Privacy
DataSabi is designed so your network activity stays on your machine.
What DataSabi stores
DataSabi stores byte counts only:
- Which app (process name)
- How many bytes sent / received
- Which network (by SSID or interface name)
- When (per-minute buckets, rolled up over time)
That's it. Nothing else is recorded.
What DataSabi does not store
- Packet contents
- URLs or domain names you visited
- HTTP headers or request bodies
- IP addresses of remote hosts you connected to
- Any personally identifying information
Where the data lives
Everything is stored in a SQLite database at /var/lib/datasabi/usage.db on your machine, owned by the datasabi system user. The desktop app never reads this file directly — it talks to the collector over a Unix socket at /run/datasabi/collector.sock, and the collector queries the database on its behalf. Nothing is sent to any remote server.
Data is kept at different resolutions over time:
- Per-minute rows are kept for 7 days, then rolled up into hourly totals
- Hourly rows are kept for 90 days, then rolled up into daily totals
- Daily totals are kept indefinitely
Telemetry
There is no telemetry in DataSabi. No crash reports, no usage analytics, no phoning home.
Update checks
When DataSabi opens, it makes one HTTPS request to check whether a new version is available. This request reveals your IP address and the version of DataSabi you're running to GitHub's servers. No other information is sent. Updates download only when you click Update now in the dialog — nothing happens automatically.
Elevated permissions
The collector requires four Linux capabilities to do its job, all granted by systemd — the service never runs as root:
- CAP_NET_RAW and CAP_NET_ADMIN — required by libpcap to capture packets on the network interface
- CAP_SYS_PTRACE and CAP_DAC_READ_SEARCH — required to read
/proc/<pid>/exeand/proc/<pid>/fdfor other users' processes, so the collector can map each connection to the app that owns it
The service runs as the datasabi system user with NoNewPrivileges=yes. It cannot gain any capability beyond those four.
Open-source collector
The component that runs with elevated rights and touches your network traffic — datasabi-collector — is fully open source under the Apache-2.0 licence:
github.com/arkodeontech/datasabi-collector
Anyone can inspect exactly what the collector does with the packets it sees.
Next steps
Issue with this page? Email isaac@arkodeon.com