Regardless of whether you are on a free or paid account, you have two options:
-Public: Upload data or use data that is already in a database that Mode hosts. All data and analysis done here is visible to anyone. This is most commonly used with the SQL tutorials that others have posted about here.
-Private: Connect your database to Mode and do analysis on your own data. This is only visible to people you add to your Mode Organization. In fact, making your private data accessible to people outside your Organization is a paid feature and comes with more granular permission controls.
We have tried to make this as clear as possible in the product and ToS, but looks like we missed on the latter. We will revise to make it clearer.
None of these platforms "get" your data other than running the queries in your databases and displaying the results (and sometimes caching it for future lookups).
