Legal
Privacy Policy
The short version.
- The Athena application transmits no data to us. It contains no telemetry, analytics, crash reporting or licence check.
- Your conversations, mail, files, notes and calendar are stored in a file on your own computer and are not transmitted to us.
- This website sets no cookies and uses no analytics.
- If you join the launch list we hold your email address and the date you confirmed it, and use it to notify you of Athena's release.
- Once Athena is on sale, a purchase adds an order record.
The sections below set this out in full.
1. Who we are
Athena is made and sold by Jonathan Ernst (operating as an individual in Sweden), located in Stockholm, Sweden. Referred to below as “we”, “us” and “our”.
We are the data controller for the personal data described in this policy. You can reach us at hello@projectathena.dev.
2. The application
The Athena application does not transmit any data to us.
It contains no telemetry, no usage analytics, no crash reporting, no automatic update check and no licence verification. We hold no record of whether Athena has been installed, how often it is opened, or whether it is used at all.
Everything Athena stores — conversations, documents, notes, tasks, calendar entries, mail, memories, skills, API keys and settings — is held in a database file on your own computer. We hold no copy of it and have no means of accessing it. If you delete that file the data is deleted with it, and we hold no corresponding record.
Because none of this is transmitted to us, it is not personal data that we process, and the rest of this policy does not apply to it.
3. This website
This site uses no analytics, tag manager, advertising pixels, session recording or A/B testing. We do not build profiles of visitors and do not identify readers of this page.
Our hosting provider, Hostinger International Ltd (Cyprus, part of the Lithuanian Hostinger group), writes standard server logs when a page is requested. These typically contain an IP address, a timestamp, the page requested and the browser's user agent string. We use them only to keep the site running and secure — the lawful basis is our legitimate interest under Article 6(1)(f) GDPR in operating a functioning, non-abused website. We do not use them to identify individuals and we do not combine them with anything else. They are retained in accordance with Hostinger's applicable retention policies.
The site stores one item in your browser's local storage,
athena-site-theme, which remembers whether you chose the
light or dark version of this page. It is not a cookie, it is not
transmitted to us, and it contains only the value light
or dark. Clearing your site data removes it.
4. The launch list
Athena is not yet released. Until it is, the only personal data this site collects is an email address, used to notify you of the release.
The form collects one field. We do not collect a name, a company, a job title or a referral source.
| Data | Why | Lawful basis |
|---|---|---|
| Your email address | To tell you when Athena is released, and afterwards only when something significant changes — a major version, or a change to something we promised here | Consent — Article 6(1)(a) |
The address is not used for any other purpose. It is not sold, shared or rented, it is not used to build a profile of you, and it is not disclosed to any advertising network. We do not track message opens or link clicks, and our email contains no tracking pixels.
Subscription requires confirmation. When you submit the form we send one email containing a confirmation link. No address is added to the list until that link is followed. An unconfirmed request is deleted after seven days.
The effect is that an address can only be added to the list by the holder of that address.
You may withdraw consent at any time. Every message contains an unsubscribe link, and you may also request removal by writing to hello@projectathena.dev. On unsubscribe the record is deleted. We do not retain unsubscribed addresses in a suppression list or any equivalent record.
The list is stored by us. It is a table in a database on the same hosting that serves this page. It is not held by any email marketing provider. The signup form contains no third-party script and no embedded form; submitting it sends a request to this website only.
One processor sees an address, at the point a message is sent to it: Scaleway SAS (Paris, France), which delivers our email. It receives one address and one message per send. It is not given the list.
Our email is sent as plain text only. No HTML alternative is sent and no remote content is embedded, so nothing in a message can report that it was opened.
To limit abuse of the form we count recent submissions per connection. Your IP address is not stored: it is irreversibly hashed with a secret key, and the record is deleted after one hour.
For completeness: the launch-list database holds no IP address. Submitting the form is nonetheless a request to this website, and is recorded in the server log described in section 3 on the same terms, and for the same period, as any other request.
Two timestamps are stored with your address: the time of submission and the time of confirmation. The second is retained as evidence of consent, which Article 7(1) GDPR requires us to be able to demonstrate. Neither is used for any other purpose, and both are deleted with the address.
We also record that an announcement was sent to your address. This record allows an interrupted send to be resumed without duplicate delivery. It identifies the announcement only, and is deleted with your address.
If Athena is not released, the list will be deleted rather than used for another purpose.
5. When you buy Athena
Athena is not on sale yet; this section describes what will happen when it is. Buying it will be the only point at which we hold anything beyond an email address. Payment will be handled by Stripe Payments Europe, Ltd. through Stripe Checkout.
We do not receive your card details. Card numbers, expiry dates and security codes are entered on Stripe's hosted checkout page and transmitted directly to Stripe. They do not pass through our systems and are not accessible to us.
What we do receive and keep:
| Data | Why we need it | Lawful basis |
|---|---|---|
| Your email address | To send you the download, your licence key and your receipt, and to contact you about a refund | Performance of a contract — Article 6(1)(b) |
| Your name, if you give one | To issue a valid invoice | Legal obligation — Article 6(1)(c) |
| Country and, where required, billing address | To determine the correct VAT rate and to prove it was applied correctly | Legal obligation — Article 6(1)(c) |
| Order record — what was bought, when, for how much, and the Stripe transaction reference | To honour your licence and your refund right, and to meet Swedish bookkeeping law | Contract and legal obligation — Article 6(1)(b) and (c) |
We use Stripe Tax to calculate and collect the VAT due in your country. This requires Stripe to determine your location, typically from your billing address and the country your card was issued in.
This data is not sold, rented or shared for marketing purposes. Purchasers are not added to any mailing list. Any future mailing list will require a separate opt-in and will carry an unsubscribe link.
7. Third parties
The following is a complete list.
| Who | What for | What they get |
|---|---|---|
| Hostinger International Ltd (Cyprus), of the Hostinger group (HOSTINGER, UAB, Lithuania) | Serving this website and hosting the database the launch list lives in | Server logs as described in section 3, and the launch list itself, as data at rest on their disks |
| Scaleway SAS (Paris, France) | Delivering our email — the confirmation link, the launch announcement, and later your receipt and licence key | One recipient address and the contents of that one message, at the moment it is sent |
| Stripe Payments Europe, Ltd. (Ireland) — not in use yet | Payment processing and VAT calculation, from the day Athena goes on sale | Your payment details, email, and billing location |
Hostinger and Scaleway act as our processors under a data processing agreement and may not use the data they hold for their own purposes. Scaleway is given one address at a time, at the point a message is sent to it, and is not given the list. Stripe acts as an independent controller in respect of its own fraud prevention and regulatory obligations, and is described separately in section 5.
We use no analytics provider, no email marketing platform, no customer relationship management system, no content delivery network in front of this site and no error monitoring service.
8. Models you connect yourself
Athena connects to AI models. The choice of model, and where it runs, is yours. It is the only circumstance in which data leaves your machine.
If you use a local model, through Ollama, llama.cpp, LM Studio or an equivalent, no data leaves your computer. Athena operates with the network disconnected.
If you supply an API key for a cloud provider such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or OpenRouter, then the text you send to that model is sent to that provider, under their terms and their privacy policy, and their handling of it is governed by your agreement with them. Athena transmits it directly from your machine to the provider you selected. It does not pass through our systems. Your API keys are stored locally and are never transmitted to us.
The same applies to web search. If you enable it, your query is sent to the search engine you selected. Athena identifies that engine before the query is sent.
9. Your rights
Under the GDPR you have the right to:
- Ask what personal data we hold about you and get a copy of it
- Have inaccurate data corrected
- Have data erased, where we have no overriding legal reason to keep it
- Restrict or object to how we process it
- Receive it in a portable, machine-readable form
- Withdraw consent at any time, where we relied on consent
In most cases the data we hold is an email address, a purchase record, or nothing. Write to hello@projectathena.dev and we will respond within one month, free of charge.
One limitation applies. Swedish bookkeeping law (bokföringslagen) requires accounting records, including invoices, to be retained for seven years. Those records cannot be deleted on request before that period has expired.
10. How long we keep things
| What | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Invoices and accounting records | 7 years, as required by bokföringslagen |
| Your email address and licence record | As long as your licence is live, so we can re-send your download or key |
| Launch-list email addresses | Until you unsubscribe, or until we abandon the product and delete the list |
| The date you signed up and the date you confirmed — our record of your consent | Held with your address and deleted with it |
| The record that an announcement was sent to you | Held with your address and deleted with it |
| Signups that were never confirmed | 7 days, then deleted automatically |
| Hashed signup counts (anti-abuse) | 1 hour |
| Server logs | As long as permitted by Hostinger's applicable retention policies |
| Support emails | 30 days |
11. Transfers outside the EEA
We use EU-based providers where possible. Your email address does not leave the EU: it is stored on Hostinger's infrastructure in Lithuania, backed up in France, and when we write to you it is handed to Scaleway SAS in Paris. Neither the launch list nor any message we send to it is processed in the United States. Stripe Payments Europe is Irish, though Stripe may transfer data to its US parent under the EU Standard Contractual Clauses and the EU–US Data Privacy Framework.
If you connect a cloud AI provider yourself, your data goes wherever that provider operates, which is often the United States. That transfer is one you initiate, under your agreement with them. Choosing a local model avoids it entirely.
12. Changes
If this policy changes, the “last updated” date at the top changes with it. If a change materially affects people who have already bought Athena, we will notify them by email. We will not extend the scope of what we collect without doing so.
13. Contact and complaints
Questions and requests: hello@projectathena.dev.
If you are not satisfied with how we have handled your personal data, you have the right to complain to the Swedish supervisory authority, Integritetsskyddsmyndigheten (IMY) — imy.se — or to the authority in your own EU country of residence.