VILLAGES

Villages - Privacy Policy

Version 2.1 - 9 September 2026. Applies to the Villages desktop app, the Villages connector for AI assistants (villages-v1-production.up.railway.app), and villages.work.

Villages exists to hold sensitive things carefully. This policy is written to be actually read. Where it says "we", that currently means Villages' founder, AJ (Edward Ashton Johnson), operating from the United Kingdom, who acts as the data controller. Contact: aj@weclic.co.uk.

The short version

Villages maps your real network, notices when someone you know can help with what you are working on, and drafts the message. To do that it needs to know who you know and what people are dealing with. It gets that from sources you connect, on your own Mac wherever possible, keeps the distilled minimum, and shows it to exactly one person: you. It never sells data, never advertises, never trains AI models on your data, and never builds a shared profile of anyone by combining what different users know.

What Villages stores

People in your network. Names, roles, companies and links, from files you provide (a LinkedIn export, phone contacts), from sources you connect (below), or from facts you state in conversation.

How you interact. Who you correspond and meet with, how often, and when. Villages keeps counts and dates, not content: never the body of an email, never a message, never a recording.

Distilled signals. One-line facts about people, each with its source and date, such as "raising a seed round, Aug 2026" or a single short quote from a call that captures what someone needs. Never a transcript, never a chat log.

Your own profile (the "twin"). Distilled facts about you: goals, challenges, constraints, how you work. Each carries where it came from and how confident Villages is. Anything that might be personal or tender (doubt about your own role, health, family, a crisis) is never stored quietly. Villages asks you first, in plain terms: who can know this - anyone, people in your network, people in your close circles, or no one? "No one" means it is not kept. The most sensitive entries are stored in two parts: a locked specific version that only you can unlock in the moment, and a general version ("navigating founder-role doubt") that Villages may use to find people who have been through the same thing.

Account and billing. Your sign-in identity (name and email address, via WorkOS) and, when you subscribe, a Stripe customer reference. Villages never sees or stores your card details.

What Villages never stores

Raw emails, messages or call recordings. Other people's intimate details (their health, relationships, private difficulties), even when they appear in your own material. Anything you have asked it to forget. Anything sensitive about you without asking you first.

Where the context comes from, and what leaves your Mac

Wherever a source can be processed on your own computer, it is. The Villages desktop app does the work locally and uploads only a summary.

WhatsApp and iMessage. Gathered from the desktop apps on your Mac. Uploaded by default: who you talk to, how often, and when. Message text and phone numbers stay on the Mac.

Going deeper (opt-in). If you choose "Distil my chats", Villages goes through your whole message history with each person, including the iPhone backup on your Mac where there is one, and distils what the chat says: what that person is working on and needs, how you two support each other, the shape of the relationship, and how you write to them. Each chat's text passes through Villages' server once, in pieces, to be distilled in memory, and is discarded the moment that is done; it is never written to disk, and only the distillation is kept. Anything private about the other person (their romantic life, health, family or money difficulties, substances, grief) is dropped by rule, both in the instructions the model follows and by a second check afterwards. Anything tender about you follows your storage setting (below). You can turn this off at any time; what was already distilled stays until you delete it.

Your storage setting. You decide what Villages may keep about you when something tender comes up in a call or a chat: ask you each time (the default), keep it visible to Villages only, keep it and let people in your network or only your close circles know the general version, or never keep anything tender. It is in the app, under "What Villages may keep about you", and your AI assistant can change it on your instruction.

LinkedIn. Your connections export (name, headline, company, connection date), uploaded as provided.

Google (Gmail and Calendar). Connected with your permission through Google sign-in. Villages requests read-only access to Gmail message metadata and read-only access to your calendar. It uses only senders, recipients and dates from Gmail, and attendees and dates from Calendar; it never accesses message bodies (the permission it asks for does not allow that) and does not use subject lines or meeting titles. Processing happens on your Mac. Uploaded, per person you correspond or meet with: their name, a one-way hash of their email address (not the address itself), their organisation's domain where it is a work domain, and monthly counts of emails sent, emails received and meetings. Your Google sign-in token is stored only on your Mac, in the system keychain, and can be revoked at any time from your Google account or by disconnecting in the app.

Villages' use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. In particular, Google user data is used only to provide the features described here, is never used for advertising, is never sold, is never used to train AI or machine-learning models, and is never read by a human except with your explicit permission, for security purposes, or where required by law.

Call recorders (Fathom, Fireflies, Granola). If you link a recorder, Villages fetches each call's transcript, distils it into a few lines per participant (what they are working on, need or have been through, plus at most one short quote) and a few lines about you, and then discards the transcript. The transcript passes through Villages' server in memory for that step only and is never written to disk or kept. Your recorder API key is stored encrypted on the server. Granola has no cloud API, so Granola notes are gathered from its cache on your Mac and sent for the same one-step distillation.

Your AI assistant. When you use Villages inside Claude, ChatGPT or another assistant, that assistant may save distilled facts to your Villages store on your instruction (for example after scanning your calendar through its own connector). The conversation itself stays in your assistant, under your agreement with its provider.

Public web research. When you ask Villages to "enrich" a profile of someone already in your network, or to research a person you want to reach cold, it searches the public web and stores a short sourced profile of what that person has publicly said and done. Research on people outside your network may be cached and shared between users, because it is drawn entirely from public sources; nothing from your private store is ever included.

The people in your network (who never signed up)

Your network is made of people, so your Villages store inevitably holds information about them, and they have not signed anything. Here is the deal we hold ourselves to on their behalf. Everything stored about them comes from your own interactions and material, or from what they have published publicly; nothing is collected behind their backs. What is stored is the distilled minimum: a role, a company, a one-line fact, never their message content. It is visible to exactly one person: you. Villages never combines what different users know about the same person; there is no shared private profile of anyone, anywhere in the system. The most private things about them are deliberately not stored even when they appear in your own material. In legal terms this processing rests on legitimate interests (the same basis as every address book and CRM) and we hold a written assessment of it. If someone in your network objects to being remembered by Villages, they can email us and we will remove them from the relevant store within 30 days.

Communities

If you belong to a community that uses Villages, Villages may confirm your membership by matching your sign-in email or name against that community's member list, and may let you search a directory of fellow members' public professional track records (drawn from the community's own records and public sources). Your private store is never shared with the community or its other members. If you are not a member of any community, nothing about communities is shown or stored.

Where it lives and who can see it

Your data sits in your own isolated store. Every request is authenticated (sign-in via WorkOS) and can only read or write your own slice; there is no code path to another user's data. Hosting is on Railway in the EU (West) region, encrypted in transit; recorder keys are additionally encrypted at rest. As the infrastructure operator, AJ can technically access the server; in practice your data is accessed only to support you at your request, to debug with your permission, or if the law requires it - never out of curiosity, for sales, or for training.

What Villages does not do with your data

No selling. No advertising. No sharing with third parties beyond the processors listed below. No use of your data to train AI models, by us or by anyone we work with.

Processors we rely on

How long we keep it

For as long as you have an account. Disconnecting a source stops new data from that source immediately; what was already distilled stays in your store until you delete it. If you delete your account, your store is erased from the server and its backups within 30 days. Recorder API keys and Google tokens are removed the moment you disconnect that source.

Your rights (UK and EU GDPR)

At any time, by email or by asking your AI assistant, you can: see and export everything Villages holds on you; correct anything (your word always outranks the system's inference); delete anything or everything; object to any processing; and disconnect any source or the whole connector, which stops access instantly. We respond within 30 days, usually much faster.

Children

Villages is for working adults and is not intended for anyone under 18.

Honesty about where we are

Villages is an early product run by a small team (of one). The security is real: authenticated access, per-user isolation, encrypted transport, EU residency, keys encrypted at rest. Formal certifications (SOC 2) and independent audits are on the roadmap, not complete. If that matters for your situation, wait; we would rather lose a tester than surprise one. If we ever have a breach or a material change to this policy, you will hear it from us directly and promptly.

Contact and complaints

aj@weclic.co.uk for questions, exports, deletions and complaints. You also have the right to complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk) if you believe your data is being mishandled.