Tisty privacy policy

Last updated: October 13, 2026

The short version

Tisty does not collect anything and has no server to transmit to. No account, no telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting.

It makes one network request on its own — when it opens, and once a day after that: it downloads a small file to see whether a newer version exists. It sends nothing. Two more follow only if you press the button that offers you an update, and one more only if you ask a link in a document for its preview. Never otherwise. A copy installed from the Microsoft Store makes none of those: it asks Windows what the Store has, and the Store does the rest. All of them are described in full below.

Since version 1.30, Tisty can also sync through your own Google Drive, talking to it directly. It runs only if you choose it and connect your account in the Tisty window, it reaches nothing but Google, and what it sends and receives is described in full below.

That is not a policy promise you have to take on trust — it is a property of the code, which is public and auditable. Run a network monitor against it if you like.

The part that is not “everything stays local”

Most privacy policies for local applications stop at “your data never leaves your machine”. Tisty’s cannot, because Tisty is designed to synchronise, and being vague about that would be dishonest.

Here is the accurate statement:

Tisty never sends your data anywhere on its own initiative. If you turn on synchronisation, your data goes exactly where you told it to go, and whoever runs that destination can technically read it.

What you can choose, and what each implies:

You choose	Who else can reach your data
Local only (the default)	Nobody. It never leaves the machine
A folder your cloud client keeps in step (Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud, Dropbox, pCloud…)	That provider, under their terms and their jurisdiction
Your own Google Drive, reached by Tisty directly (since 1.30)	Google, under its terms and its jurisdiction. Nobody else: there is no server of ours in between
A folder on hardware you own (a NAS, an external drive)	Whoever can reach that hardware
A backup zip you keep somewhere	Wherever you put it
A `.tistyx` parcel of documents you hand to somebody	Them, and whoever they hand it to. You decide what goes in it and when. It carries the documents, where they sat, what the archive held and what an assistant marked — never your device identifier
A `.tistyx` parcel locked with a number, for another machine of yours	Whoever has both the file and the number. Without it nothing here opens it — though six digits are six digits, and the lock only makes each guess expensive

With a folder, Tisty only ever reads and writes local paths. It has no network code for it, no credentials, and no idea which provider — if any — is behind the folder you named. Whatever keeps that folder in step between your machines is software you already installed and already trust. Reaching your cloud account directly is the one way that changes this, and it is described in its own section below.

There is no option where Tisty hosts anything. There is no paid tier that changes this. We never operate a server that holds your data, so there is nothing on our side to breach, subpoena, sell, or lose.

Choosing a destination is choosing who you trust. Tisty makes that choice visible instead of making it for you.

What is stored, and how

Tasks, projects and events — plain-text JSONL files. Readable with cat, searchable with grep, parseable with jq.
Documents — plain Markdown files. The log keeps a note of each one: its title, its size, and the tags it carries, all three read out of the body you wrote. A tag is a word you typed with a hash against it, so nothing is recorded that you did not write in the document itself, and taking the file elsewhere takes its tags with it.
Attachments — the files themselves, unmodified.
Local configuration — including the device identifier. The file never leaves this machine on its own: it lives outside the roaming %APPDATA%, and should a roaming profile or a copied home carry it to another computer, Tisty sees it is somewhere else and stops speaking as this machine. The identifier itself does appear in the shared folder — it names your device’s directory and stamps every event — because that is what tells two writers apart. What must never be shared is the file that binds it to this machine. Beside it, in private/, sits the key this machine signs what it writes with: its public half is written into the log so your other machines can check the signatures, and the private half is never synced, backed up or put in a parcel. Which of your other machines’ keys you have confirmed is kept on this machine alone. It also holds the day this copy first opened, whether it has already asked you to star the project, and whether it has already offered your assistant a door, so that each of those is asked once and never again. Which assistants are on this machine is read when the offer is decided and is not written down. The day this copy opened is, with the time zone below, the only field here that says anything about you rather than about your work, and none of them leaves this machine: the file is not synced, not backed up, and not put in a parcel.
An alias, if you write one — it exists so that a document you share still says who wrote it. It is optional, it lives in the log like everything else, and so it reaches your other machines through the folder you sync and travels inside any parcel you hand out. It goes out with the sync before you share anything, which is why it should be a name you are content for others to read. A log only ever grows: an alias you write today can be changed tomorrow, but the old one stays written. Your real name and your address are not asked for anywhere, and the two fields reserved for them in the log are written by nothing in this version.
The time zone you were in — every event carries the IANA zone of whoever wrote it, so an hour reads back where it happened instead of drifting when you travel. It goes to the shared folder with the rest, and a long enough history shows where you have been. It is named here because it is the one field that says something about you rather than about your work; everything else in that folder is already your own words.
A private/ folder — anything placed here never leaves the machine under any transport.
The guide — the one thing Tisty writes for you rather than the other way round. Its words and its images ship inside the program and are copied into your documents in the language you picked. Nothing is fetched to do it, and once it is there it is an ordinary document: edit it, or delete it.

Nothing is encrypted at rest. Your operating system’s file permissions are the only protection. This was a deliberate decision, not an oversight: encryption breaks the three-way merge of documents, which is precisely where synchronisation needs it most — two machines editing the same document are reconciled block by block, and that cannot be done on bytes nobody can read. The reasoning is in SECURITY.md.

Nothing is obfuscated. If Tisty disappeared tomorrow, your data would still be readable with tools you already have. That is the point.

One consequence worth knowing before it bites you

An append-only log does not forget. If a credential ends up in a task, deleting the task removes it from the current state but not from the history underneath — and if it already travelled to the shared folder, it is on every machine that pulled it, plus whatever the provider keeps in its own version history.

The private/ folder exists for exactly this. Prevention is the only real defence, because the remedy barely exists.

What Tisty does not do

Does not send data to any server.
Does not create accounts or profiles.
Does not use cookies, analytics, advertising, or tracking of any kind.
Does not share anything with third parties.
Does not use AI or machine learning on your data. The natural-language parser is deterministic rules running locally, and Tisty itself sends nothing to any model. If you connect an assistant of your own, read “the door you can open” below: what it carries is its doing and your choice, never Tisty’s.
Does not upload crash reports.
Does not make background network calls, except the update check below and, only if you connect Google Drive, the requests that sync with it.

An earlier version of this file promised that if Tisty ever needed a network request it would be read-only, documented here before it shipped, and visible as a code change first. That is what happened: the check went into the public repository, and this section was written before the release that carries it.

The request Tisty makes on its own


Why	To tell you a newer Tisty exists
What it asks for	`https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rgdevment/Tisty/manifest/release-manifest.json`
Method	GET. Nothing is uploaded
What it sends	The headers a request cannot avoid, and a user agent that says `tisty/<version>` — the same thing the download itself would reveal. No identifier, no store, no task, no name
How often	When Tisty opens, and at most once a day for as long as it keeps running
Timeout	5 seconds
If it fails	Nothing is said and nothing is retried: the next look is the next day, or the next time Tisty opens

The file it downloads contains version numbers and nothing else — no address, so nothing that arrives from it can send you anywhere. It sits in a branch of its own that holds those files and nothing else, which is why the address above stays the same however many versions come out.

If you turn on release candidates in About, this same request is what carries them: nothing else changes, and nothing more is sent.

If Tisty came from the Microsoft Store

That copy asks GitHub nothing. It asks Windows what the Store has for it, through the system’s own Store interface, and Windows is what talks to Microsoft — with the identity that machine already uses for every other app it installed from there. Tisty adds nothing of its own: no identifier, no store, no task, no name. It is the question Windows asks on its own schedule anyway; the button only asks it now.


Why	To tell you a newer Tisty exists, and to install it if you say so
What it asks	Windows, through `StoreContext`. No server of ours is involved
What it sends	Nothing of Tisty’s. What travels is what the Store already sends for any app installed from it
How often	When Tisty opens, every six hours for as long as it keeps running, and whenever you ask About to look
Timeout	10 seconds to ask
If it fails	Nothing is said, and About falls back to sending you to the Store yourself

Pressing Update there downloads nothing through Tisty: the Store fetches and installs the package, and Windows closes Tisty to put it in place.

The requests only you can start

On every copy but the Store’s, pressing Update in About makes Tisty fetch a second file, which does name an address, and then the installer at that address. They go to raw.githubusercontent.com and to github.com, which hands the download on to objects.githubusercontent.com, all over HTTPS, and both carry what any download carries: an address to send the bytes back to, and a user agent — here tauri-plugin-updater/<version>, the library doing the fetching. On a Mac the installer asked for is the one built for its chip, so the name of that download says whether the machine is Apple Silicon or Intel — as a download made by hand from the releases page would. Nothing about you, nothing about what you have written.

This is the one place where an address that arrived over the network is opened, which is why it is fenced twice. The address has to be where this project’s releases live, or nothing is downloaded at all. And what does arrive is checked against a key compiled into the copy you already have, before a single byte is run or written to disk.

On macOS, if the application sits somewhere your account cannot write, the system asks for an administrator password to put the new copy in place. You can refuse; nothing is moved.

A link you write or paste into a document is a different matter: clicking it opens your browser, the way any Markdown reader does. Tisty does not follow it on its own, and never opens anything without a click. Worth knowing if a document reached you from a shared folder someone else can write to — the words of a link and where it goes are not obliged to agree, in Tisty or anywhere else. If LinkUnbound is installed, a web link is handed to it instead, so it can ask which browser to use; nothing else changes, and nothing leaves through Tisty.

A widget in a document, or an attached .html page, is drawn by its own code in a frame that is allowed no network at all: it cannot fetch anything, load a picture from an address or send what it shows anywhere. A link inside it opens your browser only when you click it, like any other.

Tisty’s own screens carry a few links of their own: the repository, the pages for sponsorship and for a coffee, the AlternativeTo listing, the pages of the author’s two other tools, CopyPaste and LinkUnbound, and — on a copy the Microsoft Store keeps — the Store’s own rating window. Where each one leads is fixed in the program, not fetched from anywhere, and they behave like any link above: nothing is requested, nothing is sent, and your browser opens only when you click. The card that asks for a star is the same: it reads no count and checks nothing over the network, it only opens the page if you press it.

A link left alone in its own paragraph is drawn as a card, and that card is made of the address itself: the site’s name and the words you wrote. Nothing is fetched to draw it. If you press Bring the preview, Tisty asks that page once for its title, its description and the picture it offers — and that request is like any other visit: the site learns an address to answer to and the time of day. Tisty reads its answer up to 256 KiB and the picture it offers up to 400 KiB, and stops there — read to the limit off the wire, so a page cannot decide how much of your machine it takes. What comes back is kept here, so the card never asks again, not tomorrow and not on your other computer, which would have to be told to bring it too. The picture is stored inside that record rather than in your documents, so nothing of the world ends up in the folder your machines share, and the whole store of them is capped by weight, so old cards go rather than pile up.

Nothing is downloaded or installed unless you ask for it. What the daily check brings back is a line of text you can ignore. If a newer version exists, a line appears in About, and what it offers depends on how this copy was installed: the Microsoft Store updates itself and Tisty leaves it alone, a copy of the command line kept by Homebrew gets the command to run, and a copy that owns the folder it lives in gets a button.

That button is the only thing that fetches an installer, and what it does is described above. If you never press it, nothing is downloaded and the line just sits there.

Syncing with your own Google Drive

Since version 1.30, Tisty can keep your machines in step through your own Google Drive account, without Google’s desktop program installed. Google Drive is the only provider for now; OneDrive or Dropbox may follow, and none is promised. A copy built without this project’s Google credentials offers no cloud at all and makes none of these requests.


Why	To keep your machines in step through your Google Drive, without its desktop program installed
Who it talks to	Google only: `accounts.google.com` and `oauth2.googleapis.com` to sign in, and `www.googleapis.com` for Drive. Never a server of ours, because there is none
What Google lets Tisty see	The permission asked for is `drive.appdata`: Tisty sees and changes only its own hidden space in your Drive, which no other app and no Drive window shows. The rest of your Drive — your documents, your photos, what others share with you — stays out of its reach. If Google grants anything wider, Tisty gives the access back and stops. It also reads the address of the account you connected, to show you which one it is and to refuse to mix two accounts
What it sends	The files of your store — the history, the documents and `tisty.toml` — into that hidden space of your Drive, as they are on your disk. They count against your Drive storage, and Manage apps in Drive’s settings shows how much. Tisty does not encrypt them, just as it does not encrypt a folder you sync. Attachments go up too, but stay on the computer they were added on; on your other computers each one comes down only when you open it. When a machine stops syncing with a place, it leaves there a short signed note (`moved.json`) saying where it went — a folder’s name or the cloud account’s address — so your other machines stop instead of going on alone
What Google sees	What any provider of a synced folder sees: the files above, their names and sizes, when they change, and the address and time of each request. Google already holds your account; Tisty adds nothing about you
What it receives	The same files, written by your other machines, and Drive’s list of what changed
How you allow it	Only from the Tisty window: the command line and assistants never connect an account and never touch the network. You sign in on Google’s own page in your browser. Tisty never sees your password; it receives an access you can withdraw at any time. On macOS and Linux it keeps that access in the system keychain. On Windows it keeps it in a file sealed with Windows’ own protection for your user (DPAPI, the same lock Credential Manager uses), inside Tisty’s folder under your profile, so uninstalling Tisty removes it. Only the window touches it; it never reaches the log, a backup or a parcel
Letting go	Disconnect this computer forgets the access on that machine only. Remove Tisty’s access on every computer asks Google to withdraw it, which Google does for every machine at once. You can also withdraw it yourself from your Google account, under Security › Third-party apps and services (https://myaccount.google.com/connections). Uninstalling withdraws nothing. On Windows it also removes this machine’s copy. macOS and Linux run nothing when an app is removed, so there the copy stays in the system keychain until you disconnect first or delete it there; Google drops an access unused for six months
Checking the way first	Only while you are choosing Google Drive — connecting it, or moving to it — Tisty first checks that Google’s API host answers: a single request to `https://www.googleapis.com/drive/v3/about`, with no account, no token and nothing of yours in it, which Google answers at once by turning a stranger away. It waits at most 5 seconds to reach it and 10 seconds in all, and goes through whatever proxy your system names, never around it. From how it ends, Tisty only tells you whether something on the way — a proxy, a filter at work, an antivirus — blocks Google or inspects secure connections, whether Google was only slow to answer, or whether Google itself is having trouble. It never runs on a round of syncing, and what it learns stays on your screen and in Tisty’s own log on this computer
How often	Only while Tisty is running, including when it sits in the tray or started on its own at login; never once it is closed. It asks whether anything changed at most every few minutes, and less often while nothing does. There is no background service
Limits	A daily allowance per computer — not per person — of 2,000,000 request units and 50 GB downloaded, so one copy cannot spend the shared quota Google grants this project. Attachments are capped at 25 MB per task and 650 MB inside a document, and nothing over 750 MB is taken in from the cloud. Free space lets go of attachments you have not opened in a while; opening one again brings it back down and counts against the same allowance
The remote switch	A small file, `cloud.json`, published beside the version manifest at `https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rgdevment/Tisty/manifest/cloud.json`, can lower those limits or pause syncing for a while on every copy, should the project’s quota be at risk. It is signed with minisign against a key fixed in the program when it is built, read only up to 16 KiB, and an older one never replaces a newer one. It is fetched at most once an hour while you sync with Google Drive, sends nothing but the request itself, and carries numbers and nothing of yours
What it never does	Send your data to us or to anyone but Google, read a file in your Drive outside its own space, or write tokens and signed addresses into its own log
Leaving	Choose Only on this machine or a folder through Move to another place. Tisty brings home what lives only in your Drive before it lets go of it, and leaves the copies there; disconnecting keeps them too. Delete my copies deletes them for good, since that space has no bin. In Drive’s settings, under Manage apps, Disconnect from Drive only withdraws Tisty’s access; Delete hidden app data deletes the copies as well. When a machine leaves a folder, it writes a short note in it, `README - Tisty.txt`, saying where its copies went and how to come back; it takes the note away when it chooses that folder again

Google API Services

Tisty’s use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. In plain words: what Tisty reads from your Drive is used only to sync your own store between your own machines. It is never sent to us or to anyone else, never used for advertising, never sold, never used to train any model, and no person reads it.

The door you can open for an assistant

Tisty has no AI inside it and makes no request to any model. It does speak MCP when you ask it to, so an assistant already running on this machine can file a task on your behalf. None of it happens on its own:

You install it. Nothing listens until you run tisty mcp. The assistant reaches it through that process’s own input and output — on this machine, with no port, no account and no token. It is not a server and nothing can reach it from the network.
You let it in. The assistant shows up in Settings › Agents as a device you have to admit, and everything it tries before that is refused. Admitting it is an event written into your log rather than a line in a settings file, so you can see when it happened and throw it out whenever you want.
What it may do is bounded. File a task, add to the journal, say a task it filed or one you opened to agents is done — which marks it for you and closes nothing — write a document, write one again whole, keep a copy of a file you point it at, and read what is already there. It may not close or delete anything, say a task you wrote and kept closed to it is done, reach a task you hid, or take files from outside the folders where a download lands. Bringing a markdown file in copies what that file’s text points at, and only what sits in that file’s own folder or below it, so what leaves your disk is bounded by the file you named rather than by what its text asks for. To replace a whole document it has to send back the print it read that document at, so what you wrote while it was thinking cannot be taken. What it reads comes back without the paths of your disk.

The part worth knowing before you open it: whatever that assistant reads, it takes with it. If it runs against a service, then the moment you ask it to look, what it looks at is on its way to that service. Tisty still sends nothing and still has no server of its own — but this door is real, and it is the only thing here that can carry your data off this machine. Which is why it stays shut until you open it, and why closing it is one click.

Children’s privacy

Tisty collects no personal information from anyone, of any age. There are no accounts, no registration and no data transmission.

Changes to this policy

Any change is committed to the public repository with a clear message, updates the date above, and appears in the release notes. Because the project is open source, a change in privacy behaviour would be visible as a code change before it ever reached you.

Contact

[email protected]

Tisty is in early development. This document describes decisions already made; it will be expanded with concrete storage paths and behaviour as the implementation lands, and never in the direction of collecting more.