Privacy Statement

1Who is responsible

Responsible for this website, in the sense of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), is Jolocorp, the maker of Hestia (“we”, “us”).

2When you open this website

This website is delivered by Cloudflare, Inc., 101 Townsend Street, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA, through its network of servers, usually from one near you. To deliver a page, a web server has to be told a few things by your browser, and so Cloudflare’s server receives them:

your IP address;
which page or file was asked for, and when;
what your browser says about itself (its name and version, your operating system, your language) and, if your browser sends it, the page you came from;
technical details of the connection.

Cloudflare handles these on our behalf, under its data processing agreement, in order to deliver the site and to keep attacks and overload away from it. The legal ground is our legitimate interest in a site that can be reached safely (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR): without this there would be no page to read.

We keep no log files of our own. The site is made of ready-made pages. It has no database, and the small program that answers for it at Cloudflare has its logging switched off. Cloudflare keeps technical records of requests for a limited time, for its own operation and security, and shows us figures added up over all visitors, such as how many requests came from which country. When its protection stops or checks a request, it records that event together with the IP address, and we can look at such events for a short time.

Cloudflare is a company in the United States and may handle these data there and in other countries. It is certified under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, and its data processing agreement includes the EU’s standard contractual clauses.

3Cookies and your browser’s storage

This site sets no cookies and keeps nothing in your browser’s storage. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to.

One exception lies outside the site itself. If Cloudflare’s protection takes requests from your connection for an attack or for automated abuse, it can put a check in front of the page. Passing that check stores a cookie named cf_clearance, which says only that the check was passed. It is strictly necessary for that protection (§ 25(2) no. 2 of the German TDDDG) and is not used to follow you. A visitor in ordinary circumstances never meets it.

4What this website does not do

No analytics, no statistics scripts, no tracking pixels.
No advertising, and no profiles of visitors.
Nothing is loaded from other companies’ servers: no fonts, scripts, pictures, videos or maps. Everything, the one typeface included, comes from openhestia.com.
No social media buttons, no embedded posts or videos.
No forms, no newsletter, no accounts, no comments.

This is enforced, not only promised: the site’s security rules (its Content Security Policy) forbid your browser to load anything from another server or to send anything to one. Links to other sites are plain links. Nothing reaches those sites unless you follow a link, and then your browser is told not to say where you came from.

5If you write to us

If you write to us, we use your address and what you wrote in order to answer you, and for nothing else. Where your message is about a purchase or a contract, the legal ground is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR; otherwise it is our legitimate interest in answering those who write to us (Art. 6(1)(f)). We delete the exchange once the matter is settled, unless the law obliges us to keep it longer.

6The Hestia app: what stays on your Mac

Hestia runs on your Mac, and so does its AI: the chat model, the speech recognition and the voice. What you say, write, dictate, record or store in Hestia is worked on by your own Mac and stays there, in Hestia’s folder (~/Library/Application Support/Hestia).

We receive none of it. Hestia has no account with us. It sends us no usage figures, no crash reports and no other telemetry, and it does not look for updates by itself. Because nothing reaches us, we are not the ones who decide about that data. You are, on your own computer.

What Hestia keeps on your Mac:

your conversations, your notes and notebooks;
the documents you add and the text read out of them, and the transcripts of your recordings;
what you let it remember about you, which you can read, change and delete in the app under “About you”;
your settings, and the keys and sign-ins of the providers you linked;
the models and voices you downloaded.

Deleting Hestia’s folder deletes all of it.

When you dictate or talk with Hestia, your Mac turns the sound from the microphone into text by itself, unless you chose a cloud service for that in the settings. If you switch on “Spell names the way they are written on my screen”, Hestia reads the words on your screen, on your Mac, for the length of one dictation; they are not stored and not sent anywhere.

7What the app fetches by itself

Hestia needs a few large files that do not come inside the app. It fetches them from where their makers publish them:

at the first start: the program that runs the models (llama.cpp, from GitHub) and the first chat model (from Hugging Face);
the first time you give it a picture: the file the chat model needs for seeing (from Hugging Face);
the first time you give it a recording, or a link to one: two helper programs, ffmpeg (from ffmpeg.martin-riedl.de) and yt-dlp (from GitHub);
further models and voices only when you choose them (from Hugging Face and GitHub).

As with any download, the server learns your IP address and which file was asked for. Nothing about you, and nothing of yours, is sent along.

Two more things reach out to the internet, and only when you use them:

Today’s news is off until you switch it on. Then, when you ask for the news, Hestia reads the public headline feeds of news outlets and the pictures that belong to the headlines, from those outlets’ servers.
A link to a recording that you hand to Hestia is fetched from the site it points to.

8Providers you link

Beyond the downloads above, data leaves your Mac for another company only if you link that company’s service yourself. What you send there is then handled by that provider, on its own responsibility and under its own privacy rules:

Groq (cloud models and cloud transcription, with your own key): your messages go to Groq, and with cloud transcription your recordings do too.
OpenRouter (cloud models, with your own key): your messages go to OpenRouter and on to the maker of the model you chose. Hestia tells OpenRouter which app is calling: the name “Hestia” and this site’s address. If you add models by their name, it also reads OpenRouter’s public list of models.
Microsoft (your OneNote notebooks, with your Microsoft account): see the details below.
Google (Gmail, with your Gmail address and an app password you create at Google): the emails you have Hestia send go out through Google’s mail server. Hestia cannot read your mailbox.

The keys, passwords and sign-ins for these services stay on your Mac. None of this passes through us.

Microsoft and OneNote, in detail

You sign in on Microsoft’s own page, in your browser. Hestia never sees your password.
Hestia asks Microsoft for three permissions: to read and write your OneNote notebooks (Notes.ReadWrite), to read your basic profile (User.Read) and to stay signed in (offline_access).
From your profile it reads your name and your email address, to show you which account is connected.
It lists your notebooks so that you can pick, reads the ones you picked and keeps a copy of their pages on your Mac. While Hestia is open, it asks OneNote every five minutes what has changed.
What you change in Hestia goes to OneNote only when you press Send, or by itself a minute after you stop typing if you switched that on.
The sign-in that Microsoft hands to Hestia is kept on your Mac, encrypted with a key from the macOS Keychain.
All of this passes directly between your Mac and Microsoft. None of it comes to us.
To end it, sign out in Hestia’s settings: the sign-in is deleted from your Mac, and nothing more goes to or comes from OneNote. The notes already copied stay on your Mac until you delete them. You can also take back Hestia’s access in your Microsoft account, among the apps you have given access to.

9Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right:

to learn whether we handle data about you, and to receive a copy of it (Art. 15);
to have wrong data corrected (Art. 16) and to have data deleted (Art. 17);
to have the handling of your data restricted (Art. 18);
to receive data you gave us in a form you can take elsewhere (Art. 20);
to object to handling that rests on our legitimate interests (Art. 21);
to complain to a data protection authority, for instance the one where you live (Art. 77).

How this works out here: we keep nothing that tells us who visited this site, and we receive nothing from the app. In most cases there is therefore nothing about you that we could look up, correct or delete. If you have written to us, your message is what we hold.

We make no automated decisions about you and build no profiles. Nothing obliges you to give us any data in order to read this site.

To use these rights, write to the address in the Impressum.

10Changes to this statement

If the site or the app begins to do something this page does not describe, this page changes first. The date at the top says when the statement was last changed.