What we store
An ordinary chat here is saved to your account, and we can read it. That is the plain version, and everything below is the detail behind it — including the things this setup does not protect you from, which is the part worth reading.
Checked against the running code on 3 November 2026.
A normal chat
Saved against your email address:
| What | Detail |
|---|---|
| Your messages | Every message, both sides. Editing a question or asking for another answer keeps the earlier version too — that is how you can go back to it. |
| Titles | Taken from your first message, so the sidebar has something to show. |
| A search index | The words of your messages, so search works. It points back at the messages rather than holding a second copy. |
| Files you attach | The file itself, and the text read out of a document once at upload so it does not have to be re-read every turn. |
| Your instructions | What you tell us about yourself and how you want answers written. |
| Shared chats | A copy of the conversation as it read when you shared it. Not a live view — what you type next week is not in it. |
| Your email address | The account. There is no password to store: signing in is a one-time code, and the code itself is only ever kept hashed, single-use, for ten minutes. |
| Your session | A random token in a cookie. We store only its hash, so signing out destroys the record rather than just the cookie. |
Not your IP address. The web server in front of this app keeps no record of who visited what: there is no access log, and the error log it does keep — what failed, on which URL — has the address and the request headers stripped out of it before it is written. So an error from your browser is recorded without anything that says it was yours.
If you import a ChatGPT or Claude export, the archive sits on our disk while it is being read and is deleted when the import finishes. We keep a note of which source chat became which conversation, so re-uploading the same export does not duplicate everything.
It is encrypted on the disk
The database and the files you upload are encrypted where they sit. That closes the likeliest way data actually leaks: a backup that goes astray, a copied volume snapshot, a disk that leaves the building.
What it does not do is protect you from us. The key is on the same machine as the data, because the server has to read your chat to show it to you. Anyone with that machine has both. We would rather write that sentence than let “encrypted” do work it has not earned.
One gap, named rather than buried: an import archive is not encrypted while it is being read, because the software that unpacks it needs to jump around inside the file. It is the largest plaintext thing on the disk and the shortest-lived.
Who sees a message while it is being answered
Your message goes from this app to our gateway, and the gateway hands it to whoever is going to answer it. That is either a network member — someone running a Gnodi node on their own GPU — or a commercial provider, when no node is free or the model you picked only exists there.
Every answer in the app is labelled with which one it was. That label is not decoration: it is the difference between your words passing through an individual’s computer and passing through a company’s.
In both cases what is sent is the conversation and the model name, and not who you are. A node is handed the messages, the model, a token limit and a deadline; there is no email address, no account id and no IP address in it. A commercial provider sees the text under our account, not yours.
Our gateway records that a request happened — which node served it, how many it has served, what it cost — and none of what was said. There is nowhere in it for a message to be stored.
The honest edge of this: a network member’s machine is processing your words in order to answer them. The node software does not write them down or log them, but it is their hardware, and we are not going to pretend that is the same as nobody having seen it.
Temporary chat
A temporary chat is the one place none of the above applies. There is no conversation record, no message rows, no title, no search index entry — not written and then deleted, but never written. The copy in your browser tab is the only copy there is, which is why closing the tab ends it and why you can save it to your computer first.
It is answered only by a network member, never by a commercial provider. If none is free, it tells you so and refuses, rather than quietly sending a private chat to a company. That is also why the model list is shorter there.
It is not end-to-end encrypted, and we are careful about that word. Our server reads your message in order to pass it on. What we promise is that nothing is kept, not that nothing is seen.
Running it on your own machine
The Gnodi node app for Windows includes a chat that talks to the model on your own GPU. In that one, nothing leaves your computer at all — there is no account, no gateway and no network hop, so there is nothing for this page to be about.
What we do not do with your chats
We do not train models on them, sell them, or show you advertising. There is no analytics product reading them and no third party we hand them to other than the provider that answers a fallback request, which is told the conversation and nothing about you.
Deleting
Deleting a conversation deletes its messages, its search index entries, its attachments — the files on disk as well as the records of them — and any share link, which stops working. “I deleted it” has to be true to be worth saying.
There is no self-serve button for deleting your whole account yet. Ask us and we will do it.
Where this is weak
Everything here is true today and some of it is not good enough yet.
- We can read your saved chats. Encryption at rest does not change that. Chats encrypted in your browser, so that we could not, is a design we have costed and not yet built.
- A stolen session cookie works until it expires or you sign out. Sessions are not tied to a device or an address.
- A share link is not a password. Anyone who has it can read that snapshot until you turn it off.
- A network member’s machine handles your words to answer them, including in a temporary chat. That is the trade temporary chat makes: an individual’s GPU instead of a company’s datacentre, and nothing written down at either end.