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Privacy Notice

drift has no accounts, no analytics and no tracking. This page exists to say exactly what that means, and to be honest about the few places where data does unavoidably exist.

Last updated 9 October 2026.

The short version

The app on your Mac has no account, no analytics, no telemetry and no crash reporting. Your licence is verified on your own machine, so drift works with the wifi off. It contacts us for exactly two things: once, when you finish setting it up, to register the email address you gave for a reminder before your trial ends; and from time to time to ask whether a newer version exists.

If you buy Pro, an email address and a licence key have to exist somewhere, and they do. That is the whole of it, and the rest of this page is the detail.

Who is responsible

drift is run by an individual based in India, trading as drift (driftmac.com). There is no company and no data protection officer — for anything on this page, write to support@driftmac.com and it reaches the one person who can act on it.

What the app collects

One email address, and nothing about how you use drift. drift does not create an account, does not measure how you use it, and has no analytics SDK of any kind compiled into it.

drift asks for one macOS permission the first time you open it. That permission is what lets it block the keyboard and notice when a coding tool is waiting on you. What it observes stays on your Mac and is never transmitted, stored by us, or shown to anyone else — including the names of your projects, the contents of your terminal, and anything your agents produce.

The trial reminder

The last step of setting up drift asks for your email address, so we can send you one email shortly before your free trial ends. When you finish setup, drift sends that address to our licence service together with a short, one-way hash of the Mac (a few characters of a fingerprint that cannot be turned back into a serial number, a name or a location). We store the address, that hash, when it arrived, and whether the reminder has been sent.

We use the address for that reminder and nothing else: no newsletter, no marketing list, and it is never shared or sold. If you later buy Pro, it is also what lets us match the purchase to your trial, so you are not reminded about a trial you have already paid for. The reminder is sent through our email delivery provider. If you would rather we did not keep the address, ask and we will delete it.

Update checks

drift periodically fetches driftmac.com/appcast.xml to see whether a newer version has shipped. Like any request to any website, our host sees the connecting IP address, the time, and the app version making the request. We do not aggregate this, build profiles from it, or connect it to a purchase. You can turn automatic update checks off inside drift.

What this website collects

driftmac.com has no analytics, no cookies of our own and no tracking pixels. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to.

The site is hosted on Vercel, which keeps short-lived operational logs of requests — IP address, page, timestamp, user agent — as every web host does, to serve the site and absorb attacks. We do not use those logs to identify visitors.

Buying Pro

Checkout runs on Paddle.com Market Ltd, the merchant of record for every purchase of drift Pro. You enter your payment details into Paddle, not into this site. We never see, receive or store your card number — we could not, and the design is deliberate. Paddle processes your data under its own privacy notice, and tells us the email address, the country used for tax, and the transaction reference.

When drift itself opens the checkout for you, it passes along two things so a purchase can be matched to the copy of drift that made it: the email address you already had in the app, and a machine hash — a one-way fingerprint of the Mac, which cannot be reversed into a serial number, a name, or a location. Buying from the website instead sends neither.

The licence service

Issuing and re-sending licences is the one system that holds data about you. Besides the trial reminder addresses described above, it stores, for each purchase:

  • the email address you paid with;
  • the signed licence key issued to it;
  • the Paddle transaction reference, and the machine hash and trial email described above when they were sent;
  • the date of purchase, and — briefly — the IP address of requests to the resend endpoint, purely to rate-limit it.

This exists so that you can get your licence back, years later, by typing your email address into a form. That form answers identically whether or not an address ever bought drift, so it cannot be used to find out who our customers are.

The email carrying your licence is sent through an email delivery provider, which necessarily processes the address to deliver it.

Who else sees any of this

Nobody, beyond the providers listed above who are needed to actually run the thing: Paddle for payment, our hosting provider for the site, and an email provider for delivery. We do not sell data, share it for advertising, or hand it to data brokers. There is no advertising on this site and there never will be.

How long it is kept

Purchase records are kept for as long as we sell drift, because a licence is perpetual and you may need it resent in five years. Some records must be kept longer to satisfy tax and accounting obligations. Trial reminder addresses are kept until you ask us to delete them. Rate-limiting IP addresses are discarded within days. Hosting logs expire on the host’s own short schedule.

Your rights

Email support@driftmac.com and you can ask us to:

  • tell you what we hold about you;
  • correct it;
  • delete it — note that deleting your purchase record also destroys our ability to resend that licence, so keep a copy of the key first;
  • send you a copy in a portable form.

Depending on where you live you may also have the right to object to processing or to complain to your local data protection authority. Requests about payment data itself may need to go to Paddle, which holds it; we will tell you if so rather than leaving you to guess.

We ask nothing extra to verify a request beyond your control of the email address the record is under.

Children

drift is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect anything from them.

Changes

If this notice changes, the date at the top changes with it. A change that meaningfully affects existing customers will be emailed to them rather than quietly published.

Contact

support@driftmac.com. A person answers.