Privacy policy

Updated 12 September 2026

Your notebook

Drift stores your account details and the notes, replies, attachments, collections and context you save so you can access your notebook across devices. The mobile app also keeps a local cache and unsent captures on your device.

Deliberately opening a thought records when it was opened and where you opened it from, such as search or your stream. This private return history is stored with your account, with local copies and unsent openings on your devices. In device-only mode it stays in your browser. It is not used for advertising or sent to an AI model.

Optional AI analysis

AI analysis is optional. Enabling an AI feature allows Drift to send the relevant text or images to an AI model for that feature. Generating a Taking shape overview sends the recent thoughts described beside that action to a large language model (LLM).

• Smarter connections analyses note and reply text and suggests connection names.
• Memory overviews analyses bounded note and reply excerpts.
• AI collection matching analyses collection details and bounded authored excerpts from candidate notes and notes you deliberately kept. When enabled, clear matches can join collections you have set to auto-add; additions can be undone.
• Include extracted context allows enabled public-link, document and screenshot text, and enabled image interpretations, to inform connections and overviews.
• Search by meaning analyses note and reply text, enabled extracted text and search queries, including existing notes.
• Describe images sends image content for visual interpretation only when enabled.

Who processes AI requests

Hosted Drift uses DigitalOcean Inference for optional AI processing, including embeddings, text analysis and enabled image descriptions. DigitalOcean operates the inference service; a model's name does not mean Drift sends your content directly to the model's publisher. Self-hosted installations can configure different inference services.

Extraction and public links

Attachment text extraction runs on the notebook server. When public-link reading is enabled, the linked websites receive requests from that server to retrieve page information. Reading a public link or extracting attachment text does not by itself enable optional AI analysis.

Your choices

You can change processing choices in your notebook settings. Disabling an AI feature stops new processing under that permission; a request already sent cannot be recalled. AI results may be inaccurate and remain separate from your original words. Saved overviews and image descriptions can be reused while their sources remain unchanged.

Account settings also provide account deletion. Unsent captures and local copies are handled on each device; keep any content you want before deleting your account.