Privacy & Sovereignty
One click decides how far your words are allowed to travel. Five stances run from hard to soft, and where you set that dial is entirely your decision.
Five stances, one dial
The Privacy switcher orders its stances from most private to most capable. Picking one sets the model behind every text feature and, for the cloud stances, attaches routing rules to each request:
- Totally Local: nothing leaves your computer; runs on your own machine via Ollama or LM Studio.
- EU Only: your text only ever reaches AI providers physically located in the EU.
- Zero Data Retention: processed, then immediately forgotten; never stored anywhere.
- No Training: top models, but providers are contractually barred from training on your text.
- Frontier: the most capable models with the fewest restrictions, for the best possible quality.
How the guarantees are enforced
The four cloud stances lean on OpenRouter as an enforcement layer between Markelangelo and the model providers. Every provider is labelled with its region, retention policy and training policy; Markelangelo attaches the right rules to each request (a zero-retention flag, a no-data-collection directive, an EU allow-list); and OpenRouter routes only to providers that comply, refusing the request rather than quietly downgrading it. The actual commitment, no retention, no training, EU residency, is made by each downstream provider under the terms OpenRouter publishes and applies. The fine print lives in OpenRouter's sovereign-AI documentation.
Totally Local needs none of this: there is no network call to route.
The stance you select decides how much of your text may leave your machine, from none at all on Totally Local to the fewest limits on Frontier. Choosing a more open stance is a deliberate decision to share more in exchange for capability, made by you, never behind your back.
Be clear-eyed about the limits of anyone's control. On the cloud stances we apply the strongest routing controls available to us, but the actual handling of your text is performed by third parties, OpenRouter and the model providers, under their own policies. Those policies are theirs, not warranties given by Markelangelo, and we do not control, operate or audit those services. Even a model you run locally is third-party software we did not write.
We give our genuine best endeavours to honour every stance faithfully. We cannot, and do not, guarantee that a third party will adhere to its own stated policy. Choose a stance suited to the sensitivity of your material; if in any doubt, Totally Local shares nothing. This page is not legal advice and does not replace the terms of the providers you use.
None of that is a hedge around the intent, it is the intent: the choice sits in your hands, deliberately. Pick the strictest stance you are comfortable working within, and you never have to wonder where your words went.