Privacy

Motel OS collects nothing unless you explicitly turn it on.

Default state

Telemetry is off. The consent checkbox in the welcome app ships unchecked.

With it unchecked, motel-telemetry-client is installed but inert and makes no

network requests of any kind. Declining is not a degraded experience: nothing in

the system behaves differently.

If you opt in

A single report is sent on install, and one heartbeat per month. Each contains

exactly these fields and nothing else:

Field	Example	Why
install_id	random UUIDv4, generated locally	Distinguish installs without identifying people
edition	core	Which edition to prioritise
version	1.0	Which releases are still in use
locale	en_US	Which translations are worth funding
cpu_arch	x86_64	Architecture support decisions
ram_bucket	8-16GB	Bucketed, never exact
gpu_vendor	amd	Vendor only — no model, no device ID

What is never collected

• IP addresses. The ingest endpoint discards them and they are not written to logs or the database.
• Hostnames, usernames, or any account data
• Hardware serial numbers, MAC addresses, or disk identifiers
• Installed package lists, running processes, or file contents
• Anything about how you use the desktop

Your control

• The install_id is random and is not linked to anything else we hold.
• Turning telemetry off stops all reporting immediately.
• Deleting /var/lib/motel/telemetry-id regenerates the identifier, severing the

link to previous reports.

Changes

This document is versioned in the repository. Any change to the collected

fields must land here in the same commit that changes the client, and the

welcome app links to this page directly from the consent checkbox.