Privacy, in plain words
Rift stores your conversations and search index on your Mac. A fresh install uses keyword search and makes no AI calls. No Rift account is needed. Your conversation content leaves only through the choices described below. There is also a version check, which sends no content.
Search by meaning sends text to Voyage’s models, with a key Rift gives you or with your own. AI processing uses your own accounts. 2 things can reach me: a random install ID if you ask Rift for a search key, and feedback if you enable the relay. When you ask your AI tool to search Rift, the excerpts it retrieves become part of that tool’s chat.
Search by meaning, off until you turn it on
Turn it on and search gets smarter. From then on, the text Rift indexes and the queries you type are sent out to be embedded by Voyage’s models. There are 2 ways to turn it on. In the app, Rift asks my key service for a key. That request carries a random install ID and, like any web request, your IP address, which is used to limit how many keys 1 address can get. It carries no content, no name and no email. The key is for Voyage’s models as hosted by MongoDB Atlas, and I pay for it. Your text then goes from your Mac to that service directly, not through me. Or add your own Voyage API key, and your text goes to api.voyageai.com under your account, with nothing sent to me. With search by meaning off, nothing is embedded and nothing is sent.
AI enrichment & capture, only if you opt in
These features are off by default. When enabled, metadata extraction and capture triage send conversation content to your configured worker: Codex CLI (OpenAI) or Claude Code (Anthropic), under your own account. Digest summaries use Codex. Choosing Claude for metadata does not silently enable Codex digests. A local Ollama model can do metadata and digest work on your Mac instead.
When your AI tool uses Rift
When Claude, Codex, Cursor, or another connected tool calls Rift, matching conversation excerpts and their source references enter that chat. A cloud AI tool can send this context to its provider under your account and its own privacy settings. The local browser search stays on your Mac unless you have enabled cloud search.
Feedback, off by default, opt-in
Your rift feedback notes are saved locally. A note only reaches me if you turned on the feedback relay during rift onboard, and then just your note, a random per-install ID (not your name or hostname), your email if you chose to share one, and optional health information such as whether the daemon is running. Leave the relay off and nothing is sent.
A version check
About once an hour the app pings registry.npmjs.org to see if a newer beta exists, the same plain request npm install makes. No content, no ID, no key.
What never happens
No telemetry to me. No usage counters, no crash reports, no analytics, no snippets or embeddings phoned home. The Rift app never sends your conversations or search activity to me. The only things it sends me are a feedback note you opt into and type yourself, and the random install ID when you ask Rift for a search key.
The beta signup on this site
Separate from the app: when you get access on the homepage, the email you type is stored in my contact list at Resend (an email provider) so I can email you about the beta, like when free access changes. The email is all it collects, and skipping the form stores nothing. It has nothing to do with the app, which never uploads your conversations or search activity.
Leaving is 1 command
In the macOS setup page, choose Remove Rift and confirm once. This removes Rift’s archive, credentials, background service, bundled app and its connections to your AI tools. Original exports and unrelated tools are preserved. The same removal is available from Terminal with rift uninstall --purge-data. Without--purge-data, your archive and credentials are kept. A setup-page removal leaves a report in ~/Library/Logs/Rift/ and tells you if any step failed. Separately installed npm packages need their package manager’s uninstall command.
This page is the contract. If the app ever does something this page doesn’t say, that’s a bug. Run rift feedback --kind=broke and I’ll fix it.
Last reviewed: September 5, 2026
Rift is in private beta. Join the Mac beta from the homepage →