Privacy Policy

Effective Date: September 12, 2026
Application: Garage & GarageApp
Developer: Rick Mark

1. Overview & Local-First Philosophy

Garage is designed from the ground up as a local-first personal knowledge indexing and retrieval application. We respect your privacy and have designed the application so that it does not collect, track, or sell user data, and does not transmit your content anywhere except to a model server you configure yourself (section 4).

2. Data Collection

Garage does not collect personal information from users.

The application does not collect, store, transmit, or share:

Names or identity data
Email addresses or contact lists
Account credentials or passwords
Usage analytics or telemetry
Device identifiers or hardware IDs
Location data
Documents, codebases, or file contents
Personal images or scanned documents
Search queries and retrieval results
Application activity or runtime sessions

Garage contains no advertising trackers, no analytics SDKs, and no background telemetry.

3. Local Processing & Storage

All data indexed by Garage is processed and stored locally on your device in your private PostgreSQL database located in:
~/Library/Group Containers/DWVXMLB45Y.group.me.rickmark.garage-rag/Library/Application Support/GarageApp/pgdata

Garage never sends your communications off your device, and sends other content only to a model server you have configured yourself (see section 4). Content you retrieve through a connected MCP client is subject to that client.

4. No Third-Party Services

Garage does not send your content to third-party services, and contains no client for any cloud AI service:

Text recognition (OCR) in images uses Tesseract on your device. There is no cloud fallback.
Language models for embeddings, fact extraction, and answers run in the application itself, or in a model server you run yourself (Ollama or LM Studio), on your device by default. If you configure an Ollama or LM Studio server on another computer, Garage sends the text it needs to process to that server and to no other address, and never sends private communications (Messages, Mail) to a server that is not on your device.

If you connect an MCP client such as Claude Desktop or Claude Code to Garage, the search results and document excerpts Garage returns to that client are then handled by that client and its provider under their own terms and privacy policies. Garage itself sends nothing to that client’s provider; the client decides what it does with what it receives. Many clients send what they receive, together with your conversation, to their own cloud model provider, and that can include excerpts from Messages and Mail if you have indexed them. By default Garage’s MCP server is reachable only from your own device; if you start it with --allow-remote to serve clients on other computers, it sends those results and excerpts to them over your network.

5. Security & Access Control

Keychain Security: Database superuser passwords and optional API tokens (e.g., LM Studio API keys) are stored securely in the native macOS Keychain.
Loopback Isolation: The embedded HTTP MCP server binds exclusively to 127.0.0.1 with DNS-rebinding guards and origin validation, preventing web pages and remote networks from accessing your corpus.
macOS Sandboxing & TCC: Access to protected directories (Documents, Downloads, Desktop, Messages, Mail) requires explicit macOS user authorization under System Settings.

6. Children’s Privacy

Garage does not knowingly collect information from children or any other users. Because the application does not collect personal data, it does not knowingly collect personal data from children under 13 or the equivalent minimum age in other jurisdictions.

7. Changes to This Policy

This Privacy Policy may be updated from time to time. Any material updates will be published to this website and included with subsequent application releases.

8. Contact

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy or our local-first security architecture, please reach out:

GitHub Issues: https://github.com/rickmark/garage-rag/issues
Email: privacy@rickmark.com