#1

I’ve asked this question in a couple public forums and I didn’t get any reply. Trying here:

Does Obsidian have any plans to release a terms of service, privacy policy, or data usage statement?

I understand that it is a local application that manages local files, but it is also not open source and there’s no clear terms or guarantees. The only legal statement is a license that protects Obsidian.

For an applciation of this nature (having access to private data) I think there should be some kind of effort to recognize user privacy.

According to the license, it appears Obsidian is a Dynalist property of some kind. Do the Dynalist privacy policies apply to Obsidian?

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#2

Until we have Obsidian Sync or Obsidian Publish, we don’t intend to release them for now:

Right now, we aren’t offering any “service”, so there isn’t a terms associated with anything. Once Sync or Publish is live, we’ll have terms for those.

As for privacy policy and data usage statement, none right now. The app only ever sends its version number when checking for updates. Otherwise we don’t collect any data at all, no telemetry, no personal information.

The EULA mentions Dynalist since it’s developed by the same developers and we have not yet registered another legal entity for Obsidian.

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#3

Thank you for this response.

I hope you’ll consider publishing a short privacy policy in the app that states that the Obsidian application does not collect data. Privacy policies are not reserved for services alone. I believe that since you are a privately-developed, closed source application, the responsible approach is to publish a statement.

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#4

That makes sense, we’ll consider doing that soon.

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#5

The lack of privacy policy and terms of service is concerning. I appreciate the June 6 response, but I hesitate to move forward with Obsidian until this is clarified and published. Thank you in advance.

#6

The privacy statement is now available here: https://obsidian.md/privacy

#7

Thank you!

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#8

Thanks! One question about this:

We do not collect any personal data either.

…and this:

Obsidian only connects to the internet to periodically check for new updates.

I’m really happy that this is the case. I just wanted to check… is this true even with the various third-party libraries that are integrated (e.g., mermaid, latex, etc.)?

#9

Yes, they do not need internet to function, as we bundle all of them with Obsidian.

#10

Great! Very glad to hear this.