Privacy Policy — Sovernity Chat

Version 1.0-beta.4 · Effective: 2026-10-07

Sovernity Chat is built so that this policy can be short: the app sends us nothing. Everything you do in it — every conversation, every file, every search — happens and stays on your Mac.

1. What we collect through the app

Nothing. Sovernity Chat has:

• no account or sign-in,
• no telemetry, analytics, or usage tracking,
• no crash reporting,
• no advertising or third-party SDKs that collect data,
• no ability — by design — to see your conversations, files, file names, search indexes, or activity logs.

We cannot hand over, sell, leak, or lose data we never receive.

2. The only times the app uses the network

Sovernity Chat makes exactly three kinds of network connection. Nothing else, ever, in any configuration — and none of them ever carries your content.

Every request fetches a static, signed file. There are no query parameters derived from your data, no cookies, no identifiers. Connections 2 and 3 share one switch, set during onboarding (unchecked) and changeable anytime in Settings. In the app's default configuration, it performs zero automatic network activity after setup.

You don't have to take our word for it: the full product works in airplane mode after setup, and the app's network behavior can be verified by anyone with standard packet-capture tools. We will publish a step-by-step packet-capture walkthrough you can repeat.

3. Third party: Hugging Face

The first-run model download is served by Hugging Face's repository and CDN. Like any web server, Hugging Face can log the request (IP address, requested files, user-agent) under its own privacy policy (https://huggingface.co/privacy). We chose a download from the public source over running the traffic through ourselves so that we learn nothing — not even that you installed the app. We receive no information about your download.

4. Updates and model recommendations (static files on sovernity.com)

Today, these files are not published. As of this version, the update and model-recommendation files are not live, and the app — by a built-in switch, independent of your settings — makes no request for them, manual or automatic, until they are.

When connections 2 and 3 do go live and you use them, the app will fetch static files from sovernity.com. Sovernity runs no servers of its own: sovernity.com is a static site hosted on GitHub Pages, so these requests go to GitHub, not to us. Like any web host, GitHub can log the request (IP address, request time, requested file, user-agent) under its own privacy statement (https://docs.github.com/privacy).

• We receive no request logs for these files from GitHub, and we run no analytics on them.

5. Your data on your device

All app data lives in the app's local container on your Mac — a SQLite store (chats, messages, file-activity log, folder-access records) and an attachments store — plus the downloaded model files. It is yours, under your control, protected by your Mac's own protections (we recommend turning on FileVault and using a strong login password).

Deleting data:

• Deleting a chat in the app permanently removes its messages, its attachments (when no other chat references them), and its file-activity entries, followed by a secure-delete pass on the database so the content isn't recoverable from database free space.
• Revoking a folder's access immediately deletes its search index.
• Settings → Data → "Delete All Data" removes, in one action, everything in the SQLite store and the attachments store — every chat and message, all attachments, the file-activity log, folder-access records, search indexes, undo history and Sovernity Trash copies — followed by the same secure-delete pass. It does not remove the model files. Those are the AI model itself: the same bytes for everyone on your model tier, containing nothing about you or anything you did, and keeping them means the app never has to download anything again as a result of your deleting your data. If you want them gone too, delete the app's container folder (see "Uninstalling" below).
• Uninstalling: delete the app and its container folder (~/Library/Containers/com.sovernity.chat). Nothing remains anywhere else, because nothing was ever anywhere else.

Note: your own backups (e.g., Time Machine) may retain copies of app data under your control, like for any app.

6. Website

Our website, sovernity.com, is the Sovernity studio site: static pages about Sovernity's apps, Sovernity Chat among them, including this policy. It is hosted on GitHub Pages; Sovernity runs no servers of its own. The site:

• runs no analytics and no tracking of any kind,
• sets no cookies (if you pick a light or dark theme, your browser remembers that choice in its own local storage, and it is never sent anywhere),
• has no accounts, forms, or sign-ups — nothing on it asks for or accepts your data,
• and is not contacted by the app today. Once the files in §4 are live, connections 2 and 3 (both off by default) fetch them from it, and nothing else in the app ever does.

GitHub, which serves the pages, can keep standard server logs (IP address, requested page, time, user-agent) under its own privacy statement (https://docs.github.com/privacy) in the course of delivering them. We receive no such logs from GitHub, and we add nothing on top: no analytics scripts, no fingerprinting, no identifiers — nothing on the site can tell us who you are.

App downloads are served from GitHub (github.com), which can likewise log the download request under GitHub's privacy policy (https://docs.github.com/privacy). We receive no information about your download.

7. Children

Sovernity Chat is a general-audience productivity tool, not directed at children, and collects no personal information from anyone — including children.

8. Your rights (GDPR, CCPA, and similar laws)

For everything you do in the app, we are not a data controller or processor — your data never reaches us, so rights of access, deletion, portability, and the rest are satisfied directly and instantly by you, on your device (see §5: the app gives you deletion and export, and there is nothing to request from us).

For the sliver of personal data processed around the edges — IP addresses in the delivery logs of the hosts that serve the downloads, the update files and the website (Hugging Face, §3; GitHub, §4 and §6) — those hosts process it under their own privacy policies, and you have whatever rights your local law provides (access, deletion, objection) with them. Where GDPR applies: the app and the site send those requests to hosts we chose, so we treat ourselves as responsible, together with each host, for delivering your request to it — not for what the host then keeps, which the host alone decides. Our legal basis is our legitimate interest in making the app's downloads, its update files and our website available, securely. We hold none of those logs, so there is nothing about you we could look up; you can still contact us and we'll do what we can within those limits. We do not sell or share personal information as defined by the CCPA/CPRA, and we have no advertising relationships.

9. Changes

If this policy changes materially, the new version ships with the app update that occasions it, is published at sovernity.com, and the change is described plainly. Beyond that, we can't notify you individually — we don't know who you are.

10. Contact

Milo Shieber, doing business as Sovernity · milo.sovernity@shieber.com