Privacy

What we collect

Nothing. There are no sign-ups, no forms, no comment boxes, and no login. We run no analytics (no Google Analytics, no Plausible, no Fathom — none), set no cookies, and load no advertising or tracking pixels. Your browser makes no third-party requests when you read these pages: the fonts are served from adna.network itself, and there are no embedded widgets, iframes, or remote scripts.

What is stored in your browser

If you switch between light and dark mode, we save that choice — the word theme. If you work through the intro course, we save which lessons you have finished — under adna:course:v1. Both live in your browser's localStorage, so the site remembers them on your next visit. Neither ever leaves your device, neither is sent to us or to anyone else, and you can clear both at any time through your browser. They exist to serve you, not to identify you.

Performance measurement

The site measures how fast each page loads in your own browser — standard web performance numbers like "how long until the largest element painted". Those numbers are now sent to Vercel, the host described above, so we can see whether the site is actually fast for the people using it rather than only on our own machines.

What is sent is the timing itself, the page it belongs to, and coarse technical context your browser already reveals to any site. No cookie is set for this, nothing extra is stored on your device, and we do not receive anything that names you or lets us follow you between pages. We see aggregate speed, not visitors. Vercel's handling of what it receives is governed by Vercel's privacy policy, exactly as with the server logs above.

A second measurement still stays entirely on your device: the same timings are also raised inside the page itself, where they exist only in memory while the page is open and are discarded when you leave. That one has never been sent anywhere and still is not.

Hosting & server logs

The site is a set of pre-built static files hosted on Vercel. Like every web host, Vercel processes the standard technical metadata your browser sends with any request — your IP address and user-agent — to actually deliver the pages and to keep the service secure and available. We do not receive, store, or analyse that data ourselves, and we do not combine it with anything else. Vercel's handling of it is governed by Vercel's privacy policy.

Your aDNA vault stays yours

aDNA is an open standard for plain-Markdown, local-first knowledge vaults. A vault you build with aDNA lives on your own machine and is never pushed anywhere unless you choose to configure a remote. Nothing about your vault — its contents, structure, or the credential names it indexes — is transmitted to us by using this site or the standard. This site is documentation; it is not a service that ingests your data.

If you work with regulated data

This site's own examples reach into rare-disease research, so it is worth saying plainly what aDNA is. It is an open specification for how knowledge files and directories are named and annotated — a file-layout convention, not a system that runs. Adopting it transmits nothing, because a naming convention has nothing to transmit with.

Because of that, we make no regulatory claim about it at all: nothing here is certified, approved, audited, or warranted under any regime. If you keep regulated material in a vault, the obligations that attach to it — HIPAA, GDPR, IRB review, or whatever governs your work — rest entirely with you and the tools you actually run: your machine, your storage, your agents, your institution's rules. A directory layout cannot discharge any of them, and nothing on this site should be read as though it could.

Links to other sites

We link out to places like GitHub, the projects in the network, and the tools aDNA composes with. Once you follow a link, you are on someone else's site under their own privacy terms — we have no control over, and take no responsibility for, how they handle your data.

Questions or corrections

This is an open-source project. If you have a privacy question — or you think something on this page is inaccurate — open an issue on the canonical repository and a maintainer will follow up in the open.

Published by aDNA Network. Last updated 2026-09-03. If this posture ever changes — for example, if aggregate, privacy-respecting analytics are ever added — we will update this page before the change ships, and note it in the site changelog.