Privacy & BYOK
4DA is local-first and direct-to-provider. There is no 4DA-operated server, no analytics, and no user account system. Your indexed content, scores, and intelligence live in a SQLite database on your machine.
Every outbound connection
That's the whole promise, so here's the whole list:
| Category | Where | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Source adapters | HN, GitHub, Reddit, arXiv, etc. | Fetching the public content you configured |
| LLM providers | Anthropic / OpenAI / localhost Ollama | Only if you set up BYOK keys |
| License validation | Keygen | Only if you activated a paid license |
| Updater | GitHub Releases | Signed with minisign, once per session |
| Crash reports | None | 4DA sends none. Export a scrubbed diagnostic bundle locally, on demand. |
There is no 4DA telemetry endpoint because there is no 4DA cloud.
Bring your own key
AI features are opt-in and run on compute you own:
- Local (fully private): Ollama or a downloaded model runs everything offline. Nothing leaves the machine.
- Cloud (your key): add an Anthropic or OpenAI key for AI-written briefings and deeper reranking.
4DA never pays for your compute, never stores your keys on a remote server, and never makes an API call you didn't configure. Keys are held in your OS keychain, local to the device.
Don't take our word for it
Because 4DA is source-available, the outbound behavior above is verifiable in code. The repository ships several trust documents — a network-transparency map of every connection with source references, a plain-language privacy summary, a security-audit guide to the trust-critical paths, and instructions to build from source and verify the binary yourself.
Read them in the repository. Local-first means you don't have to trust us — you can check.
Next: MCP server & agents.