Hey mlte,
I get your concern. I also have a lot of private content in my vault that I also don’t want to upload anywhere. One clarifying point is that (unlike obsidian sync) you choose which folders you want to share selectively (opt-in), so you can only pick folders that you want to collaborate on with other people.
The folders that are shared are clearly marked with a connection indicator and a highlighted line on the left.
We have no interest in looking at user written content (never have). I’d like to get to a point where it is impossible for us to look at user data. The gold standard is end-to-end encryption (supported by Obsidian Sync), but at the moment there is too much complexity in real-time collaboration for us to support that. It makes debugging nearly impossible. I hope to offer that once we have some of the basic product features the way that we want them.
We did just start offering self-hosting of Relay Servers. The architecture is such that our server authorizes user access via cryptographic signatures. We don’t require a network connection to the Relay Server. If you host your server on a private network then it would be impossible for us to access any of your content. If this is of interest, feel free to reach out on our discord. Even if you don’t use this feature, I hope that it is indicative of our efforts to support privacy and total data ownership.
You may also be interested in our privacy policy and our company ideals.
If you don’t actually need collaboration and are instead looking for private device sync, then I recommend paying for Obsidian Sync – it is end-to-end encrypted. I use both Relay for real-time collaboration and Obsidian Sync for end-to-end encrypted device sync.