Privacy & safety

It stays local

zaungast makes no network calls. It reads a database already on your machine and serves it to your local agent over stdio. Nothing is uploaded, and there are no credentials or tokens involved.

It cannot harm your Teams data

The single most important safety property: the live Teams directory is only ever read and copied — never written to, locked, or memory-mapped.

• No LevelDB library is opened against the live directory (so the LOCK file is never contended, no compaction/repair is triggered).
• Files are opened read-only and copied to a temporary directory; parsing happens on the copy, never in place.
• On Windows, a read-only observer cannot cause a running writer's writes to fail, and a file removed by Teams' compaction mid-copy is handled gracefully.

This was verified by design review and is covered by tests.

Attachments and images

Images and files shared in chat are not stored locally — Teams keeps them in its cloud behind authentication. zaungast surfaces that an attachment exists (an [attachment] marker, and the URL is preserved in the data) but never fetches the bytes and never handles any auth token. Fetching them would require live, authenticated calls — out of scope for a local, credential-free reader.

What's on disk

• The in-memory index is exactly that — in memory; it is not persisted.
• Temporary snapshots of the Teams files are written to the OS temp directory during a refresh and removed afterward.
• No artifact in the source tree contains your chat content: schema mappings hold only store names and field paths, and fixtures are synthetic.

Scope

The reader sees everything in the local cache your Teams client synced — including 1:1 DMs. That is correct and powerful, but the surface is broad; treat the tool's output as you would your own Teams client.