Please do not open a public GitHub issue for security reports.

Use one of these private channels instead:

• GitHub Security Advisories — preferred. Open https://github.com/micschr0/photochron/security/advisories/new and we will triage from there.
• Email the maintainer privately at the address listed on https://github.com/micschr0 (use a subject prefix [photochron security]).

We will acknowledge a report within 7 days and aim to ship a fix for confirmed issues within 30 days. Coordinated disclosure is appreciated; we credit reporters in the release notes unless asked otherwise.

photochron is in early alpha (0.1.x). Only the latest tagged release on main receives security fixes. Once a stable line ships, this section will list the supported branches.

photochron is designed to keep your photo data local. Things to be aware of:

• All inference is on-device. No image bytes, EXIF metadata, or embeddings are sent to a remote service. The vision LLM runs via a local Ollama daemon (default http://localhost:11434); if you point context.ollama_host at a remote URL you take on the trust-store of that endpoint.
• GPS extraction is opt-in. ingestion.extract_gps defaults to false so coordinates do not leak into reports or enriched copies when shared. Flip it on only after deciding you're comfortable with that trade-off.
• EXIF-enriched copies embed the full per-photo result JSON in the UserComment field (Mode B output, exif_enriched/). The JSON includes confidence scores and may include matched person hints. If you plan to share those copies publicly, consider stripping UserComment first (exiftool -UserComment= file.jpg).
• anchors.yaml contains real birthdays once you fill it in. Treat it like any other private credential file: add it to your local .gitignore, do not commit it to a public repo, and store backups encrypted. The shipped template is fully commented out and contains no real data.
• .photochron/cache.db stores face embeddings. These are biometric identifiers and are subject to GDPR / similar regimes in many jurisdictions. Treat the cache directory as sensitive personal data and consider full-disk encryption.

• Run the pipeline in a dedicated user account when feasible.
• Keep ollama and onnxruntime up to date — both ship CVE fixes occasionally and our Dependabot config covers pip and github-actions dependencies but not external services.
• Do not pipe outputs from untrusted users straight into photochron run --input unless you trust the file source (image-decoding libs have a long history of memory-safety bugs).