An AI storytelling engine in your terminal

The boring but important page

Privacy Policy

The short version: this site is a static brochure, and the app runs on your own computer. There are no accounts, no sign-up, no cookies we set, and nothing about you is ever sold or shared for advertising. This policy covers both the website and the Machine Violet app; the sections below are simply the handful of places any data touches at all.

Last updated: August 2, 2026

What this website collects

Almost nothing, and none of it identifies you to us by name:

  • Hosting. The site is served by Cloudflare Pages. Like every web host, Cloudflare processes your IP address and basic request details (browser, timestamp) to deliver pages and block abuse. We do not receive this as a mailing list — it lives in standard server logs.
  • Privacy-friendly analytics. We use Cloudflare Web Analytics to count page views. It is cookieless, sets nothing on your device, and reports only aggregates (which pages, roughly which country, which browser). It cannot follow you across other sites, and most ad blockers switch it off entirely.
  • A request to GitHub. The download links pull the latest release straight from GitHub. That means your browser makes one request to api.github.com, which necessarily sees your IP, governed by GitHub's own privacy policy. Nothing else is sent.
  • A theme preference. The site picks one of its colour palettes per visit and remembers it in your browser's sessionStorage so it stays put while you click around. It never leaves your device and is gone when you close the tab.

What we don't do

  • No accounts, logins, or forms — there is nothing to sign up for.
  • No cookies set by this site.
  • No selling, renting, or sharing of personal data. Ever.
  • No cross-site tracking or advertising pixels on these pages.

The Machine Violet app

The program you download runs entirely on your own computer. Its privacy story is just as short as the website's:

  • Your games stay on your machine. Campaigns, saves, settings, and exported transcripts are written to your own disk. None of it is uploaded to us — we operate no server that receives it.
  • Your story goes only to your AI provider. To generate the game, the app sends your prompts and campaign context directly to whichever provider you configure (Anthropic, OpenAI, and so on), using your own account or API key. That provider processes it under its own privacy policy. This is the one place your creative content travels, and it never passes through us.
  • Your API keys never reach us. Keys are stored locally for the app's own use in talking to your provider. We never receive or transmit them.
  • No telemetry. The app has no analytics, usage tracking, or crash reporting. It does not phone home with your data.
  • Update checks. The desktop build can update itself, so it periodically asks the update server whether a newer version exists. That request downloads release information; it does not send us anything about you or your games.

Advertising

We promote Machine Violet through Google Ads. If you reached this site by clicking one of our ads, Google may process data about that click under Google's own privacy policy. We do not run remarketing or ad-conversion trackers on the site itself; if that ever changes, this page — and our use of cookies — will be updated first.

Your choices

Because we set no cookies and store nothing that identifies you, there's little to opt out of. If you'd rather not be counted in the aggregate analytics at all, any content or tracker blocker will stop the analytics request — and plenty already do.

Changes

If this policy changes, the "Last updated" date above changes with it. Material changes will be reflected here before they take effect.

Contact

Questions about privacy? Open an issue on the project's GitHub repository and we'll answer there.