The short version
Silo Read collects no data. None.
No analytics. No telemetry. No account. No personal data. No usage metrics. No error beacons. No advertising IDs. No fingerprinting. No crash reports. No data of any kind is collected, stored, transmitted, or shared by Silo Read about you, your device, or your content.
Everything Silo Read does runs entirely on your Mac, on-device, using a bundled local runtime and locally-stored open-weights models. There is no cloud component. There is no server. There is no Silo Read account.
What we don't have, and therefore never see
Because Silo Read has no server-side component, none of the following exists anywhere in our infrastructure (which consists of: nothing): your name, email, phone, or address; your IP address, device identifier, or any hardware fingerprint; your content and anything derived from it; session timing, feature usage, or behavioural data; crash reports. The app does not phone home, ever.
The local backend is not a network service
Silo Read runs a small local process to perform its on-device work. It binds strictly to the loopback interface (127.0.0.1:8765), never to a public or network-facing address. The SwiftUI host renders the UI in a WKWebViewloaded from that same loopback origin. This is on-device inter-process communication only — it accepts no external connections and is not reachable from your network or the internet.
Outbound traffic you initiate
The only outbound network traffic, all user-initiated, and none of it to Silo Read:
- Model weight downloads. After onboarding, Silo Read offers to download model weights from public open-weights repositories (Hugging Face (mlx-community/Kokoro-82M-bf16), Hugging Face (mlx-community/gemma-4-e2b-it-4bit)). The download is anonymous by default; no token, account, or registration is required. Once the weights are on disk, Silo Read works fully offline.
- App Store updates.When Apple ships a Silo Read update, the App Store delivers it. This traffic is between your Mac and Apple's servers. Silo Read is not involved.
- Links you click. If you click an external link inside the app, your default browser handles the request. Silo Read is not involved.
Permissions we request, and why
- Folders you choose. Read and write only the document folders you select via the macOS file picker, remembered across launches with security-scoped bookmarks.
- Network client. (optional)Scoped solely to the consent-gated model downloads (Kokoro; optional Gemma) from Hugging Face — the app's only egress. No account, no telemetry, no data collection.
Silo Read does not request Camera, Contacts, Location, or Full Disk Access beyond what is listed above. If you grant nothing, it can read nothing.
On-device data you create
Your content and everything derived from it live on your disk under ~/Library/Containers/com.silosystems.siloread/Data/Library/Application Support/SiloRead/ (plus any folder you explicitly choose to export to). They are yours. We do not have access to them. Deleting Silo Read removes the app; your work remains under its container until you delete it manually.
Third-party components
Silo Read uses these open-source components and public services. None of them receive any data about you from Silo Read:
- mlx-audio — runs locally on-device.
- kokoro-82m-bf16 — runs locally on-device.
- mlx-lm — runs locally on-device.
- gemma-4-e2b-it-4bit — runs locally on-device.
- vision-ocr-cli — runs locally on-device.
- Kokoro-82M (bf16) neural text-to-speech (Hugging Face (mlx-community/Kokoro-82M-bf16)) — downloaded on demand, runs locally.
- Gemma 4 E2B (4-bit) — optional, for chapter recaps (Hugging Face (mlx-community/gemma-4-e2b-it-4bit)) — downloaded on demand, runs locally.
- FastAPI — the bundled local backend, bound to loopback only.
- Hugging Face Hub / ModelScope — contacted only when you choose to download model weights.
Children's privacy
Silo Read is rated 4+. Because no personal data is collected from any user, no special treatment is required for users under 13. Same policy applies regardless of age: nothing collected.
Changes
If we ever materially change how Silo Read handles data, we will publish an updated version of this page, announce the change prominently in the release notes, and require explicit consent in-app before any new collection begins. The current policy is: nothing is collected.
Contact
Questions about this policy: admin@ohmslaw.net