VILLAGES

Villages - Privacy Policy

Version 2.7 - 29 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 means Villages Networks Ltd, the UK company behind Villages, which acts as the data controller. Its founder, AJ (Edward Ashton Johnson), is the person to contact. 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. Villages notes who you talk to, how often and when, and goes through your history with the people you message most (your closest 50 on the trial, 150 once you subscribe) to keep a few notes about each: what they are working on and need, how you two support each other, how you write to them, and a short note of what you last talked about. It uses the iPhone backup on your Mac where there is one. 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 notes are kept. Phone numbers stay on the Mac.

Your choice. Making notes from your chats and calls, and looking people up, is on by default because it is what lets Villages spot who could help. If you would rather it didn't, choose "Just who and how often" in Settings ("How deep Villages goes"): Villages then keeps only who you talk to, how often and when, and nobody is looked up. Either way, 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, and anything tender about you follows your storage setting (below). 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, and email address where the person shared one with you), uploaded as provided. Only the connections list is used; your LinkedIn messages stay in the file.

Google (Gmail and Calendar). Connected with your permission through Google sign-in. Villages asks for read-only access to Gmail and read-only access to your calendar. From Gmail it uses senders, recipients and dates, plus up to 150 of your own sent emails to learn how you write (your usual greetings, sign-offs, length and tone) so that drafts sound like you. Those sent emails pass through Villages' server once to build a short set of notes on your writing style and are then discarded; no email text is kept. It does not use the emails other people send you, subject lines or meeting titles. From Calendar it uses attendees and dates. The counting 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), a few lines about you, and a short note of what the call covered (topics, decisions, next steps, so you can ask "what did we last talk about"), 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.

The browser extension (Chrome). If you install the Villages extension, it works on two pages: Gmail and LinkedIn profiles. When you open or write an email, it takes the names and addresses of the people on that email; when you open a LinkedIn profile, the name and the profile address. Each email address is turned into a one-way hash in your browser before anything is sent; the address itself never leaves the page. The extension sends only that hash, the name and, on LinkedIn, the profile address to your own Villages store and asks one question: is this someone I know? If it is, the panel shows what your own store already holds about them. On a LinkedIn profile you open, it also gathers the public work history shown there (the roles and dates in the Experience section) and saves it to that person's profile in your private store, so their background is right when Villages suggests who could help with something. It never runs on the inbox list or on any other website. Nothing is created from a lookup; a person is only matched, never added. The notes you type in its panel, and anything you tell it in the chat box, update that person's profile; the chat text itself is not kept. "Research deeper" runs the same public-web enrichment described below. The extension signs in with the same account as the app and holds its sign-in token in the browser's extension storage; signing out removes it.

Context from your emails, with your say-so. A coming version of the extension can, if you turn it on, gather context from the email you are reading or writing to work out what you are trying to do (a hire, a deal, an introduction, a question), so that Villages can suggest the two or three people in your own network who could help. What leaves your browser is a short line describing the ask, never the message itself. No email text is stored, on your Mac or on our server, and no email text is ever used to build anyone else's profile. This is off until you switch it on, and you can turn it off per site at any time.

Public web research. Villages looks up the public work history of the people you know best: automatically for your closest 300 on the trial and 1,000 once you subscribe, and whenever you ask about someone else, including a person you want to reach cold. It searches the public web (which can include someone's public LinkedIn page) and stores a short sourced profile of what that person has publicly said and done. It never logs in to LinkedIn or any other site to collect anything, and a fact is only kept when a page names the person and matches something you already know about them. You can stop the automatic look-ups by choosing "Just who and how often" in Settings, and add anyone to a "don't research" list. 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.

Villages for Teams (referrals)

If you use Villages for Teams, a company you run or refer for holds a small shared record: its open roles, who can refer, and the referrals made. Your private store is not part of it. When Villages suggests that someone you know fits a role, that suggestion is computed from your own store and shown only to you; the company sees nothing until you choose to refer someone. A referral shares the candidate's name and the reason you wrote. Their contact details are shared only after you confirm they have agreed to be put forward, and Villages drafts the message you send them first so that consent is real. Past roles captured from a LinkedIn profile you open with the extension go into your private store only. Companies see referrals and their status; they never see your network, your other referrals to other companies, or anyone else's.

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. Everything is encrypted in transit, and your private store is encrypted at rest with a key of its own, so a copy of the disk is unreadable. Recorder keys are encrypted the same way. 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.

How AI is used, and what it keeps

Villages uses AI to turn your material into short notes and to answer your questions. It does this through a small number of specialist AI providers in the US, each under a written agreement.

Transfers to the US are covered by the UK's approved safeguards (the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, or the UK International Data Transfer Agreement). If you would like the names of our current providers, email us and we will send the list.

When you use Villages inside your own Claude or ChatGPT, that conversation runs in your own account, under your own agreement with that company.

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 erase your account, your store is removed from the server at once and from 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 you can: see and export everything Villages holds on you (one click at villages-v1-production.up.railway.app/teams/account, or from the app, gives you a zip of your whole store as readable files); read the access log, which lists every read and write of your store and how it happened; correct anything (your word always outranks the system's inference); delete anything, or erase everything yourself, immediately, with no email needed (the same page, or by asking your AI assistant); object to any processing; and disconnect any source or the whole connector, which stops access instantly. Anything you cannot do yourself, email us and 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, your store and keys encrypted at rest, and registration with the ICO. 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. Villages is registered with the UK Information Commissioner's Office as a data controller, reference C2045507. You also have the right to complain to the ICO (ico.org.uk) if you believe your data is being mishandled.