Encore Privacy Policy

Overview

Encore reads your photo library on your iPhone to find the stretches worth watching again, then plays them back on the beat. Your photos are never uploaded. Encore has no account system — there is nothing to sign up for. The only data that leaves your device is what you actively send us via in-app feedback, plus standard anonymous diagnostics.

Encore can also group your photos by who keeps showing up in them. That feature uses face recognition, it is off until you explicitly turn it on, and it too runs entirely on this iPhone. Section 5 sets out exactly what it computes, what it stores, how long it is kept, and how to destroy it.

1. Data We Handle

Data	Where it lives	Purpose
Photos and videos	Read on-device; never uploaded	Find and play back the moments worth revisiting
Photo metadata (capture time, location, favourite flag, burst grouping)	Read on-device	Group photos into trips, days, anniversaries, and revisited places
Derived location grid cells	On your device only	Judge how rare a place is for you; exact coordinates are never stored
Your edits (which frames stay in, which rhythm you chose, what you've watched)	On your device only	Remember your choices between launches
Face templates — a 512-number descriptor of each face found in your photos, plus where that face sits in the frame (only if you turn face recognition on)	On your device only, inside Encore's sandbox	Gather the photos of the same person together
People and the names you give them (only if you turn face recognition on)	On your device only, inside Encore's sandbox	Let you look back by person, and keep your corrections
Feedback (message, optional email, optional screenshot)	Sent to us when you submit feedback	Reply and improve the app
Anonymous diagnostics & crash data	Aggregated analytics	Stability and quality

Encore does not require an account and does not collect your name, contacts, or browsing history.

2. Photo Library Access

Encore requests access to your photo library so it can read your photos and their capture metadata. Everything it does with them — quality scoring, near-duplicate detection, aesthetic assessment, grouping into stories — runs entirely on this device. No photo, thumbnail, or derived image is transmitted to our servers or to any third party.

Encore only reads your library. It does not delete, modify, or move your photos.

If you grant Limited access (only selected photos) rather than full access, Encore will tell you plainly that its picks would be drawn from a hand-picked subset and would therefore be misleading, rather than silently producing a distorted result.

3. Location Data

Photos often carry the coordinates where they were taken. Encore uses this to tell a trip apart from an ordinary day at home, and to judge how rare a place is for you.

Before any of that happens, coordinates are reduced to a coarse grid cell — a square roughly a few kilometres across. Only the grid cell is kept and compared. Encore never stores your exact coordinates and never transmits location data of any kind.

4. On-Device Analysis

Sharpness, exposure, near-duplicate detection, and aesthetic assessment all run on-device using Apple's Vision framework and local image processing. No analysis request is ever sent to a server, and Encore does not use any cloud AI service to look at your photos.

The same is true of face recognition, which is covered separately in Section 5 because you have to turn it on first.

5. Face Recognition — Off Until You Turn It On

Encore can gather together the photos of people who keep showing up in your library, so you can look back by person. That feature is called We, and it is the only part of Encore that looks at faces.

Nothing is scanned until you say yes. Encore does not detect, measure, or encode a single face until you have explicitly switched on Recognise people — either in Settings, or on the We shelf itself, which explains what will happen before it offers you the choice. There is no default-on state and no implied consent. If you decline, that is a final answer: Encore stops asking, and you can still turn it on yourself later.

What it computes. Once you turn it on, Encore uses Apple's Vision framework to find faces in the photos already on this iPhone and converts each face into a 512-number mathematical descriptor — a face template, sometimes called a faceprint. Templates that sit close together are grouped into one person. You can name a person, hide them, or tell Encore that a face is not that person; your corrections are never overwritten by a later scan.

What is stored, and where. Face templates, the position of each face within its photo, the groupings, and any names you type are held in a database inside Encore's own app sandbox on this iPhone. None of it is uploaded, sent to our servers, backed up to us, sold, leased, traded, or otherwise disclosed to anyone — not to SignalRender, not to Apple, not to any third party. We never receive it and cannot see it.

Retention and destruction. Because face data never leaves your device, you hold the only copy, and the schedule is short by design:

It is destroyed immediately when you tap Erase face data in Settings. Templates, groupings, and names are all deleted — actually deleted, not hidden.
It is destroyed when you uninstall Encore, along with the rest of its sandbox.
It is destroyed no later than three years after you last use Encore, or as soon as the purpose above has been satisfied, whichever comes first.
Switching Recognise people off stops any further scanning but keeps what has already been worked out; use Erase face data when you want it gone.

Face recognition is separable from everything else Encore does: every other kind of story is built from time, place, and image statistics, never from faces. Leaving it off, or erasing what it found, costs you nothing but the We shelf.

6. What Encore Says About Your Photos

Every reason Encore shows you (for example, "the only time you went there in 2024", "42 shots that day") is a statement of fact derived from your library's own metadata, and can be checked against it. Encore does not make aesthetic judgments about your life, your relationships, or the people in your photos.

7. Third-Party Services

Encore embeds no third-party advertising or social tracking SDKs. Purchases, where offered, are handled by Apple In-App Purchase, and subscription status is provided by Apple. Anonymous diagnostics may be processed by analytics infrastructure operated by SignalRender Inc.

8. Data Retention & Deletion

Your edits and watch history: stored locally; removed when you uninstall the app.
Derived scores and grid cells: held only for the current session's analysis and rebuilt on each scan; nothing is retained about photos you have deleted.
Face templates, people, and names: only ever present if you turned face recognition on; destroyed the moment you tap Erase face data, when you uninstall the app, or within three years of your last use — whichever comes first. See Section 5.
Feedback: retained only as long as needed to handle your request.
Diagnostics: retained in aggregated, anonymous form.

9. Your Rights

Encore is local-first and account-free, so you stay in control. Revoke photo access at any time in iOS Settings; Encore will stop reading your library immediately. Turn Recognise people off to stop face recognition, and tap Erase face data to destroy what it found. Uninstalling the app removes every trace of Encore's own data from your device. For questions about feedback data you've submitted, contact us.