Last updated 30 July 2026
Privacy
This is short because there is very little to say. Warden does not collect anything, and sends nothing anywhere unless you switch on the cloud model yourself.
What the software collects
Nothing is collected. Warden reads a great deal about your computer: the Windows event log, installed services, device inventory, network configuration, drive health, temperatures. All of it stays on the machine it was read from, and none of it comes to us. There is no us: no server, nowhere for it to go.
One exception, and it is off by default. If you switch on the cloud model and supply your own API key, then when it answers a diagnosis Warden sends that provider the symptom, the readings relevant to it, your Windows version, and the list of actions it may choose from. Not your files, not your browsing, not your account names, and nothing Warden has not itself measured. Their terms govern what happens to it after that, which is a real cost and the reason it is a choice rather than a default.
There is no account, no licence key, no activation, no usage analytics and no crash reporting. No identifier for you or your machine is generated, because none is needed.
What is stored, and where
All inside your own user folder:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Warden\sessionsA record of each run: what was read, what was concluded, what you approved, and whether it worked. Kept so a decision can be reopened later. Never uploaded.
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Warden\logsA plain-text log of the application's own activity.
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Warden\credentials.jsonOnly exists if you enabled the cloud model. Holds the API key you supplied and nothing else. Deleting the file switches cloud mode off.
Both are ordinary files. You can read them, copy them, or delete them at any time, and uninstalling asks before removing them.
The AI model
By default, Warden’s reasoning runs on a language model bundled with the download and executed on your processor. In that mode your machine’s configuration is never sent to a model provider, because no provider is involved at any point.
You can switch that for a hosted model, from the Model page inside the app, using an API key you obtain yourself. Doing so is the only circumstance in which anything Warden reads leaves your computer. It is off until you turn it on, the app states what is sent before it asks for the key, and every diagnosis is labelled with which model answered it.
Your key is stored in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Warden\credentials.json, separately from your settings, and no part of the application returns it once saved.
This website
This site is static and carries no analytics, no advertising and no tracking cookies. It is hosted on Vercel, which keeps standard server logs including IP addresses, as any web host does. The download link points to GitHub, which counts release downloads.
Verifying this
A privacy policy is a promise, and promises are worth what the person making them is worth. This one is checkable instead: the source is public, there is exactly one HTTP client in the project, and it points at your own machine.
Contact
Warden is a student project with no company behind it. Questions and corrections belong in a GitHub issue, where the answer is public too. See also the security page.