Why Photo Analysis Is a Privacy Matter
The Chastity Tracker can analyse photos — for example to read handwritten control codes, verify seal numbers or recognise the device being worn. This is convenient: a photo proof can be verified automatically instead of the keyholder checking every image by hand.
But these photos are sensitive. They show intimate situations, and even a seemingly harmless picture of a handwritten code is part of your private setup. When such images are sent to a cloud service for analysis, they leave your control. That is exactly the point where a convenience feature becomes a privacy matter.
The Alternative: Your Own Vision Model
Instead of handing photos to the cloud, in a self-hosting setup you can run your own vision model directly on your hardware. Tools like Ollama make this accessible: a local model — for example a LLaVA-style vision model built on the CLIP encoder — processes the image entirely on your server.
The crucial difference: image encoding happens locally before a model even responds. There is no intermediate call to an external service. Your intimate photos never leave your own server.
What This Looks Like in Practice
In a self-hosting setup, an Ollama service with a loaded vision model runs alongside the tracker container. When a photo proof arrives:
- The image stays stored on your server.
- The tracker passes it to the local model.
- The model reads the code, checks the seal number or recognises the device.
- The result flows back into the tracker — the image was never outside your hardware.
An Honest Assessment: Effort and Hardware
This sounds ideal, but it has a price. Local vision models need real compute — for a usable 7B model you should expect several gigabytes of VRAM. On a small mini-PC without a GPU it will run slowly or not at all. Add to that the setup effort: installing Ollama, choosing a model, configuring the integration.
In short: local AI only makes sense for self-hosting, and only if you have the right hardware and are willing to get your hands dirty.
The Alternatives, Stated Honestly
Local AI is not the only path:
- Cloud option: Convenient, no server of your own required, but images leave your system for analysis. A legitimate choice if convenience matters more to you than maximum data sovereignty — as long as you know what you are giving away.
- No AI at all: The human keyholder checks every photo personally. This is the most data-minimal option of all and needs no additional infrastructure.
A Note on the Portal
This local variant clearly belongs to the world of true self-hosting, where you control your own server. The portal (portal.chastitytracker.ch) is a free friends-and-family service where instances run on trublue's server — there you have no control over the underlying hardware. If you want maximum sovereignty over intimate photos, there is no way around your own self-hosting.