Privacy Policy

Effective date: August 2, 2026

Why this policy is unusually short

Most privacy policies describe what a company does with data it collects. Chickadee collects none, and this is structural rather than a promise: the software has no sign-in, no telemetry, no update check, no crash reporting, and no address of ours to send anything to. There is no account to delete, because there was never one to create.

What follows is therefore mostly about the choices you make — because in this design they are the only ones that move data anywhere.

What leaves your box

Chickadee runs each voice stage on an engine you choose, and the privacy answer follows entirely from that choice.

Your own engines, on your own network

Nothing leaves your network. Speech goes to the speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and language-model endpoints you configured — your Ollama box, your Whisper server — the assistant runs inside the add-on on your own hardware, and no Chickadee service is contacted, because none exists.

Home Assistant's own engines

Audio and text go wherever your Home Assistant Assist pipeline already sends them. Chickadee adds no destination of its own; whatever you have already configured and already trust is what handles it.

Your own API key

Audio and text go to the provider you configured — for example Google, OpenAI, or OpenRouter — under your API key, directly from your box to them, governed by your agreement with that provider. We are not a party to it and never see the traffic. Your keys are stored on-box only (/data/api-keys.json, file mode 600), are masked in the console UI, and are excluded from Home Assistant backups.

What the assistant sends when it answers

When a turn runs against a provider you configured, it sends the audio for transcription, the turn text plus your Assist-exposed entity context for the model, and the reply text for the voice. That context is scoped to what the question needs — your exposed-entity states, not your whole Home Assistant configuration. Which entities are exposed is controlled by you, in Home Assistant.

When the assistant looks something up

Some questions can only be answered off the box, and those go out too. Each of these fires only when a question needs it — never on a schedule, never in the background:

• Web search — if you configured a search key, the search text goes to that provider under your own account. No key configured means no web search and no request.
• Sports scores — a request to ESPN. No key and no account are involved, which also means there is nothing identifying you attached to it beyond the ordinary properties of any web request, your IP among them.
• Images — a request to Wikimedia by default, or to another image provider if you configured one.
• Weather — read from your own Home Assistant weather entities. Nothing leaves the box for this.

In every case the request goes from your box to that provider. Nothing is relayed through a server of ours, because we do not run one.

Things Chickadee never does

• No analytics or tracking SDKs — no Google Analytics, Sentry, PostHog, or anything comparable.
• No startup phone-home, no update check, no version ping.
• No listening in the background: wake-word detection happens on your satellite or on the tablet itself, and the add-on only receives the audio Home Assistant's Assist pipeline hands it.
• No training on your data. Chickadee has no models of its own to train and no pipeline that could collect data to train them with.
• The LAN engine scan (console → Local Engines → Scan) runs only when you click it, probes private subnets only, uses read-only unauthenticated version-endpoint requests to identify engines, and renders results in the console — they are never sent off-box.
• The add-on ↔ integration bridge is same-box only. Nothing is exposed on your LAN, and it is authenticated with a random per-install secret.

Requests to other people's servers, named for completeness

There are two. Neither carries anything you said or typed, but both are outbound requests you would find yourself, so here they are:

• The console page in your browser loads one pinned open-source library (heic2any, for reading iPhone photos) from a public CDN. That is a standard static asset fetch by your browser, which reveals your IP address to that CDN and nothing else. The voice pipeline itself never touches a CDN.
• The clock screensaver, if you turn its weather on, looks up your approximate location from your IP address (ipapi.co) and then the forecast for it (api.open-meteo.com) — once when it loads, then every ten minutes while it is showing. Your IP is what identifies the location; there is no account and nothing else is sent. The plain clock, with no weather, makes no requests at all, and a screensaver that shows your own photos or simply dims the screen never loads this page in the first place.

Every other page on this site loads nothing at all: no fonts, no scripts, no CDN, no analytics. View source and check.

Children's privacy

Chickadee is not directed at children under 13. Since it collects no personal information from anyone, it collects none from children either.

Changes to this policy

If this changes, the effective date above changes with it. Any change that introduced data collection would be a change to the product, not just to this page, and would be described as such.

Contact

Privacy questions are welcome in public — open an issue on the Chickadee repository. If you would rather not ask in public, or you have a request about your own data, email hello@getchickadee.org; that reaches a person and needs no GitHub account. Chickadee is published by Dashie LLC.