Privacy Policy
Rana LLC (hereafter referred to as “Rana” or “the Company”) works hard to minimize data collection and to preserve the privacy of our customers and their data. Each component of the Rana Ecosystem attempts to minimize the creation of data and identifiers that could be used to track, identify, or disambiguate end-users unless absolutely necessary. Since the technical details of each product and service in the Rana Ecosystem differ, please consult the table below for a summary of how this affects each of Rana’s products, services, and integrations.
Privacy Identifiers
| Name | Identifier | Exposure | 3rd-Party Scripts |
|---|---|---|---|
| RanaEngine | Public Key | CloudFlare, GUN Relay (User Controlled) | No |
| RanaRemix | Public Key | CloudFlare, GUN Relay (User Controlled) | No |
| RanaPod | Public Key | Solid, GUN Relay (User Controlled), ActivityPub (User Controlled) | No |
| Rana Network | Login Cookie | CloudFlare | Stripe |
| Discord: Rana User App | Discord Login | Discord | Discord Server Dependent |
| Discord: Rana Server App | Discord Login | Discord | Discord Server Dependent |
Terms References
| Company | Terms 1 | Terms 2 | Terms 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rana | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Community Guidelines |
| CloudFlare | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Service-Specific Terms |
| Discord | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Community Guidelines |
| Discord | Developer Policy | Developer Terms of Service | Additional Terms |
| Stripe | Privacy Policy | Privacy Center | Developer Agreement |
No Access to Your Data
RanaEngine runs locally in the environment of a user’s own web browser. The Company cannot access the data stored in a user’s browser at any time, including their Collections, Knowledge Base, or any other parts of the product. The only visibility that the Company can have over end-user data is when such data is specifically sent to Rana.ai’s cloud services via CloudFlare, or is shared via another network such as GUN, ActivityPub, Solid, or another system offering public access to the data. All data in RanaEngine is private by default and will not be shared with anyone until a user manually alters these settings or copies such data to a shared or public location online.
No Tracking or Surveillance
Rana does not want your data, does not want to track you, and works to minimize the data collected in the use of our products and services. Use of RanaEngine does not create or send any identifiers to the Company by default. This may change if a user chooses to use server resources provided by Rana such as a Rana GUN Relay, logging in to a Rana.ai account, connecting to a RanaPod hosted by Rana, or otherwise engaging with Rana-provided cloud services.
No Advertising and No Selling User Data
Rana does not use digital advertising in our products and services, since it violates our principle of “Maximize Signal, Minimize Noise” by being disruptive to end-users state of mind. Machine learning makes it trivially easy to block, remove, and suppress advertising content anyway, so Rana is happy to be exploring other monetization methods instead such as subscriptions, sponsorships, partnerships, and other such opportunities instead of advertising while also preventing the disclosure of user data and user identity.
Locally Installed, Works Offline, Logins Optional
Before high-speed Internet access became available, software used to be installed from physical media like disks or CDs locally onto a user’s hard drive. Applications could be launched immediately, without any obstacles such as a login screen, checking for Internet connectivity, or leaking private details in the background. By using Progressive Web App technology (PWAs), RanaEngine can be installed locally on a user’s devices while also gaining data persistence assurances to protect program data, and can once again provide the advantages of locally installed software while also gaining additional features when Internet connectivity is available. RanaEngine is locally installed browser software, similar to traditional desktop software, but loaded through a web browser for universal compatibility, ease of updates, and simple collaboration features. As locally installed software, end-users are entirely responsible for their use of the software and any actions taken, any content created or modified by use of the software, and any consequences thereof. End-users must comply with local laws and regulations, and Rana cannot be held responsible and will not be liable for any actions taken by end-users including if such actions involve the use of RanaEngine, Rana servers, or any other product or service of the Rana ecosystem provided by Rana.
Local Models = No Data Leakage
RanaEngine runs ML models locally on your own devices and hardware cluster, keeping your data safe from disclosure or repurposing by third parties including Rana. Cloud-based AI services oftentimes use user data for fine-tuning or to train additional AI models at the expense of user privacy, so RanaEngine is designed to process end-user data safely only on hardware that you trust, such as the nodes in your own cluster or in collaboration with your chosen trusted associates using distributed, decentralized, and peer-to-peer connectivity options.
Peer-to-Peer, Decentralized, and Distributed Connectivity
The Rana ecosystem has been designed with Internet-enabled features using peer-to-peer, decentralized, and distributed techniques first and foremost, in order to preserve end-user privacy and to ensure the scalability of the Rana network. When RanaEngine connects to other installations of RanaEngine to build a cluster, the GUN decentralized network is used to resolve the connection between nodes, after which the nodes are able to communicate directly with each other using peer-to-peer techniques. A similar process is used when RanaEngine nodes controlled by different end-users communicate with each other as well. For transferring extremely large files such as machine learning models, distributed transport technologies such as WebTorrent may be used as well.
In order to preserve end-user privacy while using peer-to-peer functionality, Rana recommends installing a VPN or proxy service such as the free 1.1.1.1 from CloudFlare using fully encrypted DNS and transport via the WARP protocol and malware filtering. Since Rana’s serverless cloud functionality is also hosted by the CloudFlare network, using 1.1.1.1 has the additional bonus of optimizing performance and throughput for the various features of the Rana ecosystem.
Minimal Analytics
In order to provide cloud services and monitor the health of our network, traffic to Rana’s cloud servers will be logged, and roll-up and anonymized analytics created from such traffic for performance analysis, but this does not include the need to uniquely identify end-users by default. This is powered by CloudFlare Web Analytics, a privacy-preserving performance measurement system that does not need to uniquely identify visitors. Users may choose to optionally share more detailed analytics data with Rana, including debugging information via feedback forms with full transparency of the data being sent, and requiring end-user manual approval before sending.
Open-Protocols
The Internet never would have been able to scale as far and as quickly as it did without open protocols. We have seen the limitations and trade-offs of walled gardens, it’s time to return to open-protocols, easy sharing, and widely replicated, human-curated knowledge. We had a taste of this in the early Web 2.0 era with RSS Feeds, open-access REST APIs, and content mashups, but this golden age disappeared all-too-quickly and such data streams became locked behind logins and paywalls.
Rana uses open-protocols throughout our ecosystem, including Solid Protocol for storage, ActivityPub for social networking, and GUN for connectivity and synchronization, all of which are freely accessible to other developers without special permissions or gatekeeping, and can easily be extended and repurposed for other uses. Rana is committed to continuing to use open-protocols whenever possible moving forward as standards and technologies improve, in order to maximize the utility of our ecosystem.
Source-Accessible, Local-First
One of the most beautiful parts of the architecture of the web is that web pages are always rendered locally, directly in a user’s browser. This ensures that the source code of every page is also directly accessible to end-users, for examination, modification, and adaptation to different browser environments on different devices. All parts of the Rana ecosystem including RanaEngine that run directly in the browser and are local-first may have their source code examined by these same browsers, and will always remain transparent to end-users. Rana also integrates and extends many different open-source libraries and projects to power our core functionality, and we make these open-source components freely available to the world in our GitHub account at: https://github.com/orgs/RanaEngine/repositories
For the cloud-hosted services in the Rana ecosystem, Rana reserves the right to selectively disclose the source code of the underlying technologies at our discretion, while working hard to remain compatible with open protocols and standards whenever possible.
Open-Source Licenses
Here is a table of the open-source software that Rana depends on: