The short version
Your documents never leave your Mac. SiloVault collects nothing about you.
No analytics. No telemetry. No account. No personal data. No usage metrics. No error beacons. No advertising IDs. No fingerprinting. No crash reports. The documents you ingest, your vaults, embeddings, search history, chat, and everything derived from them are never collected, stored, transmitted, or shared by SiloVault.
By default, everything SiloVault does runs entirely on your Mac, on-device, using a bundled local runtime and locally-stored open-weights models. There is no SiloVault account and no cloud service that holds your work. Two paths can reach the network, and both are off until you turn them on: the optional Bring Your Own Key mode, which sends data only to a provider you choose and pay for directly, and the optional model-catalog check, which downloads a metadata file and sends none of your content anywhere. Both are described below.
What we don't have, and therefore never see
SiloVault has no server-side component that receives your work, so none of the following reaches us: your name, email, phone, or address; your device identifier or any hardware fingerprint; your content and anything derived from it; session timing, feature usage, or behavioural data; crash reports. With the optional features below switched off, the app makes no requests to Silo Systems at all.
The local backend is not a network service
SiloVault 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.
Workspace recall (opt-in)
SiloVault includes an optional, opt-in feature: an opt-in feature that builds a private, searchable timeline of your work from periodic on-device screen OCR and optional audio transcription. It isoff by default and never runs until you explicitly enable it. Everything about it stays on your Mac:
- On-device only. All recognition and processing run locally on your Apple Silicon Mac. Nothing captured is ever transmitted anywhere.
- A visible indicator is shown the entire time capture is active.
- App and secure-field exclusions. You can exclude specific apps, and secure-field contexts (such as password fields) are excluded.
- Retention you control. You set a retention window; older entries expire automatically and you can clear the history at any time.
- Encrypted at rest inside the app's on-device container, never in any cloud.
If you never enable it, none of this runs and nothing is captured.
Outbound traffic you initiate
Outbound network traffic with the optional features off — all user-initiated, and none of it carrying your content:
- Model weight downloads. After explicit consent, SiloVault downloads revision-pinned model weights from the disclosed Hugging Face hosts and verifies them before use. No Silo account is required. Once the weights are on disk, SiloVault works fully offline.
- App Store updates. When Apple ships a SiloVault update, the App Store delivers it. This traffic is between your Mac and Apple's servers. SiloVault is not involved.
- Links you click. If you click an external link inside the app, your default browser handles the request. SiloVault is not involved.
Optional “check for new models” (off by default)
SiloVault can offer to tell you when a newer build of a local model is available. This check is off by default and never runs until you turn it on. Once enabled, SiloVault periodically downloads a small, cryptographically signed model-catalog file from ohmslaw.net — a site operated by Silo Systems and hosted on Vercel. The catalog is metadata about model builds. Nothing is uploaded: the check is a one-way download.
No document, vault name, search query, chat message, embedding, or account identifier is part of the request — there is no account to identify you with. The request exposes only what any HTTPS request to any website unavoidably exposes: your IP address and a user-agent string. SiloVault writes no log of the check. The hosting infrastructure may keep standard web access logs, as any web host does; we do not use them to profile you or link them to anything you do in the app.
Turning the setting off stops the checks. SiloVault verifies the catalog's signature before using it, so a missing, expired, or unverifiable catalog simply leaves SiloVault on the model list it already knows about.
Some models the catalog offers may be marked unvalidated (“experimental”). That label means exactly what it says: the model has not been tested on Silo Systems hardware, and the memory and disk requirements shown for it are estimated, not measured — calculated from the model's published size and format rather than from a real run on a real machine. SiloVault shows you the basis for that estimate before anything is downloaded. An unvalidated model is never chosen for you and never installed automatically: it is never a default at any memory tier, and installing one takes an explicit extra confirmation beyond the normal model-download consent. It may need more memory than estimated, or run poorly, on your Mac.
Optional Bring Your Own Key (off by default)
This is the one path by which your content can leave your Mac, and it stays closed until you open it. If you enable cloud inference in Settings and supply your own API key (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, or OpenRouter), the content you process with that feature — your notes and questions — is sent over the internet to the provider you selected, under your own account. What you send is then subject to that provider's privacy policy and data-retention practices, not ours.
Turning it on requires an explicit in-app confirmation, SiloVault shows a persistent cloud badge whenever a cloud provider is active, and you can return to on-device processing at any time. None of it is ever sent to Silo Systems. We never see your content or your key, and we run no server, proxy, or relay in this path — traffic goes directly from your Mac to the provider you configured. Your key is stored only in the macOS Keychain on this Mac, never in a file, a database, or a log. You can also point SiloVault at Ollama running on your own machine, in which case nothing leaves your network at all.
Permissions we request, and why
- Folders you choose. Read only the folders you explicitly select through the macOS file picker, remembered across launches with security-scoped bookmarks.
- Screen Recording. (optional) Used only by the optional workspace-recall feature for on-device screen OCR. Requested only when you enable recall.
- Microphone. (optional) Used only by optional workspace-recall audio capture for on-device transcription. Requested only when you enable it.
SiloVault 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.silovault.app/Data/Library/Application Support/SiloVault/ (plus any folder you explicitly choose to export to). They are yours. We do not have access to them. Deleting SiloVault removes the app; your work remains under its container until you delete it manually.
Version 1.8.0 portable export is in preparation. A .silovault archive is written only to the destination you choose, uses authenticated AES-256-GCM encryption, and is never uploaded by SiloVault. Import verifies integrity and previews conflicts before creating a separate local copy.
Third-party components
SiloVault uses these open-source components and public services. None of them receive your content from SiloVault; the hosted ones receive only the ordinary request metadata any HTTPS request carries, and only for a request you chose to make:
- mlx-lm — runs locally on-device.
- gemma-4-e2b-it-4bit — runs locally on-device.
- embeddinggemma-300m — runs locally on-device.
- Apple Vision OCR — runs locally on-device.
- Gemma 4 E2B, Gemma 4 E4B, Gemma 4 12B, Gemma 4 26B MoE, and Gemma 4 31B chat models (Hugging Face) — downloaded on demand, run locally.
- EmbeddingGemma 300M embedding model (Hugging Face) — downloaded on demand, run locally.
- FastAPI — the bundled local backend, bound to loopback only.
- Hugging Face Hub — contacted only when you choose to download model weights.
- ohmslaw.net (Silo Systems, hosted on Vercel) — contacted only if you turn on the optional model-catalog check, and only to download that signed metadata file.
Children's privacy
SiloVault is rated 4+. Because no personal data is collected from any user, no special treatment is required for users under 13. The same policy applies regardless of age.
Changes
If we ever materially change how SiloVault 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: your documents never leave your Mac, and nothing about you is collected.
Contact
Questions about this policy: admin@ohmslaw.net
For non-private inquiries you can also open an issue at github.com/flowmar47/silovault/issues.