Privacy for

Lantern Privacy Policy

Effective October 29, 2026

Lantern is a Mac app from Papermint Studio that lists the devices on your network and what each one says about itself. This policy explains what it does with information.

In short

What Lantern finds on your network stays on your Mac. Papermint collects nothing about you, your network or your devices.

What stays on your Mac4

Your devices. The devices Lantern finds, the details they report, the names you give them and the activity history are kept in one file per network in ~/Library/Application Support/Lantern. Forget removes devices; deleting the folder removes everything.
Talking to your devices. To find and describe devices, Lantern sends pings, opens short connections to common ports and asks devices on your own network for their names and details (Bonjour, UPnP, SNMP, NetBIOS, IPP and their info pages). It only reads what they share. It never logs in to a device or changes a setting.
Your Wi-Fi. With Location allowed, macOS lets Lantern read your Wi-Fi network's name and hear the networks nearby, for the channel check. Lantern doesn't read your location.
MCP and Shortcuts. If you turn on the MCP server, AI apps on your Mac that you connect can read what Lantern found. What they do with it is up to them and their own policies. The server only answers on this Mac and is off until you turn it on.

What goes online3

Your licence. When you activate a key, Lantern sends it to Papermint (console.papermint.studio) with your Mac's name as set in System Settings and a hashed id made from your Mac's hardware id, so one Mac counts once. About once a day it sends back the signed licence it was given, to confirm the key still stands. Papermint checks the key with Dodo Payments, who handle the payment. See our studio privacy policy for buying and the licence console.
Update checks. Sparkle, the updater, downloads a small file listing the latest version from downloads.papermint.studio, and the update itself if you choose to install it. Like any web request, this shows your IP address to our hosting provider, Cloudflare. We don't log it or use it to identify you.
Nothing else. Lantern has no analytics, no tracking, no ads and no account. Nothing it finds on your network is ever sent to us.

Contact2

Questions about privacy? Email hello@papermint.studio.
If this policy changes, the new version will be posted on this page with a new effective date.

Still need a hand?

A person reads every message, usually within a day.

hello@papermint.studio