---
title: Why
description: You should decide where your data lives, who may use it, and how it is sealed.
---

# Why

Ask where your notes live, who can read them and what happens if the company
holding them changes its mind. The answer is usually one you didn't choose.

your.os makes it yours to choose, for each thing you own:

- **Where it lives.** This laptop, that server, a phone, a cloud machine you
  rent. More than one, kept in sync, and movable later.
- **Who may use it.** A person, a device, an agent, a service, each granted
  exactly what it needs, for as long as it needs it, and revocable from any of
  your devices.
- **How it is sealed.** Plaintext where you want speed and search, ciphertext
  everywhere it only passes through.

## A company is just another machine

We run relays, and we'd like to run more for you. But a server of ours is a
machine you trust some amount, like any other. Give it ciphertext and it can
carry your traffic without reading it. Give it plaintext and it can search and
index for you. Either way it is your call, made per thing, and you can take it
back.

## Agents need keys, not passwords

An agent working for you should get the same thing a new laptop gets: a key,
and grants that say what it may touch. That means one folder rather than your
whole disk, until Friday rather than forever, and a record of what it did. It
gets nothing more.

## Small machines count

A Raspberry Pi in a cupboard, a router or a 3D printer should be as reachable
as your laptop. Anything that can hold a key runs the same core, from an ESP32
up. Anything smaller is reached through a machine that can.

## What we want

- Sensible defaults, so the safe thing is the easy thing.
- Real-time and offline collaboration on the same data.
- Access you can revoke, and a record of what happened.
- To know where your data and devices are, at a glance.
- Your data and compute reachable from anywhere, however small the machine.