Legal

Privacy

Draft. This page is a working draft and has not been reviewed by a lawyer. It is not yet in effect.

Last updated September 30, 2026 (draft)

Sift is built so your footage stays on your Mac. This page explains what the app does with your data, what this website collects, and what we see when you buy a license. The short version is below; the Privacy & data doc has the full technical list.

The short version

• Your footage, audio and projects never leave your Mac through Sift, and we never receive them.
• Some content does leave your Mac: to label moments and learn a style, Sift sends sampled still frames (512 px) and transcript text to the AI provider you choose, OpenRouter or Anthropic, using your own API key. That provider's privacy policy covers what it receives.
• Audio is never sent to an AI provider. Transcription runs on your Mac.
• The app has no analytics or telemetry.

The Sift app

Sift runs as a local server on your Mac (127.0.0.1) and keeps its data in ~/Library/Application Support/Sift. Your API key is stored in the macOS Keychain.

When Allow API calls is on, Sift sends these to your chosen AI provider:

• Sampled still frames from your footage, scaled to 512 px, each with its device label, clock time and the transcript heard at that moment;
• transcript text, in chunks, to find moments;
• the event name and any cast names you entered;
• for a style profile: one keyframe per shot of the videos you picked, their transcripts, the profile's statistics, and any shot-list PDFs you added.

These requests go directly from your Mac to the provider. They do not pass through us. With OpenRouter, Sift asks for providers that don't collect your data (data_collection: deny). Turn Allow API calls off and nothing is sent to an AI provider.

Sift also contacts YouTube (through yt-dlp) when you build a profile from a channel, Hugging Face once to download the Whisper model, and GitHub when you update yt-dlp.

This website

siftmy.video is a static site hosted on Vercel. It sets no cookies and runs no analytics. Vercel keeps standard server logs (such as IP address, time and page requested) to run and protect the service.

Buying a license

Payments are handled by our checkout provider. We receive your name, email address, what you bought and when, to deliver and support your license. We don't receive your full card number.

Support and diagnostics

If you send us a diagnostics zip from Settings → Diagnostics, it contains logs and tool versions. It never contains media or your API key. We use it only to fix your problem.

Your choices

Everything Sift stores is on your Mac, so you can delete it at any time: delete an event in the app, or remove ~/Library/Application Support/Sift. To ask about the license and purchase data we hold, contact us.

Changes

If this policy changes, we'll update this page and its date.