No Ads, No Tracking, No Data Selling. Here's What That Actually Means.
"We take your privacy seriously" is the most meaningless sentence on the internet. Every app says it. Most of them are funded by advertising, behavioral analytics, or selling aggregate user data to third parties. We wanted to explain, concretely, what Clairvoyant does differently.
The Standard Playbook
Most free productivity apps follow a predictable model. The app is free because you're the product. Your usage patterns, task completion rates, active hours, feature engagement, and workflow habits are collected, aggregated, and monetized — either through targeted advertising, sold insights, or "product improvement" pipelines that feed machine learning models trained on your behavior.
Even paid apps aren't immune. Many collect telemetry by default, share data with analytics providers, and bury opt-out toggles deep in settings menus that most users never find.
Here's what a typical productivity app sends to third-party services every time you open it:
- Analytics events: App opened, task created, task completed, feature clicked
- Session data: Duration, frequency, time of day, device type
- Behavioral signals: Which features you use, how long you spend on each view
- Crash data: Full stack traces that may include task content in memory
- Attribution data: Where you came from, what marketing campaign brought you in
This data flows to Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Segment, or similar services. Each of those companies has their own data retention and usage policies. Your "private" task data may pass through half a dozen third-party systems before you finish your morning coffee.
What Clairvoyant Collects
Here is the complete list:
Nothing, by default.
Crash reports and usage analytics are both disabled by default. You have to explicitly opt in to send us anything. This isn't a toggle buried in a sub-menu — it's a clear choice presented in your privacy settings.
If you choose to opt in:
| Data Type | Opt-In Required | What's Sent | What's NOT Sent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crash reports | Yes | Stack traces with PII stripped | Task content, titles, or descriptions |
| Usage analytics | Yes | Anonymous feature usage counts | User identity, behavioral profiles |
That's it. No advertising SDKs. No third-party analytics platforms. No behavioral tracking. No session recordings. No heatmaps. No A/B testing frameworks that track individual users.
How We Built This
Privacy isn't a feature we added. It's an architectural decision that shaped how we built the entire application.
Local-first architecture: Your data lives on your device. The app works fully offline. When you search, filter, or sort your tasks, those operations run locally against local data. By default, we never process your content on our servers — we can't even read it. If you choose to opt in to Server-Assisted AI, our server processes your content in memory for AI features — but it's never stored in plaintext, never logged, and never sent to third-party AI providers like OpenAI. Learn how Server-Assisted AI works →
Event-driven, not server-driven: Clairvoyant uses a local event system for communication between components. Task creation, updates, and deletions happen locally and propagate through local event buses. The sync layer transmits encrypted payloads — not raw task data.
No third-party analytics SDKs: We built a minimal telemetry service that writes to our own infrastructure. When analytics are enabled, anonymous counters increment. No user profiles. No session tracking. No behavioral funnels.
Vendor independence: Our architecture is designed so every third-party service can be replaced with a self-hosted alternative. We run our own AI models on our own servers — no dependency on OpenAI, Google, or any external AI provider. Supabase can be swapped for self-hosted Postgres. Sentry can be replaced with GlitchTip. This isn't theoretical — the migration paths are documented and tested.
Why "Free" Apps Track You
Understanding the economics helps explain why we're different.
A free productivity app with 1 million users and ad-supported revenue needs to know everything about those users to sell targeted advertising. Even without ads, venture-backed apps need growth metrics, engagement data, and retention analytics to justify their valuations to investors.
Clairvoyant uses a straightforward subscription model. You pay for the product. We build the product. There's no third party in that transaction. No advertiser needs your engagement data. No investor needs your growth metrics. No data broker needs your behavioral profile.
This is not a novel business model. It's the original business model — you pay for things you use. The surveillance economy made us forget that was an option.
The Self-Hosting Path
For users who want maximum control, Clairvoyant is open source and designed for self-hosting. Every component — the database, the sync server, the error tracking — can run on infrastructure you control.
This means:
- Your data never leaves your network if you don't want it to
- No dependency on our infrastructure — if Clairvoyant the company disappeared tomorrow, your self-hosted instance keeps working
- Full auditability — read every line of code that handles your data
We document migration paths from our hosted services to self-hosted alternatives, because we believe the ability to leave is as important as the decision to stay.
What Privacy Settings Look Like
When you open Settings > Privacy in Clairvoyant, you'll find:
- Local encryption toggle — AES-256 encryption for all local data
- Offline-first mode — Prioritize local operation, sync when you choose
- Data retention controls — Auto-delete completed tasks after 30-365 days
- Sync preferences — Wi-Fi only sync to prevent cellular data usage
- Crash reports — Disabled by default. Opt in if you want to help us fix bugs
- Usage analytics — Disabled by default. Opt in if you want to help us prioritize features
Every toggle defaults to the most private option. We'd rather have less data about how you use the app than compromise your privacy for our convenience.
A Simple Test
Next time an app tells you they "take privacy seriously," ask these questions:
- What analytics SDKs are in the app? Check the network tab in your browser's dev tools. Count the third-party domains.
- What's the default state of telemetry? If it's on by default, your data has already been sent before you could opt out.
- Can the company read your data? If customer support can see your content, it's not encrypted in any meaningful way.
- What happens if you delete your account? Is your data actually deleted, or just deactivated?
- Can you self-host? If not, you're permanently dependent on their infrastructure and their policies.
We built Clairvoyant to pass every one of these tests. Not because privacy is trendy, but because your task list — with its doctor appointments, financial deadlines, career plans, and personal goals — deserves the same protection as your private messages.