Privacy, in plain words
Rift lives on your Mac. Your conversations, your search index, and your keys all stay there. By default, nothing leaves your machine: a fresh install makes zero AI calls and search runs on keywords alone.
A few things can leave, but only ones you switch on. Voyage and Codex go to your own accounts; feedback reaches me only if you enable the relay. Here’s the whole story.
Semantic search, only with your Voyage key
Add a Voyage API key and search gets smarter. From then on, the text Rift indexes and the queries you type are sent to api.voyageai.com under your own key to be embedded. No key means no embedding, and nothing sent.
AI enrichment & capture, only if you opt in
Want titles, topics, and digests, or live capture of new chats? Turn them on and Rift hands that work to your own codex CLI (OpenAI), on your existing subscription. I hold no key and pay nothing here. Off by default. Prefer fully local? A local Ollama model can do enrichment instead.
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), and your email if you chose to share one. 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 thing it sends is a feedback note you opt into and type yourself.
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 one command
rift uninstall stops everything and cleans up its MCP entries. Add --purge-data to wipe Rift’s data directory entirely. Your Voyage key and the npm package are left for you to remove, and you can ask me to revoke your key anytime.
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: June 5, 2026
Rift is in private beta. Join the Mac beta from the homepage →