privacyyour files

Your files stay on your device

Indexing and reading access the Markdown files in the folder you choose. Source Markdown remains unchanged unless you explicitly save an edit, and the desktop indexing and search path does not upload those source documents.

privacythe index

The index stays in MDReader’s app data

To make search and outlines fast, CatDB builds one private SQLite index per library under the operating system’s app data directory. MDReader does not place database files beside your notes.

The index is derived data. Delete it and MDReader rebuilds it from your Markdown; the source Markdown remains unchanged.

privacynetwork

The first model load may use the network

The first indexing run may download bge-small-en-v1.5 through FastEmbed into its local model cache. Once the model is ready, embeddings and hybrid search run locally; MDReader does not offer an embedding-location setting in the current desktop release.

If the model cannot load, the library still opens and text search remains available. Indexing and semantic ranking resume after the model loads.

privacythis website

This website

This site is a static marketing and documentation site. It does not require an account. Its hosted viewer uses a small fixture workspace in the browser; that demo is separate from the desktop model-download path.

Want the mechanics? Read Local-first and privacy in the docs.