Last updated: 22 August 2026
Cognitive Atoms keeps your thinking on your own machine. This policy describes the small amount of data we do handle, and — just as importantly — the things we have built ourselves so that we cannot handle.
Cognitive Atoms, Inc. (“Cognitive Atoms”, “we”, “us”) provides a local-first tool for preserving and working with your own thinking.
For privacy questions, or to exercise any right described here, contact privacy@cognitiveatoms.com.
If you use Cognitive Atoms from inside an AI app such as ChatGPT, that app has to reach the Cognitive Atoms instance running on your computer. Your computer is not directly reachable from the internet, so the connection passes through a relay service we operate. This section describes exactly what that relay does, because it is the one place your data moves through infrastructure of ours.
The relay cannot read what passes through it. The encrypted session is established directly between the AI app and your own machine. Your machine holds the private key; the relay does not have it and never receives it. The relay forwards encrypted bytes it has no ability to decrypt.
ywzccc…42a.relay.cognitiveatoms.com. It is pseudonymous: it is not
your name, your email, or your account, and it is not derived from any of them.Routing labels exist in the relay’s memory only for as long as a connection is active, and are discarded when it ends. They are not written to disk and not logged. We do not build a history of which machines connected, or when.
Because we hold no key to your traffic and no record linking a label to a person, there is no store of your cognition for us to search, disclose, or hand over — including in response to a legal demand. That is a property of how the system is built, not a promise about how we behave.
When you join the waitlist we store the email address you submit and a truncated user-agent string. We use them to contact you about the beta and to diagnose signup problems. The form also contains a hidden anti-spam field, which is discarded.
Everything you capture is written to a store on your own device. We have no copy. Uninstalling the application, or deleting that store, removes it.
What you capture in the browser is sent only to the Cognitive Atoms runtime on your own machine.
If you connect an AI provider, requests go from your device to that provider under your own account or key. Their handling of that data is governed by their policy, not ours. If no provider is connected, AI features fail rather than silently falling back to a key of ours.
For the website and waitlist only, we use:
None of these receives the cognition you capture in the product.
There is none in the product. No usage statistics, no crash reporting, no feature tracking, no session recording. Our continuous integration rejects code that introduces a telemetry SDK, so this is a structural property rather than a setting you have to trust us to leave alone.
Waitlist email addresses are kept until the beta programme ends or until you ask us to delete yours, whichever comes first. Relay routing labels are kept only for the duration of a connection (§3). Your captured cognition is kept by you, on your device, for as long as you choose.
Depending on where you live you may have rights to access, correct, delete, export, or object to our processing of your personal data. For the waitlist, write to privacy@cognitiveatoms.com and we will action it.
For the cognition stored in the product, these rights are yours to exercise directly: you can read, export, or delete the store on your own machine without asking us, because we are not holding it.
Our sub-processors may process data outside your country. Where required, transfers rely on appropriate safeguards such as the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses.
Cognitive Atoms is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has given us data, write to us and we will delete it.
Traffic between an AI app and your machine is end-to-end encrypted, with the key held on your machine (§3). Credentials stored on your device are encrypted at rest. Website traffic uses HTTPS.
No system is perfectly secure. If you find a vulnerability, please tell us at security@cognitiveatoms.com rather than disclosing it publicly, and we will work with you.
If we change this policy we will update the date at the top. If a change materially affects how your data is handled, we will say so directly rather than relying on you to notice.
Cognitive Atoms, Inc.
privacy@cognitiveatoms.com