Desktop and phone
Privacy and what leaves your device
A plain account of where your notes live, what can make a network request, and what triggers it.
On this page
The short version: no telemetry, no analytics, no account, and nothing uploaded in the background. Your notes are rows in a SQLite database in the app's own folder on your device.
Everything that can make a network request
This is the complete list. Every one of these is optional, off until you configure it, and goes only to an address you typed in yourself.
| What | When it happens | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| Chat, Insights, Polish | When you press the button | Your configured inference server |
| Model list refresh | When you press Test connection | Your configured inference server |
| Transcription | When you transcribe a recording, if you chose a server rather than on-device | Your configured speech server |
| Text to speech | When you press listen, if you chose an API rather than a local voice | Your configured speech API |
| Embeddings | When you build or refresh a retrieval index | Your configured embeddings server |
| Web search | During a chat, only with web search switched on | The door you chose: your own SearXNG instance, Brave Search with your key, or your model provider (OpenRouter) |
Not using AI means no requests at all
With nothing configured, SILONotes makes no outbound connections whatsoever. It is a complete notebook in that state.How the desktop app is locked down
- The page that renders your notes is fully sandboxed, with no Node access and a strict content-security policy. The page itself has no network access at all.
- Every request goes through an audited bridge in the main process that permits only
httpandhttps, and blocks cloud-metadata and link-local addresses. - Disk access is default-deny and scoped to the app's own folder. Files outside it enter only through a native open or save dialog that you drove.
- Archive extraction is guarded against path-traversal.
- External links open in your browser, never inside the app.
Where API keys are kept
On the phone, all API keys live in the Android Keystore. On the desktop they are encrypted with the operating system keyring: Keychain on macOS, DPAPI on Windows, libsecret on Linux.
The Linux case, stated plainly
If no keyring is available, which is common on Linux without GNOME Keyring or KWallet unlocked, the desktop app falls back to a plaintext file readable by your user account. It tells you so in a red banner on the Data & Backup screen. Your notes are unaffected. Install or unlock a keyring and restart to re-enable encrypted storage.API keys are always stripped from .silo archives, so sharing a backup cannot leak one.
Yes. Every answer carries a usage line with exact token counts, and the context inspector shows the material that made up the prompt.