Privacy, in plain words

The Hearth app

What stays on your PC. Your chats, Memory shelf, settings, files you give Hearth, routines and their logs live in Hearth’s data folder inside your Windows user profile. Hearth does not upload them. Keys and bot tokens are kept in Hearth’s vault. We cannot read any of it, because it never reaches us.

What we collect from the app: nothing. There is no analytics, crash reporting, advertising ID or usage tracking in Hearth.

When Hearth does connect to the internet

When	Where it connects	What is sent
Always, when you chat	On stable 0.4.16: your Ollama host (by default your own PC, localhost). On the 0.4.21 beta: the engine you chose (the built-in engine on this PC, Ollama, or another server you added in Connections)	Your messages go to the engine you are using. If you point Hearth at another machine, they go there. A cloud server in the beta only receives a chat after you accept a privacy notice.
A few seconds after launch and about every 4 hours	controlpanel.live (our release server)	A request for the latest version for your channel and platform. It carries no chat content and no account. Our server sees your IP address like any web request. Installing a downloaded update follows the auto-install setting in Settings (on by default).
When you open the Store or install an add-on	hearth.controlpanel.live	A catalog request, and the add-on file you choose.
When you ask for web search	DuckDuckGo by default, or Brave Search with your own key, or a SearXNG address you set	Your search query.
When you ask Hearth to read a page	The page itself, fetched from your PC	A normal page request. The optional Jina Reader fallback is off by default; if you turn it on, Hearth sends a page address to r.jina.ai only when a page comes back nearly empty.
Wikipedia, weather and places	Wikipedia, Open-Meteo, and OpenStreetMap-based place search	The topic, place name or coordinates you asked about.
If you pair Telegram	Telegram	Messages you send from Telegram pass through Telegram’s servers. Replies come back the same way.
If you sign in to a connected app	That app (Google, Microsoft, Slack and others)	Whatever that connection needs, after you sign in and approve it.
When you click a download	GitHub, Hugging Face, and Ollama	One-time downloads of voice typing files and optional engines, and of models you pull (including first-run models for the built-in engine). They are checked with a SHA-256 where Hearth ships one.

Network Off (Settings) blocks all of the above except the model engine on this PC or your network. Internet model servers are refused completely. Online tools say so in the chat: each answer carries a receipt reading Stayed on this PC or Used the internet.

Locked and Incognito chats. Incognito keeps nothing. Locked chats are hidden behind your PIN and left out of search. The lock hides things; it does not encrypt your files on disk.

Third parties named above have their own privacy policies. We do not control them.

This website (hearthai.pro)

We count visits with a small tool we run ourselves on our own web hosting. There are no third-party scripts, no ad networks, and no Google Fonts or other outside resources on these pages.

• What it records: the page you viewed, the website that sent you (the site name only, never the full address), a coarse device type (desktop, mobile or tablet), your operating system and browser family, which download you clicked and which version, and which product link you clicked on the Recommended machines page (the product only, never where you go next).
• How visitors are counted: from a one-way hash of your IP address and browser, salted with a secret that changes every day. The IP address itself is never stored. Because the salt changes daily, we cannot recognise you from one day to the next, so someone who comes back tomorrow counts again.
• Cookies: none for visitors. The only cookies set by this site belong to the private admin sign-in used by the site’s owner. Sites you click through to, such as Amazon, set their own.
• Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control: if your browser sends either one, nothing is recorded at all.
• Where it lives and for how long: in a database in our Hostinger hosting account, kept up to 13 months. Our host also keeps ordinary server logs, which include IP addresses, under its own policy.
• Download links go through hearthai.pro/go/ so a click can be counted, then send you on to the file on controlpanel.live.
• Forms: there are two, both optional: the “notify me” box for Hearth for Android and the contact form, each described below. There are no accounts on this site.

Affiliate links (Recommended machines)

• What we count: a click on a product link is counted on our own server like any other visit: which product, on which page, from the same daily one-way hash, with no IP address stored, and nothing at all if your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control.
• What Amazon does: once you arrive on amazon.com, Amazon’s own cookies and privacy notice apply (see Amazon’s privacy notice). Amazon tells us when a purchase came from a link, but not who you are.
• This page and the other sites are not under our control and have their own policies.

The Android “notify me” list

If you type your email address into the box on the home page and tick the consent box, we store the address, the time, and the exact consent wording you saw, in the same database in our Hostinger hosting account. We use it for one thing: a single email when Hearth for Android is ready to try. We do not add you to a newsletter, sell or share the address, or use it for anything else. Hearth for Android is not built yet and we give no date.

Signing up is optional and Hearth works the same without it. To be removed, send us a message through the contact form with the Privacy / data request topic, and we will delete the address. To limit abuse we briefly keep a one-way, daily-changing hash of your connection (never your IP address) to count recent tries, and delete it within a day.

Contact messages

If you use the contact form, we store what you type: your message, the topic you chose, the time, and your name and reply email only if you chose to give them. It lands in a private inbox in the same database in our Hostinger hosting account, where only the site owner can read it. We do not store your IP address with it.

• What we use it for: answering you, and nothing else. We do not add your email to any list, sell or share it, or use it for marketing. Without a reply email we cannot answer you.
• Deleting it: messages are kept only as long as we need them to answer you, and you can ask us to delete yours at any time. Send a message with the Privacy / data request topic and tell us which one to remove (if you left a reply email, we will confirm there).
• Spam protection: the form uses a hidden field and a short timer, plus a brief count of recent tries from a one-way, daily-changing hash of your connection (never your IP address), which we delete within a day. No cookies are set.

Changes and contact

When this policy changes, the date at the top changes. For privacy questions or to ask us to delete data, use the contact form and choose the Privacy / data request topic.