LumenPrivacy policy
Effective 5 November 2026. This policy covers Lumen for Mac, made by Meru Apps, and this website.
The short version
Lumen has no account, no analytics, no ads and no tracking. Meru Apps has no servers that Lumen talks to, so we never receive your files, your library or what you watch. Lumen goes online only for the features you use, and only to the services those features need, which this page lists.
What stays on your Mac
Your video files, your library, your folders, where you stopped in each video, what you've watched, your profiles, favourites, collections and settings. Passwords and sign-in tokens are kept in your Mac's Keychain. Lumen doesn't send any of this to Meru Apps or anyone else, except as described below for the features you turn on.
When Lumen goes online
| Feature | Service | What is sent |
|---|---|---|
| Film and show details (on unless you turn it off in Settings ▸ Metadata) | Wikipedia, Wikidata, TVmaze | Film titles and years, show names, and IMDb IDs, to find plots, posters and cast |
| “Fill gaps from Apple's iTunes Search” (off by default) | Apple | Film titles and years |
| TMDB details (only when you save your own TMDB key) | The Movie Database | Film titles and years, with your key |
| IMDb ratings (off by default) | IMDb | Nothing about you: Lumen downloads IMDb's public ratings file |
| Subtitle search (when you search) | OpenSubtitles | The title, year or episode and the file's OpenSubtitles hash; your sign-in if you use one |
| Media servers you add | Your Jellyfin, Emby or Plex server; plex.tv when you sign in with Plex | Your sign-in, and where you stop in what you play, so the server keeps your place |
| Cloud drives you connect | Google Drive, Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive | Your sign-in (read-only access), folder listings and the files you play |
| Trakt or Simkl, if you connect them | Trakt or Simkl | The titles you watch, their year or episode, and how far you watched |
| Sync across your Macs (off by default) | Your own iCloud Drive | Where you stopped and what you've watched, with each file's name and a fingerprint of it |
| Web videos you open | The site the video is on | The request for the video |
| Trailers (when you press Trailer, or a film's page previews its trailer; previews can be turned off in Settings ▸ Metadata) | YouTube (youtube-nocookie.com, its privacy-enhanced embedded player) | The trailer's video ID, to check its title and play it; YouTube sees your IP address, as any visit would. Lumen keeps no YouTube cookies. |
| Trailer search (only when you save your own YouTube key) | Google (the YouTube Data API) | Film titles and years, with your key, to find a film's trailer once |
Posters and other pictures Lumen downloads are kept in a cache on your Mac. File names, folder names and file contents are not sent to the metadata services; only the title and year Lumen reads from a name are.
On your network
Network shares you add are reached directly on your network. The iPhone remote (off by default) is a page served by your Mac to devices on the same network; its address carries a secret key, so only someone shown it can use it.
Other services' policies
When a feature uses another service, that service's own privacy policy applies to what it receives: Wikimedia, TVmaze, Apple, TMDB, IMDb, OpenSubtitles, Plex, Google, Dropbox, Microsoft, Trakt and Simkl.
Children
Lumen doesn't collect information from anyone, children included. Profiles, age limits and the PIN are stored only on your Mac.
Removing your data
Everything Lumen keeps is on your Mac. Disconnect servers, cloud drives, Trakt and Simkl in Lumen to remove their sign-ins from your Keychain. Deleting Lumen and its folder in ~/Library/Application Support/Lumen removes the rest; synced places are in your iCloud Drive's Lumen folder.
This website and the sign-up list
This website has no analytics, no ads and no cookies of its own. Its pages are served by Google's Firebase Hosting, which, like any web host, sees your IP address when you visit.
If you leave your email in the “Get notified” form on the home page, we keep:
- your email address,
- that you signed up for Lumen, the page you signed up on, and when.
We use your email only to write to you about Lumen: when there's a beta build for you, and when Lumen is out. We don't sell it, share it or add it to anything else.
To keep bots from flooding the list, the form uses Cloudflare Turnstile, which Cloudflare runs to tell people from bots. It loads only when you click or tab into the email field, or send the form; until then this website loads nothing from Cloudflare. Cloudflare's Turnstile privacy addendum applies to what it sees. The sign-up service also keeps a salted hash of your IP address for a short time to limit repeated attempts; it never keeps the address itself.
Being removed: reply to any email we send, or write to meruappsdev@gmail.com from the address you signed up with, and we'll delete it from the list.
Changes
If Lumen starts sending anything new, this page will say so before the update ships, with the date at the top.
Contact
Questions about privacy: meruappsdev@gmail.com.