Privacy & Data Sovereignty

AI Friend is architected under the principle of absolute local data sovereignty: your companion belongs to you, and your private conversations belong on your machine.


The Zero-Leak Guarantee

  • No Cloud Accounts: There is no sign-up, no login wall, and no centralized user database.
  • No Telemetry: The codebase contains zero analytics tracking, phone-home beacons, or usage reporting.
  • Local Confinement: All databases (Postgres, Neo4j, Redis, Qdrant) bind strictly to 127.0.0.1.
  • Local Models: Ollama LLM, whisper.cpp STT, and GPT-SoVITS voice synthesis run entirely in local memory.

Where Your Data Lives

All state is persisted in local files and Docker volumes on your host disk:

Data CategoryLocal Storage LocationWhat is Stored
Authored Personapersonal/persona.toml (gitignored)Your original prose description and initial preferences.
Biography Memorypersonal/biography.md (gitignored)Background documentary context.
Episodic MemoriesDocker volume pgdata (Postgres)Vector embeddings and historical conversation turns.
Knowledge GraphDocker volume neo4j_data (Neo4j)Entity relationships and preference networks.
Affect & Weightsbackend/state_cache.db (SQLite)Durable PAD baseline values and adaptive learning weights.
Voice Recordingsbackend/voice_samples/Enrolled reference WAV audio files.

Complete Export & Data Portability

You are never locked into a hardware machine. AI Friend includes single-command backup and restore tools (scripts/export_friend.py / scripts/import_friend.py) that package all four datastores into an encrypted, portable .tar.gz archive.

bash
# Export complete friend snapshot
python backend/scripts/export_friend.py --out my_friend_backup.tar.gz

# Restore on a new computer
python backend/scripts/import_friend.py --archive my_friend_backup.tar.gz --force