Privacy on Rime

The short version

Rime runs no telemetry service. It collects no usage data, sends no crash reports and never updates the OS on its own. It does run one service, the relay for Rime Remote, and a stock install connects to it. A few other contacts are on by default, most of them inherited from Fedora. Each is listed below with how to turn it off.

Contacts made without you asking

What	Who receives it	When	Turn it off
Rime Remote relay	Rime’s relay on Cloudflare	always, per account	systemctl --user disable --now rime-remoted.service
Connectivity check	Fedora	every 5 minutes while online	a NetworkManager setting
Count Me	Fedora’s mirrors	weekly	mask Fedora’s timer
Flathub setup and Zen Browser	Flathub	once, at first boot	runs once
Rime Shell’s update check	Cloudflare DNS (a ping)	30 seconds after each login	a Settings switch

Clock synchronisation follows Fedora’s default. Rime adds no configuration for it.

Rime Remote relay

Rime Remote lets a paired phone reach this machine. Its service, rime-remoted, is on for every person’s account, and it keeps one outbound WebSocket open to Rime’s relay at wss://apex-relay.andrenijman.com, even when no phone is paired. It reconnects if the connection drops.

• The relay carries encrypted traffic it cannot read. It sees both ends’ addresses, when a session runs and how much data moves. It stores nothing.
• The relay runs on Cloudflare Workers with Cloudflare’s request logging on. The relay’s configuration does not say what Cloudflare keeps, or for how long.
• While it runs, the service also announces itself on your local network over mDNS (_rime-remote._tcp).
• It opens no inbound port. LAN access needs sudo rime firewall allow rime-remote.
• The Android app asks GitHub’s API for Rime Remote’s releases each time it starts, to offer an update. Apart from that and a UnifiedPush distributor if you install one, the phone contacts only your paired computers and the relay.

The phone app has not been released, so nobody can pair a phone yet without building the app themselves.

To turn it off for your account:

systemctl --user disable --now rime-remoted.service

To keep it but stay on your local network only, drop the relay:

systemctl --user edit rime-remoted

and add:

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/bin/rime-remoted

Rime Remote also starts Rime’s agent runtime. If you turn Rime Remote off and still want agent sessions, or want Closing the lid to keep working, run rime agent enable.

NetworkManager’s connectivity check

Every 300 seconds while a connection is up, NetworkManager fetches http://fedoraproject.org/static/hotspot.txt over plain HTTP. This is how the desktop can tell a hotel or campus sign-in page from a working connection.

To turn it off, create a file in /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/ with a higher number than 21-rime-connectivity.conf, for example /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/99-no-connectivity-check.conf:

[connectivity]
enabled=false

It applies once NetworkManager restarts; a reboot does it. Captive portals then show as a connection that does not load.

Fedora Count Me

rpm-ostree’s Count Me sends Fedora’s mirrors a weekly anonymous ping so Fedora can count installations. Rime leaves it on and only stops a failed ping from marking the system as degraded. To turn it off, mask Fedora’s timer:

sudo systemctl mask rpm-ostree-countme.timer

First boot: Flathub and Zen Browser

Once the machine is online after the first boot, it adds the Flathub remote and installs Zen Browser from it, in the background. Each runs once. Firefox stays the default browser.

Rime Shell’s own update check

Thirty seconds after Rime Shell starts, it pings 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare’s DNS service) once to see whether the network is up, then tries to fetch updates for itself from its source repository. On an installed system that fetch cannot succeed, because the image carries no repository for it: the shell updates only with the OS image. The ping still goes out.

Turn it off in Settings, Misc, Updates, Automatic updates. This switch affects only the shell’s check. OS updates are separate and never automatic.

Contacts only when you ask

• rime update downloads the image from GitHub’s container registry (ghcr.io), checks packages and Flatpaks, and asks fwupd for firmware.
• rime install and rime search reach Fedora, RPM Fusion, any COPR you enabled, and Flathub.
• Rime Search answers (queries starting with ?) go to Wolfram|Alpha only when local arithmetic cannot answer and you have supplied your own Wolfram|Alpha AppID.
• The VPN tab checks your public address at api.ipify.org when you connect a sing-box VPN.
• rime ai pull downloads models from Hugging Face.
• Online accounts you connect are contacted when you use them.
• Rime Remote push notifications go out only after a paired phone has registered a push endpoint. The message is a sealed envelope with no machine or project details in it.
• The Claude and ChatGPT desktop apps talk to their vendors when you use them. Neither updates itself on Rime.
• Firefox keeps Mozilla’s defaults. Rime’s policy sets only dark mode and the home page.

The OS image never updates on its own: the automatic update timer inherited from Fedora is masked. Rime does not change Fedora’s default for fwupd’s metadata refresh timer.

What stays on the machine

• Health reports. rime channel report prints the five fields a report would contain and says nothing was sent. This build contains no code that sends it, and Rime runs no server to receive it. See Update channels.
• The rollout slot is derived from /etc/machine-id and never sent.
• Metrics. rimed serves its measurements on 127.0.0.1:9723, reachable from this machine only.
• Crash dumps stay local, capped at 256 MB. There is no crash uploader.
• rime qualify, the hardware compatibility record, keeps nothing until you run rime qualify consent grant. Then it keeps results in ~/.local/state/rime/qualification.json. rime qualify consent decline deletes them. rime qualify export writes a file where you choose, and nothing uploads it.
• Agent handoff packets stay on the machine.

On a machine installed from the v2.1.0 ISO

This page describes current Rime images. A machine installed from the v2.1.0 ISO runs an older APEX-OS image, with the apex command, until its first update. See Install Rime.