawing that stops being one you can see leaves the tray the next time the app checks in with Loam, which is every few seconds while the app is open and on the next open otherwise. Blocking somebody clears their stickers from your tray at once. Signing out or deleting your account empties the tray altogether.
Leaving takes you out of what you were part of and ends your place in it. Deleting your account is the wider act: it removes the account here and at Clerk, your drawings and their strokes and stickers, your display name, the avatar you drew, your time zone, any device token, your pins, asks and blocks, and the usage and crash records held against you at PostHog. Backups fall behind by a short while and then catch up, so a deleted thing can persist in one for a few days before it is gone from there too.
What is left is an empty row, kept because invitations record who let somebody in and that record would otherwise point at nothing. It holds no name, no drawing, no time zone, and nothing that connects it back to you or to the account you might make next.
One thing deletion cannot reach. Drawings can be sent as stickers from Messages, and a sticker you have already sent is part of somebody else’s conversation, stored on their device by their messaging app rather than by Loam. Deleting your account removes the drawing from Loam everywhere Loam holds it, and from the sticker tray on your own phone, and it has no way to reach a message already sent. That is a real limit and it is said here rather than left implied.
Changing and deleting
Your display name is yours to change in Settings. The avatar is the one you drew when you started and it stays as you drew it, and your time zone follows your device without being asked. If you want to know everything Loam holds about you, or want something corrected that Settings does not reach, write to the address below.
Deleting your account happens in the app — Settings, then delete your account. It takes effect there and then rather than going into a queue. If you would rather ask a person, the address below works for that too.
Who else touches it
Loam runs on services that process data on its behalf and for no other purpose. As of the date at the foot of this page they are Clerk for sign-in, Railway for the database and the servers that run the game, Cloudflare for this website, PostHog for the usage and crash records above, and Apple for delivering notifications. Each is bound to protect what it holds to the standard this policy sets, and to use it only to run Loam. All of it is stored in the United States, wherever you happen to be reading this.
Nothing is sold. Nothing is shared with anyone else, for any purpose, ever.
Keeping it safe
Everything travels encrypted, and access to the database is limited to what running the game requires. No service can promise it will never be broken into, and this one does not. If something happened to your data you would be told.
Children
Loam is for adults. It is not directed at anyone under 18, and Loam does not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. An account that turns out to belong to someone under 18 will be removed.
Changes
If this changes in a way that matters, the app will say so rather than quietly updating this page. The date below moves whenever anything on this page does.
Contact
In effect since 9 September 2026.