Privacy & security

Mel is local-first. Your terminal never needs the network at all, and when you use the agent, only what a model call needs leaves your machine. The Privacy page in Settings summarizes this and links to the privacy policy; this page spells out the details.

What stays on your machine

• Drive objects — workflows, prompts, notebooks, and environment sets live under ~/.local/share/mel/drive/.
• Settings — ~/.mel/settings.json, plus tab configs and tab settings under ~/.mel/. See the Settings overview.
• Your sign-in token — stored at ~/.local/share/mel/auth_token with owner-only file permissions.
• Agent tool execution — reads, edits, searches, and commands run locally on your machine (or over your own ssh connection for remote sessions). The backend never executes anything on your behalf.

You can open all of this yourself: the avatar menu's View app data reveals the app-data directory.

What goes to the backend

The agent talks only to the Mel relay — never directly to a model provider. Per model call, the relay receives your prompt and the conversation context that call needs (including tool results the model has to see), forwards it to the provider, and streams the response back. That's it.

• Hosted-plan provider keys stay server-side. The app ships no keys. If you add your own key (BYOK), it is stored on your device — in the OS keychain where available — and sent only in-flight with your own requests. Signing out removes saved BYOK keys from this device.
• No analytics, no telemetry. Mel collects none.

Conversations

Conversations are saved as JSON on your machine and also synced to your Mel account, so they follow you to another device. Resuming, the recents list, and the conversations picker read from the local copy; the backup lives with the relay under your account.

• Local copy — ~/.local/share/mel/accounts/<account>/conversations/. Each account signed in on a machine gets its own folder, and a signed-out session writes to accounts/local/. Nothing one account saved is visible to, or uploaded under, another.
• Turning sync off — Settings ▸ Privacy has a Sync conversations to my account toggle. With it off, conversations stay on the machine and nothing is uploaded; conversations already in the cloud stay there. The MEL_DISABLE_CONVO_SYNC=1 environment variable does the same thing and wins over the setting, which is useful for a support session or a shared machine.
• Deleting — Delete all my data (below) removes the cloud copy along with everything else.

Memory

Cross-session memory is optional and per-conversation (the ◈ memory chip toggles whether a conversation contributes to or recalls it). Notes that are saved live on the relay, and you stay in control:

• The Memory panel lists every stored note; you can edit, pin, or delete any note individually.
• Delete all my data runs a full deletion cascade after a confirmation dialog that names exactly what is and isn't covered.

Approvals

File writes, edits, and command executions round-trip an approval card before anything happens — unless you've pre-approved an action type on the Profiles settings page or switched a conversation to autonomous mode yourself. See AI settings.

Related

• Account — sign-in and where the token lives
• Billing and usage