Legal

Privacy Policy

Last updated 29 August 2026.

The short version. SynapseOS runs on your own machine. There is no SynapseOS account to create, no SynapseOS server to talk to, and nothing reports back to us. This site has no analytics and no cookies. When you connect SynapseOS to a service you already use — Google Calendar, for instance — your data travels between your computer and that service directly, and we never receive a copy.

Who this covers

SynapseOS is a free, open-source Linux distribution written by Velle Sinclair. This policy covers the website at soslinux.org and the software published under the SynapseOS name, including the syn-cal calendar.

SynapseOS is a project, not a company. It sells nothing, has no customers, and keeps no database of users.

This website

soslinux.org is a set of static files. It runs no scripts of any kind — the site's Content-Security-Policy sets script-src 'none', so a browser will refuse to execute JavaScript here even if some were added by mistake.

As a result the site sets no cookies, uses no analytics, embeds no third-party trackers or fonts, and has no forms — nothing on this site asks you for information, and there is nowhere for it to be sent.

The site is hosted on Cloudflare. Like any web host, Cloudflare receives the technical details a request cannot be served without — your IP address, the page requested, your browser's user-agent string — and handles them under its own privacy policy. We do not add anything to that, do not tie it to a person, and never see a visitor-level report of it.

The operating system

SynapseOS contains no telemetry. It does not count installations, report which components you use, send crash reports, or check in on a schedule to say it exists.

The system makes network connections only in the ordinary course of being a Linux distribution, and only for a reason you can name:

Updates. syn-update fetches the project's git repository from GitHub, and package updates come from the Arch Linux mirrors your machine is configured to use. Those services see your IP address, as they must to send you the files.
Software you install. Packages and their sources come from the Arch repositories and, if you use it, the AUR.
Services you connect yourself. An application only contacts a server after you point it at one and sign in.

Nothing in that list routes through a machine we control. There is no SynapseOS server.

The local AI

The language model that SynapseOS runs as a system service runs on your computer. Prompts, answers, and anything the model reads stay on the machine. There is no API key to supply because there is no remote API being called, and the installer will tell you it ships no model at all — you choose one and it is downloaded to your disk, where it stays.

Google Calendar, and Google user data

SynapseOS includes syn-cal, a calendar. If you choose to connect a Google account to it, this section describes exactly what happens. If you do not, none of it applies — the feature is off until you run the command that turns it on.

What is requested, and why

syn-cal requests a single Google scope, https://www.googleapis.com/auth/calendar. It needs read and write access because the calendar synchronises in both directions: an event you create or edit on your machine is meant to appear in Google Calendar, and the read-only scope cannot do that. No other scope is requested. It does not ask for your mail, your contacts, your files, or your profile.

Where the sign-in lives

Signing in happens in your own browser, against Google, using PKCE. Your Google password is never typed into SynapseOS and never passes through it.

What Google returns is an access token and a refresh token. Both are stored on your computer, in your system keyring (GNOME Keyring or KWallet). If no keyring is running, syn-cal says so out loud and falls back to a file readable only by your user account. Tokens are never written to the account configuration file, never transmitted anywhere except back to Google, and never sent to us.

Where your calendar data goes

Calendar events travel directly between your computer and Google's servers. They are stored on your machine as ordinary iCalendar files under your home directory. The SynapseOS project operates no server, receives no copy of your calendar, and has no ability to read it. The author cannot see your events, your calendar names, or the fact that you signed in at all.

Your Google data is never sold, never used for advertising, never used to train any model, and never transferred to anyone — because it never reaches us in the first place.

Limited Use

SynapseOS's use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Taking it back

You can disconnect at any time, and it takes effect immediately:

syn-cal logout <name> deletes the stored tokens from your machine.
syn-cal account remove <name> deletes the account and its tokens together.
Revoking SynapseOS at myaccount.google.com/permissions invalidates the tokens at Google's end, whatever is on your disk.
Deleting the calendar's folder in your home directory removes the local copy of your events.

Microsoft and CalDAV accounts

syn-cal can also connect to Microsoft 365 over the Graph API, and to any standards-compliant CalDAV server. Everything above applies unchanged: sign-in happens against that provider, credentials and tokens are kept in your keyring on your machine, calendar data moves directly between your computer and that server, and the project receives nothing.

Children

SynapseOS is a general-purpose operating system and is not directed at children under 13. It collects no information from anyone, of any age.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it and the previous wording remains in the site's public git history. Material changes to how any account data is handled will be described in the release notes for the version that makes them.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or about what a piece of SynapseOS does with data, can be raised as an issue at github.com/velle999/SYNAPSE/issues, where the answer is public and stays findable.