Privacy
Short version: Bulb does not collect anything about you.
What the app stores
Your rolls, frames, notes, locations and any reference photos live on your phone, in the app's own database. There is no Bulb account and no sync, and the one server Bulb talks to never sees the log. Anything an iPhone backup picks up travels through your own backup, not through me.
What you say
While you talk, the phone's own recogniser listens. Bulb sets the on-device recognition flag in iOS and will not fall back to Apple's servers for that pass. A recogniser small enough to run in your pocket mishears numbers, though, so when there is signal the few seconds of you saying what you shot go to Bulb's own server to be read by a larger speech model, along with the name of the film and camera you are using so it knows that Portra is a word. This is the only part of Bulb that sends anything anywhere, it uses a little data each time you say a frame, and the app says so under the keys the first time you use it.
The words come back and the audio is dropped. It is not stored and it is not used to train anything. The model runs on Cloudflare Workers AI, whose terms say inputs are not used to train models, and the endpoint Bulb talks to writes nothing down. There is no account and nothing sent is tied to you. The request carries a random string generated on your phone, which exists so the daily allowance is shared out fairly and means nothing anywhere else.
What does not go: your frames, your photographs, your positions, your notes, your scans. The log has never left the phone and this does not change that.
With no signal, the phone reads the sentence on its own. Two optional passes help it, on the device. Bulb can fetch a speech model once, about 217 MB, from the roll menu, which reads the recorded sentence again and corrects misheard f-stops; it only ever pulls a file down, and nothing about you goes with it. Where it is missing, Bulb carries on without it. Nothing rewrites the sentence: what you said is what the log keeps.
Where you were
If you allow it, Bulb takes one location fix for each frame, so the place you stood can travel into the scan and Lightroom can put the roll on a map. It asks the first time you log a frame, not when the app opens. It never runs a continuous track: it takes a single fix, reuses it for about ninety seconds, and lets the receiver go quiet again. The position is rounded to roughly ten metres, it is stored with the frame on your phone, and it is sent nowhere. Say no and everything else works as before.
Your scans
When Bulb writes shooting data into your files, that happens on your own machine. The scans are never uploaded.
Analytics
None. No tracking, no advertising identifiers, no third-party SDKs.
The list
If you left an email address to hear when Bulb is out, it is stored so that one message can be sent to you, and it is used for nothing else. Write to hello@bulb.film and it will be deleted.