Privacy & Data

Varen's privacy model is architectural — the separation between your content and Varen's systems is built into how the platform works, not enforced by policy. This reference explains exactly what stays on your node, what the control plane can see, and where the boundaries are.

The architecture

Your content — your conversations, your uploaded files, your knowledge base, your profile — lives on your node. The Varen control plane (the cloud component) brokers connections, handles authentication, and manages billing. It does not store your content and cannot access it.

As Varen's design puts it: "Not as a policy. As an architecture." The separation between your content and Varen's systems isn't a matter of policy compliance, a privacy setting you configure, or a promise that depends on Varen behaving a certain way. The content simply doesn't go to the control plane. The system is built so it can't. Your conversations are stored on the hardware you've designated as your node; the control plane only ever sees connection state, authentication tokens, and billing records.

What the control plane can see

The Varen control plane stores a defined, limited set of information:

• Your account details — email address, plan, and credit balance
• Node connection state — whether a node is online and which account it belongs to
• Billing records — usage amounts and timestamps (not the content of conversations)

The control plane does not store, and has no access to:

• Conversation content — the text of your questions and the responses you've received
• Uploaded files — documents, PDFs, images, or any other files you've added to a workspace
• Knowledge facts or profile information — the structured facts Varen has accumulated
• Session history — the record of your conversations and their branches

The encrypted tunnel

Your node connects to the Varen control plane through an encrypted tunnel. Traffic between your browser and your node travels through this tunnel — your browser connects to varen.tech, and varen.tech relays the connection through to your node. The control plane acts as a relay but does not inspect or store the content of the relay. It routes the connection and handles authentication; it cannot read what passes through the tunnel between your browser and your node.

This architecture means your node doesn't need to be directly reachable from the internet. The encrypted tunnel provides the connection path. Your node reaches out to the control plane; the control plane holds the connection open; your browser accesses the node through that connection.

Inference

This is the one exception worth understanding clearly. When you send a message and Varen generates a response, the text of your message and relevant context from your knowledge base are sent to an AI inference provider to generate the reply. This is the model generating the response — the text of what you asked, along with relevant facts and context, travels to the inference provider as part of each request.

The inference provider does not retain conversation history between requests — each request is independent. But the content of individual requests does travel outside your node as part of generating the response. This is the same pattern used by any cloud-based AI service, including the chat products people use every day.

Varen treats inference with the same level of trust as the chat interface itself. If you're using a hosted inference provider and have concerns about specific sensitive content, keep that content out of messages to the model — store it in uploaded files rather than pasting it into chat, and note that file content is included in inference requests when it's directly relevant to a question.

Node hosting and privacy

Three hosting models are available, and the privacy implications differ slightly between them. In all three cases, the content isolation architecture is identical — the difference is who controls the hardware and who manages updates.

Your hardware — the node runs on hardware you own, in your home or office. Your content is entirely under your physical and operational control. Varen has no physical or network access to the machine. This is the highest level of hardware sovereignty.

Your cloud account — the node runs on a cloud host provisioned under your own account (AWS, Hetzner, DigitalOcean, or similar). The infrastructure is yours; Varen has no access. Your cloud provider has the usual access rights that come with operating the underlying infrastructure — the same access any cloud provider has to any tenant's data.

Varen-hosted — Varen provisions and manages the node on infrastructure that is dedicated to your account and separate from Varen's own operational systems. Varen maintains the infrastructure (updates, monitoring, backups) but the same isolation architecture applies: your conversation content is on your node, not in Varen's systems, and Varen's operational access to the managed infrastructure is infrastructure-level, not content-level.