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Privacy sweep — August 2026

Most people run Home Assistant so that their home is not in somebody else's cloud. We think a company saying that should be able to show its working, so twice a year we go through the whole product asking one question — what do we hold, who else sees it, and can you get it all back? — and publish what we found, including the things we got wrong.

This is the first one. It was prompted by adding AI features, on the principle that if we are going to show people the exact data those send, the rest of the product should survive the same question.


What we got wrong

Four things. All fixed in the same week, none of them comfortable.

Deleting your account did not delete your data

Erasure removed your published score cards and your account row, and left the rest: your servers, your health reports — which quote entity names and log lines from your house — every message you had written to support, your API tokens, and your email address in our email delivery log. Nothing was exposed by this and nobody's data went anywhere. It simply would not have been the deletion we promised.

Erasure is now driven by a list of every table that can hold something of yours, and a test walks our live database schema and fails our build if a table appears that is on neither that list nor an explicit "contains nothing about a customer" list with a written reason. In other words, the next feature cannot quietly keep a copy of you.

Four things we store were not written down

Health check findings, support conversations, the log of what has acted on your instance through the portal, and our email delivery log were all real, all reasonable, and none of them mentioned in the privacy policy. Our policy also said we do not copy data out of your VM, which the health report quietly contradicted. All four are now described in the policy, and the VM paragraph says which two features read a slice of it and what each keeps.

Every page told a CDN you had loaded it

Our stylesheet, icon font and scripts came from a public CDN, so your browser announced each page view to a third party — including public score cards, opened by people who never signed up for anything.

Those files are now served from our own domain, and our content security policy permits no external host at all, so it cannot come back by accident. Loading a Vome page now talks to us and to nobody else.

Exercising your rights meant emailing us

Taking a copy of your data, or closing your account, worked — by asking a person, who then did it by hand. A right you have to request politely is not much of a right, so both are now buttons under Your data in the menu: one downloads everything we hold about you as a file, the other deletes it, including the instances themselves. Neither asks you why.

Our AI sub-processor was not named

The features shipped before the policy caught up. Anthropic is now listed with what it receives, what its terms say about training, and a link to its own policies — plus a page, on every report and every assistant thread, that shows you the exact request rather than describing it.

What held up

  • No trackers. No analytics, no tag manager, no session recorder, no advertising cookies — nowhere in the product. Our score-card counters are day-and-page totals with no visitor identity, and search-engine and social unfurls are excluded so they cannot inflate them.
  • Public pages set no cookie. Open a score card somebody shared and nothing is stored on your machine.
  • AI requests are not logged. We keep no copy of what is sent, in the database or in the logs, and there is a test that runs the failure path with logging turned all the way up to prove it.
  • Getting into your instance takes a key you cut. A support access grant is yours to give, expires on its own, and can be revoked mid-way. An administrator viewing the portal as you is written to your activity log every time it starts.

Still on the list

Nothing from this sweep — the last item, an unused earlier sign-in integration still sitting in our codebase, was deleted along with the two packages and the dormant callback route that came with it. The next sweep is due February 2027, and it will be published here in the same shape whether or not it makes us look good.

Added since this sweep

A sweep is a snapshot, and we would rather tell you about a new store when we build it than when we next go looking. Since August we keep two more things, both disclosed in the privacy policy:

  • A remote access log. When someone reaches a customer's Home Assistant through a Vome address, we record what happened at our edge — the address they came from, the page they asked for, and whether we let them through. Some of those addresses belong to people who are not our customers: a guest the owner let in, or a stranger trying passwords. We keep it 30 days, show it only to the owner of that home, and use it for nothing else. It exists because Home Assistant genuinely cannot see this for itself — every visitor reaches it through us, so its own warning names our plumbing instead of the person, which is alarming and useless in equal measure.
  • Device addresses. If you issue one for a phone, we store the name you gave it and when and where it was last used, so you can tell which one to switch off.

Questions, or something we have missed? privacy@vome.io. If it is a vulnerability rather than a privacy question, please use security@vome.io and the disclosure process.