Privacy Policy

The short version

Tempest the app is local-first. Your code, agent conversations, prompts, and repository data never leave your machine. We do not have servers that see your codebase.

The app can send anonymous usage telemetry to help us prioritise what to build — but only if you turn it on. It is off by default. No code, prompts, file names, or personal information are ever included.

The website (tempestai.dev) collects anonymous analytics via Vercel Analytics (always on) and Google Analytics (only if you accept the cookie banner). No personal information is sold.

What the app collects (opt-in telemetry)

The desktop app ships with usage telemetry disabled by default. Nothing is loaded, initialised, or sent until you explicitly enable it in Settings. If you turn it off later, capture stops immediately and the local analytics state is reset.

When enabled, telemetry is sent to PostHog (posthog.com) — a product analytics service — under an anonymous, randomly generated ID stored locally on your machine. We never call PostHog's identify(), so the ID is never linked to an email, name, or account. Autocapture, page views, and session recording are all explicitly disabled.

What is sent when telemetry is on:

• An anonymous UUID minted on first opt-in and stored in your local Tempest database.
• App version (e.g. 0.1.2).
• Coarse OS bucket: windows, macos, linux, or other.
• Whether Atlas (semantic code search) is enabled — boolean only.
• Product events with no free-text content, such as: app opened, onboarding finished, feature used (which feature — e.g. canvas, chat, pr, atlas, command_palette), session created, agent turn completed (which agent), project added (whether it is a git repo), update failed / feature failed (a fixed error category, never the error message), and crash detection (error kind, never the stack trace or message).
• Your IP address is used by PostHog server-side to derive approximate country and is not stored on the event. No precise location is collected.

What is never sent: your code, prompts, agent output, chat contents, file paths, file names, repository names, branch names, commit messages, API keys, environment variables, error messages, stack traces, screen contents, keystrokes, or any personally identifiable information.

Other outbound requests from the app

Independent of telemetry, the app makes network requests to:

• GitHub, to fetch release information for update checks.
• AI provider APIs you configure (e.g. Anthropic for Claude Code, OpenAI, etc.), using credentials you supply. These requests go directly from your machine to the provider — Tempest does not proxy them.
• If you enable Atlas semantic search, a one-time download of the embedding model (~25 MB) from its public host.

What the website collects

Vercel Analytics. Anonymised page view data — page visited, referrer, country, device type, browser. No IP addresses are stored. No cookies are set. Data is aggregated and not linked to individuals.

Google Analytics (GA4). Loaded only if you click “Accept” on the cookie banner. GA4 sets cookies and collects standard analytics data including a client identifier, page interactions, approximate location, and device information. If you click “Decline” (or ignore the banner), GA4 is not loaded and no GA cookies are set.

Cookie consent preference. Your accept/decline choice is stored in localStorage on your device under the key cookie-consent. To change it, clear that key from your browser storage.

Third-party services

The website is hosted on Vercel. Vercel may log standard server access data (IP addresses, request headers) as part of normal hosting infrastructure. See Vercel's privacy policy. App telemetry, when enabled, is processed by PostHog. Website analytics, when you accept the cookie banner, is processed by Google.

Your choices and rights

Turn app telemetry off at any time from Settings inside Tempest. Doing so halts capture immediately and resets the local analytics state. Because the ID is anonymous and never linked to your identity, there is nothing tied to “you” for us to look up or export.

Website analytics: click “Decline” on the cookie banner (or clear the cookie-consent key) to keep GA4 off. Vercel Analytics is cookieless and aggregate-only.

Questions or requests can be raised as an issue on our GitHub repository.

Changes

We may update this policy as the product evolves. The effective date at the top indicates the most recent revision. Continued use after changes constitutes acceptance of the updated policy. See also our Terms of Service.