Privacy

LightYou is local-first. That means the shortest privacy policy we can write is: your reading doesn't leave your device unless you opt in.

What LightYou stores locally

• Articles you save, their original URL, and the extracted text.
• Highlights, notes, and the links between them.
• Your reading progress, stars, and archive state.
• Preferences: theme, font, shortcut bindings, language.
• Optional embeddings (on-device) for semantic search and topic clustering.

All of this lives in a per-user data directory on your machine. On desktop, API keys and WebDAV credentials are kept in an encrypted Stronghold vault tied to your machine; they never touch plain-text storage.

What leaves your machine — and when

Nothing leaves by default. A network request only goes out when you trigger one of these:

• Saving a URL — we fetch the article from the original site so we can extract the reader text.
• AI features (summarize, translate, explain, chat) — the prompt plus the article text is sent to whichever AI provider you configured (OpenAI, Gemini, Claude, etc.). We never proxy your requests; they go directly from the app to the provider.
• WebDAV sync — when enabled, an encrypted payload of your library is pushed to the WebDAV endpoint you chose. You control the server.
• Update check — the app pings our release channel to see if a newer version exists. No identifiers are sent beyond a standard User-Agent.

What LightYou never does

• No account, no sign-in, no "LightYou cloud."
• No analytics, no crash reporting, no third-party scripts.
• No reading-history upload to any server we control.
• No ad networks, no trackers, no telemetry — opt-in or otherwise.

If you uninstall

Deleting the app removes its binary. Your local library lives in your OS user data directory; you may want to delete that separately if you want a clean break.

Contact

Questions, feedback, or a security report? Email leetao@duck.com.

For security issues, please put security: at the start of the subject line so we can prioritize it. We aim to acknowledge within 7 days and keep you updated weekly until a fix ships.