Privacy and Network Activity

Caplets has three independent outbound product services: anonymous telemetry, passive npm update metadata checks, and best-effort public catalog indexing after eligible lifecycle operations. Each has a separate control. Disabling one does not disable the others.

Remote Caplets, downstream APIs, OAuth providers, and user-configured catalog sources naturally add the network calls required by those capabilities; those are not product telemetry.

Anonymous telemetry

Telemetry is opt-out and reports bounded product-usage and reliability categories. The first eligible interactive CLI run prints a notice to stderr. Non-CI telemetry remains suppressed until that notice has been recorded, so a native-first run does not silently activate collection.

Disable telemetry for one process:

CAPLETS_DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1 caplets serve

Disable it in user config and inspect the effective state:

caplets telemetry disable
caplets telemetry status

Re-enable it with caplets telemetry enable. The environment variable wins over user config. Tests disable telemetry automatically.

Telemetry properties are allowlisted categorical values, integer counts, booleans, duration/timeout buckets, package/version metadata, and coarse runtime information such as OS family, architecture, and Node major version. Reliability exceptions keep only sanitized package/workspace-relative stack frames and an error type.

Caplets telemetry does not collect raw config, prompts, Code Mode source, tool arguments, tool outputs, resource or prompt contents, logs, raw or absolute local paths, URLs, hostnames, Caplet IDs, credentials, tokens, raw environment variables, raw error messages, or unsanitized stack traces. Reliability stack frames may retain the sanitized package/workspace-relative paths or safe basenames described above.

Inspect the sanitized events a command would produce without delivering them:

caplets telemetry debug -- doctor
caplets telemetry debug -- code-mode 'return 1'

Telemetry debug mode also disables the update check for that invocation. Manage the anonymous local identity separately:

caplets telemetry rotate-id
caplets telemetry delete-id

Passive update checks

Eligible CLI commands may fetch public package metadata from https://registry.npmjs.org/caplets. The lookup requests only npm’s install metadata, has a 250 ms fetch timeout and 1 MiB response limit, and keeps successful metadata fresh for 24 hours. If later refreshes fail, that metadata may remain usable for a further seven days. An update notice is written to stderr at most once per version every seven days.

Update notices avoid help, version, completion, JSON/output-product commands, Code Mode, daemon commands, CI, and non-interactive output. Stdio serve and attach stay quiet by default so MCP protocol output is not polluted. Set CAPLETS_UPDATE_NOTICE_STDERR=1 only for a foreground stdio process whose stderr is visible and separate from protocol stdout.

Disable both update notices and metadata lookups:

CAPLETS_DISABLE_UPDATE_CHECK=1 caplets doctor

This switch is independent from telemetry.

Public catalog indexing

After a successful install, restore, or update of an eligible GitHub-shaped external Caplet, Caplets may submit normalized source identity, revisions and hashes, the full installed CAPLET.md, and derived catalog/child metadata to the public catalog. Eligibility checks source syntax but do not verify GitHub repository visibility. Disable indexing before operating on a private GitHub repository or any Caplet file whose contents must not become public. Indexing is best effort and never changes the local lifecycle result.

Disable catalog indexing network requests:

CAPLETS_DISABLE_CATALOG_INDEXING=1 caplets install spiritledsoftware/caplets osv

The envelope does not separately add installer identity, local filesystem paths, Vault values, agent prompts, tool arguments, tool outputs, or raw environment values. Because it includes the full Caplet file, anything authored in that file can be submitted. See Catalog indexing privacy for the exact boundary.

Control matrix

Activity	Default	Disable
Anonymous telemetry	Opt-out after the visible notice gate	CAPLETS_DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1 or caplets telemetry disable
Passive update metadata	Eligible foreground CLI commands	CAPLETS_DISABLE_UPDATE_CHECK=1
Public catalog indexing	Eligible GitHub-shaped install/restore/update results	CAPLETS_DISABLE_CATALOG_INDEXING=1

For machine-readable automation, prefer --json where supported. Caplets keeps update notices and telemetry notices on stderr and suppresses them for structured output paths.