Privacy

What Drift keeps, what it sends, and where. Last changed 16 September 2026.

Drift is a Mac app that sets the location an iPhone reports. The short version: where you put your iPhone stays on your Mac. What leaves is who is signed in and whether they have paid.

What stays on your Mac

Your saved places, plans, recent searches, settings and the record of runs are files in a folder on your Mac. Drift does not upload them, back them up, or attach them to your account. The location the iPhone is set to is never sent to us.

What leaves your Mac, and to whom

• Map tiles. The map is drawn from tiles fetched from OpenFreeMap, a public map service. It sees a request from your internet connection, the same as any map app.
• Place search and routes. Searching sends the words you type and the part of the map you are looking at to the OpenStreetMap place search. Asking for a route sends the two points to the OpenStreetMap routing service. Nothing about your iPhone goes with either.
• Sign in. You sign in with Google. Drift's licence server receives your Google account id, email address and name, and keeps them with your licence so it can answer whether this account has paid. That is all it stores about you.
• Payment. Payments are taken by Stripe on Stripe's own pages. Drift never sees your card. Stripe tells our server which account paid and whether the subscription is active.
• Plans from a sentence. When you ask Drift to write a plan from a sentence, the sentence, the time and time zone your Mac is set to, the names of your saved places, where the iPhone is currently set, and your default way of travelling are sent to Drift's server, which passes them to Fireworks AI to write the plan. Nothing is sent until you ask, and nothing is kept afterwards beyond a count of how many plans your account has asked for.

What we do not do

No analytics, no advertising identifiers, no tracking pixels, no sale of anything to anyone. The website keeps one value in your browser, the name of the creator whose link brought you here, so a purchase can be credited to their video.

Deleting your account

Ask, and the record of your account on the licence server is removed. Deleting Drift from your Mac removes everything it kept there.

Questions about any of this: the address in Drift under Help.