---
title: "Privacy"
description: Understanding privacy and telemetry in self-hosted Phoenix deployments
---

## Self-Hosted Privacy

**Phoenix, when self-hosted, is fully private.** No data from your traces, evaluations, datasets, or any other application data is ever sent to Arize or any third party. All of your data remains entirely within your own infrastructure.

This means you have complete control over:
- Where your data is stored
- Who has access to your data
- How long your data is retained
- Your compliance with data privacy regulations

<Info>
  When SaaS compliance and security certifications are a requirement, [Arize AX](https://arize.com/docs/ax/security-and-settings/compliance) is a good option, a fully managed platform with the compliance and security controls many organizations need.
</Info>

## Telemetry

### What kind of telemetry does Phoenix collect?

By default, Phoenix collects basic web analytics (e.g., page views, UI interactions) to help us understand how the product is used. **None of your trace data, evaluation results, or any sensitive information is ever collected.** The telemetry is limited to understanding how users interact with the Phoenix web interface.

### Why does Phoenix collect telemetry?

Telemetry helps us to:
- Understand how Phoenix is used and improve the most relevant features
- Track overall usage for internal and external (e.g., fundraising) reporting
- Identify and fix issues in the user interface

### How can I opt-out?

To disable telemetry, set the following environment variable:

```bash
PHOENIX_TELEMETRY_ENABLED=false
```

This will disable all analytics tracking in the Phoenix web interface, regardless of any other telemetry-related environment variable settings.

### Air-gapped deployments

If you are running Phoenix in an air-gapped environment, set `PHOENIX_ALLOW_EXTERNAL_RESOURCES=false`. This will:

- Automatically disable all telemetry
- Disable external Google Fonts (the UI will fall back to system fonts)

This prevents any external network requests from the Phoenix web interface, avoiding connection timeouts and UI loading delays in environments without internet access.
