What a Forge you run yourself holds

If you run your own relay or Forge, TOVIO's privacy policy does not govern it. That policy covers the planned hosted service and the public websites. Your server is yours; no TOVIO processor is involved, and nothing about it reports to the project.

What it stores

• Objects — the content-addressed store. Protected paths are stored as ciphertext with wrapped keys; unprotected paths are stored as they are.
• References — lanes and tags, as convergent registers.
• Forge-side audit state — the per-actor chain heads and collaboration audit a Forge maintains. Note what this is not: each actor's local read/decrypt audit chain does not replicate, so the record of who decrypted what lives on that person's own machine, not on your server. If you are running a server to satisfy an accountability obligation, that gap is the thing to plan around.
• Collaboration state, on a Forge — proposals, reviews, checks, events.
• Connection identities and access control — which identities may connect and write.

What it cannot read

The same boundary that applies to a hosted server applies to your own: it is designed to operate with zero plaintext for any protected object. It holds no recipient secret and no content key, and there is no server-side read check that could be reconfigured to grant one. Read access is granted by wrapping a key for an identity, which is a client-side act.

That said, an operator with shell access to the machine is a different threat from the server software itself, and running the server does not exempt you from the visibility described in What a remote sees when you sync: unprotected content, graph shape, sizes, and policy expressions are all readable on disk.

What you take on by running it

Backups, retention, access control, key custody, and any data-protection obligations to the people whose data it holds. TOVIO's subprocessor register, retention statements, and deletion commitments describe the project's own services — they say nothing about yours, and cannot be pointed to on your behalf.

The Forge is a commercial product

The engine, CLI, SDKs, and specification are Apache-2.0. The Forge is a separate proprietary product. Which one you run changes the licence, not the confidentiality boundary described above.