Privacy by design: the architecture
PoisonZero collects as little as technically possible, and what it does collect is locally verifiable. This page maps each privacy property to its mechanism, with the deep dive linked per topic.
Overview
Each property, its mechanism, and where it is specified:
| Property | Mechanism | Details |
|---|---|---|
| No activity timestamps | Liveness is a relative countdown; no absolute last-seen time is persisted | This page |
| Minimal egress | Path plus redacted, added-only diff; every request in a local egress ledger | What Cloud mode sends |
| On-device analysis | The model runs locally in both modes; a private device contacts the network at most every 30 days | Cloud or private |
| Bounded storage | Quarantine retention 30 days, audit cap 50 MiB, daily janitor | Storage, retention and cleanup |
| Your own second evaluator | A pinned-TLS endpoint you host; content stays on your network | Bring your own on-prem model |
| No secondary use | No activity profiling, no data sale, no ad-tech | This page |
No activity timestamps
Device liveness is a relative countdown, not a timestamp:
- Countdown: a scheduled sweep decrements the counter; a device heartbeat resets it.
- No absolute time: no last-seen timestamp is persisted, so the dashboard cannot reconstruct when a person was at the machine, and working hours cannot be derived.
- Self-report: a device reports status and engine health with a coarse liveness marker, never activity times.
Data minimization at the egress boundary
In Cloud mode the endpoint surface is fixed; content crosses it only as a redacted, added-only diff:
| Endpoint | Payload |
|---|---|
/evaluate | path and redacted, added-only unified diff (no full texts) |
/reportQuarantine | case ID, path, reason, scores and the redacted diff (size-capped) |
/reportAudit | timestamp, action, path, reason, scores |
/getConfig | auth token only |
- Redacted locally: secrets and structured PII are replaced by placeholders and home paths are masked before any byte is sent.
- Removed lines: only their count leaves the device, never the removed text.
- Egress ledger: every outbound request is recorded locally with
timestamp,endpoint,bytes, payloadsha256and HTTPstatus, cross-checkable against firewall logs.
The local model and private mode
The analysis model runs on the device in both modes; the mode, persisted in a local devicemode file, decides only what leaves the machine:
- 30-day contact: a private daemon contacts the network at most once every 30 days, to a documented update URL; update check and license check-in share that single request.
- No incident reporting: a private device sends nothing on suspicion; aggregate analytics are opt-in and numbers only.
- Air-gapped: a fully offline install and a stand-down kill-switch are available.
Enterprise isolation and residency
Residency is a deployment property; Enterprise offers custom cloud sovereignty and residency:
| Deployment | Isolation | Region |
|---|---|---|
| Enterprise dedicated instance | Own console at your own hostname, own tenant database, nothing shared with other customers | Your chosen region: Germany, EU, US or Asia; the tenant database follows that choice |
| Shared tier (default) | Shared setup | German-hosted, europe-west3 (Frankfurt) |
Encryption
- In transit: TLS on all traffic.
- At rest in the cloud: AES-256 on Google Cloud.
- At rest on the device: the detection model is held authenticated-encrypted and tamper-evident; any alteration fails closed.
Retention, deletion and the DPA
| Data | Limit | Enforcement |
|---|---|---|
| Quarantine blobs | Retention window, default 30 days (range 1 to 3650) | Daily janitor pass expires and deletes them |
| Audit log (device) | Size cap, default 50 MiB (range 1 to 1024) | Rotated to one backup at the cap |
| Audit data (cloud) | Retention limits | Deletable on request |
A data processing agreement (DPA/AVV) is available for enterprise customers.
Read next
The exact egress contract: what Cloud mode sends. The mode choice and its guarantees: cloud or private. Local retention in detail: storage, retention and cleanup. A second evaluator on your own network: bring your own on-prem model.
Protection that cannot be repurposed for surveillance.
No activity timestamps, redacted egress and a local ledger that proves it. Free for Linux, macOS and Windows.
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