Your things stay on your computer.

• Your Personal Cloud’s content — your web apps, documents, files, photos and notes — stays on your own computer. We don’t have a copy.
• Your Oikou account holds what it needs to sign you in, find your Personal Cloud and send you notifications: your email address, your devices and which Personal Clouds you belong to.
• The Oikou app’s browser keeps your browsing on your device. When you aren’t signed in, the app sends nothing to Oikou.
• AI chat goes from your device to your Personal Cloud, and from there to the AI provider its owner connected, once you allow it. It never passes through Oikou’s servers.
• When you report a web app, a widget or an AI answer, the report goes to Oikou’s moderators or to the Personal Cloud’s owner, with your Oikou account. Below says what it holds and how long it is kept.
• There is no advertising and no selling of your data. You can delete your account at any time.

Oikou is made by Contextual Labs, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. “We” and “us” in this policy mean Contextual Labs. This policy covers this website, the Oikou account, the Oikou app for iPhone and iPad, and Oikou Host.

When you create and use an Oikou account, our account service keeps:

• Your account: an id, the display name you choose, and the email addresses you have verified.
• How you sign in: if you use Apple, Google or GitHub, the user id that service gives us and the email address it shared at the time.
• Your sign-ins: a hashed token for each session, the device it belongs to, and when it was last used.
• Your devices: a device id, the push token Apple gives the app for notifications, the app’s bundle id, the key Apple’s App Attest uses to show the app is genuine, and when the device was last seen and last sent a notification.
• Your Personal Clouds: each one’s id, public key, name, owner, the address it can be reached at, how it is reached (for example through Tailscale or a Cloudflare tunnel) and when it last checked in.
• Who belongs where: the Personal Clouds you own or were invited to, your role in each, and the notification settings you chose for them.
• Invitations: the email address, name and note on an invitation you send or receive. An invitation expires after 7 days.
• If you publish web apps to the Catalogue: your publisher details and the apps you publish.
• Reports you make of a Catalogue web app or an AI answer, described below.

We use this to run Oikou: to sign you in, to connect the app to your Personal Cloud, to let the people you invite in, to deliver notifications and to keep the service secure. We send email only about your account, such as sign-in codes and invitations.

Oikou Host runs on a computer you own. Your web apps, their data, your documents, files, photos, notes and Unified Search index live on that computer. We don’t store, back up or read them, and Oikou Host doesn’t send us telemetry.

What our account service does learn about a Personal Cloud is listed above: its name, its address, how it is reached, when it last checked in, and who belongs to it.

Oikou doesn’t relay your traffic. The app reaches your Personal Cloud over the connection its owner set up: Tailscale, which is encrypted end to end between your devices, or a Cloudflare tunnel on the owner’s own domain, whose traffic passes through Cloudflare under Cloudflare’s terms.

The built-in browser keeps your browsing — the pages you visit, your history and the Smart Bookmarks you save — on your device. It isn’t sent to Oikou. When you aren’t signed in to an Oikou account, the app sends nothing to Oikou at all.

Websites you visit see your visit the way they would in any browser, under their own privacy policies.

AI in Oikou runs on the AI provider the owner of a Personal Cloud chose and signed in to on that computer, such as Claude from Anthropic or Codex from OpenAI. Oikou never sees or holds those credentials.

When you use AI chat in the Oikou app, the app asks you first and names the provider, the way the Personal Cloud labels it. Once you allow it, your messages go from your device to your Personal Cloud, and from there to that provider. It handles them under its own terms and privacy policy. Your messages don’t pass through Oikou’s servers.

Web apps you allowed to use AI in the background send what they need to the same provider, in the same way.

In the Oikou app, anyone on a Personal Cloud can report a web app, a widget someone made, or an AI answer. A report holds:

• the reason you chose;
• the note you added, if you added one;
• what you reported: the web app and the version on the Personal Cloud, the widget, or the AI answer together with the question you asked and the links it gave;
• your Oikou account, and the Personal Cloud you reported from.

• A web app from the Catalogue: Oikou’s moderators. Your Personal Cloud sends the report to Oikou’s account service with its own id and your Oikou account, and the moderators get an email about it. If the web app is on someone else’s Personal Cloud, its owner gets a note that it was reported too.
• A web app that is the Personal Cloud’s alone (one its owner added from a folder or an upload, or changed), or a widget someone made: the Personal Cloud owner’s inbox, with your name, the reason and your note. Nothing goes to Oikou.
• An AI answer: Oikou’s moderators, the same way as a Catalogue web app. Which AI provider wrote it isn’t sent.

Moderators may write to a Catalogue web app’s publisher about reports of it, and may take the web app down. The publisher isn’t told who reported it: your Oikou account stays with the moderators.

Oikou’s moderators keep a report for 12 months after it is resolved, then delete it. A report in a Personal Cloud owner’s inbox stays until the owner deletes it. Oikou Host keeps nothing of an AI answer you report. When you report a web app installed on a Personal Cloud, that web app’s activity log, which its owner can read, records that it was reported, the reason and where the report went.

After a report you can choose “Hide this app for me”, or hide a web app from its menu at any time. What you hid is stored on the Personal Cloud, not on your device, for you alone: the owner can’t see it, and nothing is sent to Oikou. Settings → Hidden apps shows it again.

How to report or hide a web app →

When a web app on your Personal Cloud sends you a notification, your Personal Cloud passes its title, text and link to our account service, which hands it to Apple’s push notification service to deliver to your device. We don’t keep the content: we record only when a notification was last sent. It is not encrypted end to end, so it is readable to our service and to Apple while it is being delivered.

You can turn notifications off in your device’s Settings, or mute a Personal Cloud in the Oikou app.

oikou.app sets no cookies and runs no analytics or advertising. It is served by Amazon Web Services, whose servers record the requests they answer, including your IP address, as any web server does.

• No advertising identifiers, and no tracking across other companies’ apps and websites.
• No analytics in the account service, and no telemetry from Oikou Host.
• No location, contacts or health data.
• Nothing is sold, rented or shared for advertising.

We use a small number of service providers to run Oikou, each only for its part:

• Amazon Web Services runs the account service, stores the account data above and hosts this website. Amazon Simple Email Service sends our email.
• Apple delivers notifications, checks the app is genuine with App Attest, and runs Sign in with Apple when you use it.
• Google and GitHub run sign-in when you choose them.
• The AI provider a Personal Cloud’s owner chose, such as Anthropic or OpenAI, receives AI requests from that Personal Cloud, under the plan its owner signed in with.
• Tailscale or Cloudflare carry traffic between your devices and your Personal Cloud, as its owner chose.

We may also disclose information when the law requires it.

• Account data is kept while your account exists.
• Invitations expire after 7 days.
• Security logs about sign-ins are kept for 30 days. The IP address used to check a device is kept for about 5 minutes.
• Notification content isn’t kept at all.
• Reports to Oikou’s moderators are kept for 12 months after they are resolved.

You can delete your account yourself:

1. In the Oikou app, open Settings and, under Oikou account, choose Delete Account.
2. Or sign in at https://account.oikou.app/account, find “Delete this account”, type DELETE and choose “Delete my account”.

This deletes your account, its email addresses, sign-ins and linked sign-in services, and your memberships in Personal Clouds. If you signed in with Apple, we also ask Apple to revoke Oikou’s access. Your devices are unlinked from your account. Web apps you published to the Catalogue are withdrawn.

Your Personal Cloud and its data are on your own computer, so deleting your account doesn’t remove them. Uninstall Oikou Host to remove them.

You can ask us for a copy of what your account holds, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, by emailing ben@clabs.ca. Depending on where you live, you may have other rights under privacy law, and you can complain to your privacy regulator.

Oikou accounts are for people 13 and older. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, email us and we will delete it.

If we change this policy, we will update it here and change the date at the top. If a change matters to how your data is used, we will tell you by email or in the app before it takes effect.

Questions about privacy go to ben@clabs.ca. Security reports go to security@oikou.app.