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Aethel Beta
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FOR Windows 11

Your memories never leave this PC.

Aethel records your screen — so privacy here is not a policy page, it is the architecture. One local SQLite vault on your own disk, and no code path that could upload it.

Download for Windows See the data isolation architecture
Local vault
Banking auto-shielded
Pause anytime
Active monitoring
Data uploaded to the cloud
0 BYTES
Remote or cloud processing sessions
0
Share of processing done locally
100% LOCAL
DATA BOUNDARY // CHAPTER 01

The split: account vs. machine

Your account manages

AETHEL SERVERS

Your subscription and licence only. The optional account exists to bill Pro and activate a seat on this device — it never receives a frame, an OCR string or a search query.

  • Sign-in is optional; capture works signed out
  • Licence and subscription state
  • No screen content, ever — there is no field for it

That is the whole list. Nothing here can receive your screen.

Stays on this PC — always

LOCAL SSD ONLY

Every captured frame and every OCR string stays inside your Windows profile, in one SQLite file the app opens directly.

  • Every captured frame and visual screenshot
  • Extracted text and OCR metadata strings
  • Your full searchable historical timeline
  • The ONNX vector embedding index

0 bytes of this ever upload. No endpoint accepts screen data.

STORAGE ARCHITECTURE // CHAPTER 02

A vault on your disk.

Stored locally

Saved directly into your Windows profile directory. You own the SQLite file and the frame cache, and you can move or delete either.

%APPDATA%\Aethel Project\Aethel\Aethel

Direct user ownership and control

No sync, ever

Zero cloud mirroring and zero background telemetry. Nothing you capture — no frame, no OCR string, no query — has a network path out of this machine.

Screen data egress: none

100% offline-first guarantee

Planned

Encrypted at rest

Not yet shipped. The DPAPI bridge exists and is unit-tested against the real crypt32.dll, but the storage layer does not route through it — see the note below.

%APPDATA% vault · currently unencrypted

On the roadmap, stated plainly

CAPTURE PIPELINE // IN FULL

One frame, four steps, no exit.

Where your data actually goes

LOCAL PIPELINE · NO UPLOAD
01

Screen capture

Every display, once per tick, straight into GPU memory.

DXGI · BGRA
02

Local dHash check

Perceptual hash compared against the last frame on that monitor.

64-BIT HASH
03

Local SQLite FTS5

Changed frames only, written into your local vault on disk.

LOCAL FILE
04

Zero data egress

No screenshot, index or query ever leaves this machine.

0 BYTES OUT
AETHEL
CLOUD
BLOCKED

Frames are hashed and stored on this machine only. The client holds no credentials capable of uploading a screenshot, and no query is ever sent to a server.

USER GOVERNANCE // CHAPTER 03

You hold every switch.

Whatever is remembered, whatever is masked, and whatever is deleted — all of it is a setting you own, and each one takes effect at the engine rather than on the display.

Auto-shielded apps

Password managers and other sensitive apps are blocked at the rule engine before a frame is ever handed to the capture path.

RULE ENGINE

Incognito guard

Any window titled incognito, InPrivate or private browsing is blocked unconditionally — it does not depend on your rule list being configured.

ALWAYS ON

Scheduled blinds

Suppress recording outside the hours you choose — the default window is 6:00 PM to 8:00 AM — and the toggle now persists across launches.

PERSISTED TOGGLE

Keyword purge

Add your own apps, domains and phrases to the exclusion list. Anything matching is dropped by the same engine that handles the defaults.

LOCAL RULE LIST

Pause anytime

One tray action stops capture entirely, and the tray dot changes colour so the state is never ambiguous.

TRAY CONTROL

Delete anything

The retention service prunes captures past your window and physically removes the matching frame files from disk, on a schedule or on demand.

RETENTION SERVICE
SYSTEM TRAY HUD & VISUAL STATE

Spyware hides. Aethel doesn't.

The tray icon reflects the engine's real state, so a glance tells you whether anything is being recorded — including when it is not.

WINDOWS TASKBAR STATUS TRAY HOST
Emerald dot
Recording — saving locally
Amber dot
Paused, or a shield rule is active
Red dot
Recording off — engine disabled
POLICY & TERMS // SUMMARY

The short version.

Is this spyware?
Spyware hides. Aethel shows its operational status at all times via a persistent tray icon, pauses instantly, and keeps every index on your own physical PC.
Where does my data live?
On your own hard drive, in a local SQLite vault. Nothing you capture is ever uploaded: there is no endpoint that could accept a screenshot, and the optional account used for licence activation never receives screen content.
What about private browsing and banking apps?
Any InPrivate or Incognito window is dropped unconditionally, before a frame is even captured. Password managers and major banking and payment domains ship on the exclusion list by default.
Will it slow my PC down?
Two tiny local models operate with an aggregate footprint of approximately 300 MB RAM. Frame analysis pauses during active 3D games, on battery saver, and while you are away from the keyboard.

Stop losing what you've already found.

Your memory. Your machine. Install the client and let it learn your workflow quietly — 100% offline.

Download for Windows

Windows 11 (x64 / ARM64) · 100% offline engine · Standalone MSIX installer