---
title: tl;dr privacy model
description: How tl;dr decides which summaries are public vs private.
canonical: https://tl-dr.cc/llms-privacy.md
---

# Privacy model

tl;dr distinguishes between **public** and **private** summaries. Only public summaries appear on share pages and in trending aggregates.

A summary is private if any of the following is true:

- The domain is on the auto-private list (e.g. Gmail, internal SaaS, anything clearly behind auth). Internally stored as `privacy_reason = 'auto_domain'`.
- The user marked it private (extension UI or account setting). Stored as `privacy_reason = 'user_set'`.
- The user enabled "private by default" in their account settings.

A summary is **public** when `privacy_reason IS NULL`. This is the filter used for all trending queries, share-page indexing, and the corpus served from [llms.tl-dr.cc](https://llms.tl-dr.cc).

Private summaries never appear in:

- The trending hubs at `tl-dr.cc/trending/*`.
- Share pages at `tl-dr.cc/s/{slug}`.
- The sitemap.
- The machine-readable corpus at `llms.tl-dr.cc`.

See the full [Privacy Policy](https://tl-dr.cc/privacy-policy) for the legal version.