Privacy policy

1. Who is responsible

Aura Linux is an operating system designed and published by Yohan Simon (“the publisher”).

Contact for any question about your data: yohan.simon3@gmail.com

2. The principle: your data stays with you

• Aura Linux collects no personal data: no mandatory account, no telemetry, no usage statistics, no advertising.
• The publisher receives nothing from your computer. Your settings, notes, reports and logs stay on your disk (~/.config/aura, ~/.cache/aura, ~/.local/share/aura and Aura's system folders).
• The only Internet connections are those required by the features you use. They are listed below.
• By default, Aura also blocks the telemetry of installed software and tracking by websites and media (audience measurement, ads, session recorders, social-network pixels, streaming).

3. What stays on your computer

• Appearance settings (style, light/dark mode, accent colour, dock, widgets, schedules, emoji set, brightness, animations), notes, pins, files pinned to the ChromeOS shelf.
• Protection: your “allow / deny / ask” decisions for remote access, the sudo log, checksums of security files and guardians, the guardians' weekly report.
• PIN: only a salted scrypt hash is stored, never the PIN itself. Secure folders are encrypted (gocryptfs); Aura keeps no password.
• Camera: the list of allowed or blocked programs and the camera usage log (~/.local/share/aura/camera-journal.txt).
• Notifications: history of the last 60 (ChromeOS style) or 200 (Windows style), on the computer only.
• Photos: removing GPS position and hidden information happens entirely on the computer.
• File sentinel: new or modified files are checked (viruses, trojans, fake documents, macros, damaged files) entirely on the computer. Dangerous files are moved to quarantine (~/.local/share/aura/quarantaine) and the log stays in ~/.local/share/aura/sentinelle-fichiers.log. No file and no file name is ever sent.
• Data breaches: the e-mail addresses you monitor and the breaches found (~/.config/aura/fuites.json, readable by you only).
• Masked addresses: your SimpleLogin or addy.io access key and your list of aliases (~/.config/aura/alias.json, readable by you only).
• Screen time (foreground app, once a minute), saved SSH servers and computers, reports you create (diagnostics, slowness, sound, online exposure, crashes). Nothing leaves the computer without your action. Aura stores no remote-connection password.

4. Internet connections, feature by feature

Each service applies its own privacy policy. Aura adds no identifier. Emoji fonts (Fluent, Twemoji) are downloaded once, while building the ISO, not from your computer.

5. Optional features, off until you start them

• “What does the Internet know about me?”: checks your e-mail in known breaches (XposedOrNot) and your public Gravatar profile. If you provide your own Anthropic API key, a web search is made with the information you enter. Nothing is kept except the report on your computer.
• Parental control (off by default): once enabled, visited site addresses are checked on the computer against the SquidGuard rules, then sent, with no account or identifier, to the Cloudflare for Families (family filter) or Quad9 name service. Rules are updated weekly from GitHub or their original server. The log of blocked sites and bypass attempts stays 7 days on the computer, never sent.
• Security check: every week, Aura checks updates, known vulnerabilities, permissions of sensitive files, SSH integrity and the firewall, on the computer. Only the list of updates is downloaded from the Ubuntu repositories; the report stays on the computer. For firmware (BIOS/UEFI), the update list comes from LVFS (fwupd).
• Crash reports: prepared on your computer. Never sent automatically, unless a sending address was configured and you enabled sending yourself.
• Emoji avatar: the image is made on the computer and saved as your account picture (~/.face and the system accounts service).

6. Camera, microphone and documents

• The camera is switched off at every startup; only the person in front of the screen can turn it back on, with their password. A program started remotely, without a window, deleted from disk, or streaming the image over the network is stopped and the camera switched off.
• When you download an administrative document (tax notice, certificate, bank details, payslip, ID…), Aura offers to store it in a secure folder. Detection uses the file name, on the computer.

7. Browsers

• Aura Browser: ad blocker, tracking protection, third-party cookies refused, “Do Not Track” on, passwords not saved by default.
• Firefox: locked enhanced protections (tracking, browser fingerprinting, cryptomining, e-mail tracking pixels), HTTPS-only mode, origin not passed to other sites.
• French public sites (impots.gouv.fr, ameli.fr, caf.fr, FranceConnect, URSSAF, France Travail…): sessions are erased when the browser closes, so malware cannot reuse them. Fake sites posing as public services are flagged as traps.
• Private browsing: private windows are protected like the others. In Firefox, the ad blocker and protection extensions are active there, strict tracking protection applies, tracker cookies are refused and the “Global Privacy Control” signal (do not sell or share my data) is sent. For the whole computer, telemetry and trackers of every category (big tech, social networks, ad networks, session recorders, data brokers) are blocked, private windows included.
• Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Opera are not welcome: they are blocked out of the box (apt, Flatpak, downloaded file, Windows version) to protect users' privacy.
• Google tracking (analytics, ads) is blocked in every browser and in Android; Gmail, Drive, Docs and other Google services remain usable (they can be closed in Settings > Privacy > Google); after 1 hour of inactivity the user is signed out of Google, and a browser left running without a window is closed. This happens on the computer: no data is sent. The same protections apply to Microsoft (Outlook, OneDrive, Office, Bing), Yahoo and AOL, and Apple (iCloud). In Android, Google apps are removed, except the Play Store if installed; Proton is offered instead.
• Links imitating a known site with deceptive letters (homographs) are flagged before opening.
• Known scam, malware and phishing sites are blocked in every browser.
• Network: visited site names are sent encrypted (DNS-over-TLS) to Quad9 (Switzerland, no logs) instead of the ISP; random MAC address; temporary IPv6 addresses; no WebRTC address leak; no incoming connection accepted by the firewall. The “See what sites see about you” button queries Mullvad (am.i.mullvad.net) only when the user clicks.
• Media filter (off by default): the user who enables it chooses the sites to hide; the list stays on the computer.

8. Your rights

As the publisher holds no data about you, there is nothing to communicate, correct or erase. You keep full control of your computer: you can delete ~/.config/aura, ~/.cache/aura, ~/.local/share/aura and your reports at any time.

For the third-party services listed above, your rights (access, rectification, erasure, objection, portability — GDPR articles 15 to 22) are exercised with each of them. You may also contact the CNIL (cnil.fr).

9. Changes

This policy evolves with Aura Linux. The date at the top shows the latest version, shipped with each system version. This version adds: protected private browsing, file sentinel, Aura Studio kernel, SquidGuard rules for parental control, data-breach guardian, masked e-mail addresses, PIN, camera protection, photo protection, guardian of guardians, French public sites, ChromeOS-style notification history, emoji per style.