Day 24 of 28 · OpenClaw Challenge
Privacy & Security
⏱ 7 min
📊 Intermediate
Your agent reads your email, manages your calendar, monitors your Slack, and accesses your files. That's a lot of sensitive data.
Today you'll learn exactly how to keep it safe — and why OpenClaw's architecture makes it fundamentally different from cloud-based AI services.
The privacy advantage of open-source
With a cloud AI service (like ChatGPT or Google's Gemini), your data goes to their servers. They process it on their infrastructure. You're trusting a company with your emails, documents, and conversations.
With OpenClaw, everything runs on your machine. Your data stays with you. The only thing that leaves your computer is the request to the AI model provider — and even that can be eliminated if you run a local model.
This isn't a feature. It's the architecture.
Knowledge Check
Where does OpenClaw process your data by default?
A
Locally on your own machine — your data never leaves unless you configure it to
B
On OpenClaw's cloud servers
C
On your AI provider's servers
OpenClaw processes everything locally. Your emails, files, and conversations stay on your machine. The only external communication is with the AI model provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) for the "thinking" part — and even that can be local if you use Ollama.
What data goes where
Let's be precise about what leaves your machine:
Stays completely local: Your files, your emails (stored locally), your memory database, your workflow configurations, your tool connections
Sent to AI provider: The text of your requests and the agent's context (so the AI can think about your request). This is sent to OpenAI, Anthropic, or whoever provides your AI model.
Sent nowhere: If you use a local model (like Ollama), nothing leaves your machine. Zero. Complete data isolation.
Walk me through exactly what happens when I ask you to read an email.
Here's the exact data flow:
1. You say "read my latest email from Sarah"
2. I pull Sarah's email from your local email cache — **stays on your machine**
3. I read the email content — **processed locally**
4. I send a summary request to the AI provider: "Summarize this email about Q1 budget" — **sent to AI provider**
5. The AI returns a summary — **received from AI provider**
6. I show you the summary — **stays on your machine**
⚠️ Important: the actual email content is summarized locally first. Only the summary (not the full email) is sent to the AI for formatting.
For full privacy, use a local model and nothing leaves your machine at all.
↻ Replay conversation
Knowledge Check
How can you make OpenClaw completely private — zero data leaving your machine?
A
Turn off all tool connections
B
Disconnect from the internet entirely
C
Use a local AI model (like Ollama) instead of a cloud provider
D
It's impossible — AI always needs the cloud
Running a local AI model means the "thinking" happens on your machine too. No requests to OpenAI, no data to Anthropic. Complete isolation. The trade-off is that local models are less powerful than cloud models — but for many tasks, they're more than enough.
Security best practices
Even with a great architecture, you need good habits:
API key security — Never share your API key. Never commit it to GitHub. Never paste it in a public chat. Rotate it if you suspect it's been exposed.
Permission scoping — Give the agent only the access it needs. If it doesn't need to delete emails, don't give it delete permissions. If it doesn't need your personal calendar, only connect your work calendar.
Audit logs — Review what the agent did regularly. Every action is logged. Spot-check weekly to make sure nothing unexpected happened.
Update regularly — OpenClaw is actively maintained. Security patches and updates come regularly. Keep your installation current.
Knowledge Check
You accidentally pushed your API key to a public GitHub repository. What should you do?
A
Delete the commit — no one saw it
C
Change your GitHub password
D
Immediately rotate the key with your AI provider and revoke the old one
Once a key is public, assume it's compromised — even if you delete the commit, bots scrape GitHub constantly. Immediately go to your AI provider's dashboard, revoke the old key, and generate a new one. Then update your local configuration.
The trust question
People often ask: "Can I really trust an AI agent with my email and files?"
The answer is about architecture, not trust. You're not trusting OpenClaw-the-company — there is no company. You're trusting code you can read. Every line of OpenClaw is open-source. Security researchers audit it. The community finds and fixes vulnerabilities.
Compare that to a cloud service where you can't see the code, can't verify the privacy claims, and can't control where your data goes.
Open-source isn't just a philosophy. It's a security model.
Final Check
Why is OpenClaw's open-source nature a security advantage?
A
It's free, so there's no financial motive to steal data
B
Open-source software never has bugs
C
Anyone can inspect the code, verify the privacy claims, and find vulnerabilities — transparency creates accountability
D
Open-source software is automatically encrypted
Open-source means transparency. Thousands of developers can read the code, verify that data isn't being sent anywhere unexpected, and find security issues. Closed-source services ask you to trust their claims — open-source lets you verify them.
🔒
Day 24 Complete
"Your data, your machine, your rules. Open-source means you don't have to trust — you can verify."
Tomorrow — Day 25
Working with Data
Numbers, spreadsheets, reports — let's teach your agent to crunch data and surface insights.