Very true, many of the actions taken mention whether the processing is being handled in the cloud or locally.
While I’m not going to claim to be an expert on the matter, it’s my impression that authentication & verification are limited primarily to downloading/updating software— once you’ve managed to bypass the activation and keep mind to avoid updating directly through the app, you’re “inside the walled garden”.
That was my first terminal-based usage of SD before I found Automatic1111, but admittedly they picked an unfortunate name as I’m pretty sure the name was already in use by an NSFW AI-gen art community.