A Love Wins Media product
Garage Support

Privacy Policy

Effective Date: September 27, 2026
Application: Garage & GarageApp
Developer: Rick Mark-Penwell

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). The few requests the application makes on its own, to fetch its model list, models you download, and updates, carry none of your data (section 5). This website, garagerag.app, uses Google Analytics to count visits; the application does not (section 6).

2. Data Collection

Garage does not collect personal information from users.

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

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.

If you allow Garage to access your Contacts, it uses the names there to show people by name instead of by phone number or email address in the Messages and Mail it indexes. Those names are stored with your indexed communications in the same local database and are treated the same way: they never leave your device except as part of search results you send to an MCP client yourself. Declining Contacts access changes nothing else.

4. No Third-Party Services

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

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. Network Requests the Application Makes

Apart from the model server you configure (section 4), Garage connects to the internet only for the following. None of these requests contains your documents, communications, search queries, or any identifier for you or your device.

Like any server, garagerag.app (hosted on GitHub Pages) and Hugging Face receive the network information that every web request carries, such as your IP address and the app’s user agent, and handle it under their own privacy policies. Garage does not receive or keep that information.

6. This Website

The website at garagerag.app, including these support pages, uses Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages people read. When you open a page, your browser loads Google’s analytics script, which sets cookies and sends Google the page address, the referring page, your browser and device type, an approximate location derived from your IP address, and how you interact with the page. Google handles that information under the Google Privacy Policy. We use the reports only to understand how the site is used; we do not use them for advertising and do not combine them with anything else.

You can stop this collection with a content blocker that blocks Google Analytics, or with Google’s opt-out browser add-on.

This applies to the website only. GarageApp and the garage tools contain no analytics, and the website cannot see anything in your Garage library.

7. Security & Access Control

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. Contact

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