Privacy and network access

onQ requires no cloud account and contains no telemetry pipeline. Prompt storage, indexing, embedding inference, settings, history, and audit data are local.

Local data

Data	Location
Prompt source	<vault>/prompts/*.md
Search and per-vault state	<vault>/.onq/search-index/
History	<vault>/.onq/history/
Prompt-lock envelopes	<vault>/.onq/locked/
Audit log	<vault>/.onq/audit.log
Plugins	<vault>/.onq/plugins/
Last/recent vaults and auto-lock policy	Tauri application config directory
Language, shortcut, and recent prompt IDs	Local WebView profile
MiniLM files	Tauri application cache directory
Vault and prompt keys	Operating-system keychain

Use Settings > Backups to display and copy the current vault and search index paths.

Network paths

GitHub update metadata

On launch, onQ silently checks configured GitHub release endpoints for Tauri updater metadata. Manual checks are available in Settings and through the Home version button.

The request checks application version metadata. onQ does not attach prompt contents. Startup failures stay silent. There is no current UI switch to disable this check.

Hugging Face model download

The built-in semantic model downloads only after selecting Load MiniLM model:

sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2

The download fetches onnx/model.onnx and tokenizer.json from Hugging Face Hub into the app cache. After that:

• prompt embedding runs locally;
• query embedding runs locally;
• prompt text is not sent to Hugging Face;
• keyword search remains available without the model.

External links

Opening repository, release, or documentation links delegates to the platform browser. The destination site then applies its own privacy policy.

What onQ does not provide

• no user account;
• no hosted prompt database;
• no telemetry or usage analytics;
• no advertising SDK;
• no remote prompt inference;
• no cloud synchronization service;
• no automatic upload of audit logs or crash reports.

Clipboard

Copying is a core workflow. Clipboard content is visible to the operating system and may be retained by:

• clipboard history;
• desktop-environment clipboard managers;
• remote-desktop software;
• other local applications.

onQ does not automatically clear copied prompt text. Configure the operating system when clipboard retention is a concern.

Keychain

Keychain-mode vault secrets and per-prompt lock keys use the platform keyring through the Rust keyring library. Access behavior depends on the operating system, desktop environment, user session, and keyring configuration.

Linux systems need a working secret service. A missing or locked secret service can prevent keychain vault or prompt-lock access.

Audit and application logs

The optional audit log is local but can contain:

• vault paths;
• archive paths;
• prompt IDs;
• event timestamps.

Runtime tracing may also contain diagnostic paths and errors. Share logs only after reviewing them for local identifiers.

Native plugins

Plugins are signed native libraries loaded into the onQ process. Signature and license checks verify package policy, not harmless behavior.

An enabled native plugin has process-level access and can potentially bypass application privacy expectations. The current SDK callback surface is incomplete, but normal native-code privileges still apply. Install only packages you trust.

External synchronization

If a vault lives inside Git, Dropbox, iCloud, Syncthing, or another provider, that provider receives whichever vault files its configuration includes. onQ does not control:

• provider-side encryption;
• retention and version history;
• collaborator access;
• conflict behavior;
• metadata collection.

Unlocked Markdown files are plaintext. Prompt-lock keys remain in the local OS keychain, so syncing only the envelope does not make a locked prompt portable.

Delete and retention

Deleting a prompt removes its current file and index row. Copies may remain in:

• .onq/history/;
• full or Markdown backups;
• sync-provider history;
• Git history;
• clipboard history;
• filesystem snapshots.

Data erasure requires clearing every applicable layer.