Privacy
Local by default — what stays on your machine (everything), and the habits that keep it that way.
A job search generates some of the most personal data you have: where you've worked, what you earn, where you're willing to move, which companies turned you down. CareerForge's position is simple — that data is nobody's business but yours, so it never leaves your computer.
Where your data lives
All of it, locally:
| Data | Lives in | Ever uploaded? |
|---|---|---|
| Candidate profile | your CareerForge folder | No |
| Generated CVs & cover letters | cv/, cover_letters/ | No |
| Application tracker | job_search_tracker.csv | No |
| Seen-jobs registry | job_scraper/ | No |
| Source documents (CV, diplomas…) | documents/ | No |
| Salary data (optional) | salary_data.json | No |
There are no accounts, no sign-ups, no telemetry, no analytics, and no "anonymous usage statistics." Even this documentation site is built to fetch nothing — fonts and assets are bundled, not loaded from third-party servers.
What does go over the network — and when
Honesty requires the full picture. Two things touch the internet, both only when you ask:
- The AI itself. CareerForge runs on Claude Code, so the text of your conversation — including profile content the AI is working with — is processed by Anthropic's service under their privacy terms. That's the same deal as using Claude for anything else; if it's acceptable for your chats, it's the same arrangement here.
- Web searches you trigger.
/searchqueries public job boards, and/applyfetches the posting and verifies claims about the company. These look like ordinary web browsing.
What never happens: background uploads, your files being sent anywhere as files, or any CareerForge server — there isn't one.
Git and the one habit that matters
CareerForge ships with a .gitignore that excludes every personal artifact
above, so the folder's history stays clean of your data by default.
One habit to keep, in two words: private fork. If you push your copy of CareerForge to GitHub, make the repository private. Your profile lives in the same folder tree as the code, and while the ignore rules protect you, a private repo means even a mistake stays yours.
Deleting everything
No account to close, no support ticket. Delete the folder, and CareerForge — along with every trace of your search — is gone. That's what local-first means.