Drift Privacy Policy

Who we are, and what this covers

This policy is published by CutWire Studios, based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Where any of the data described below counts as personal data, CutWire Studios is the controller of it.

It covers Drift, our desktop and Android video editor, on every platform we ship it for — Linux, Windows, macOS and Android. The site-wide privacy policy covers the cutwire.org website itself, including the support form.

What Drift never sends

Editing happens locally. Nothing below is transmitted anywhere, at any point, by any feature of the app:

• Video, audio, image and other media you import
• Project files, timelines, edit history and layouts
• Exported or rendered files
• File names, folder paths and the contents of your media bin
• Subtitles and transcripts, including anything produced by automatic captions
• Camera or microphone input
• Your name, email address, device identifiers or advertising IDs

Automatic subtitles are worth calling out specifically, because comparable features in other editors are cloud services. In Drift the speech model is downloaded once as an addon and then runs on your own machine. Your audio is never sent to a transcription service — ours or anybody else's.

What Drift does send

Exactly two features open a network connection.

1. The update check

Roughly five seconds after launch, and at most once every 24 hours, Drift asks GitHub whether a newer release exists. It is a single request to api.github.com for the public release listing of the Drift repository. It sends no information about you, your projects or your installation beyond what any HTTPS request unavoidably carries — your IP address and a standard user agent — and it is answered by GitHub, not by us.

You can turn it off completely in Settings → Updates → “Check on startup”. With it off, Drift makes no update request at all, and you can still press Check now when you want one.

2. Addons: fonts, stickers, speech models and runtimes

Fonts, emoji stickers, speech models and the optional acceleration runtimes are not bundled in the download — they are installed on demand from our addon service at drift-addons.cutwire.org. Drift refreshes the addon catalog when it starts and downloads a package only when you choose to install one.

These requests reach our service, which can see:

• your IP address,
• the time of the request, and
• which catalog or package was requested.

We do not attach an account, a profile or a persistent identifier to any of it. Every copy of Drift sends the same fixed application token with these requests (X-Drift-Client); it identifies the application, so that our storage bucket cannot be trivially crawled or hotlinked by others, and it is identical in every installation. It is not a user ID, an install ID or a device ID, and it cannot be used to link one request to another.

If you would rather Drift never contact the addon service, you can simply not install addons — but note that the catalog refresh happens at startup. Builds distributed with the addon service disabled make no such request at all, and anything you have already installed keeps working offline.

About IP addresses

An IP address is personal data under laws such as the GDPR, so we would rather be plain about it than claim to collect “nothing”. Any server has to see the address of the computer it is answering, and ours is no exception.

We use those addresses only to deliver the file that was asked for, to keep the service working, and to stop abuse such as scraping or bulk hotlinking of our storage. We do not use them to build a profile, we do not combine them with anything else, we do not sell or share them, and we do not use them for advertising. They appear in ordinary server request logs, which are retained only for as long as they are useful for those operational purposes and are then discarded.

Agent access (MCP)

Drift can expose a local MCP server so that a coding agent can edit the open project. This is off every time Drift launches and has to be switched on deliberately. The server binds to loopback (127.0.0.1) only — it is not reachable from your network or from the internet.

Two things follow from that, and they are yours to weigh:

• While it is on, any program running on the same computer can connect to it and drive the editor.
• If the agent you connect is itself a cloud service, then whatever that agent reads from your project goes to its provider under their privacy policy. That is the one path by which project content can leave your machine, and it exists only because you turned the feature on and pointed an agent at it. Drift itself still sends nothing.

What Drift stores on your device

Drift keeps your preferences, recent projects, window layout, the addon catalog and any addons you have installed in the standard settings and application-data locations for your operating system. This data stays on your device, is never transmitted, and is removed when you uninstall the app or clear its data.

Android permissions

The Android build requests only what a given feature needs, and none of it is used to collect information about you:

• Internet / network state — the update check and addon downloads described above, and nothing else.
• Notifications and foreground service — a video export runs for minutes, so it holds a foreground service and shows a progress notification to keep Android from killing it partway through.
• Vibration — optional haptic feedback on the timeline, which you can switch off.
• Modify audio settings — audio playback in the editor.

Drift deliberately does not request broad storage or media permissions. Importing media uses Android's Storage Access Framework, so the app receives access to the specific files you pick and nothing else. Camera and microphone are declared as optional hardware features so that devices without them can still install the app; they are used only if and when you record with them, and that recording stays on your device.

Third parties

We rely on a small number of services, and it is worth knowing which:

• GitHub hosts the source code, the release downloads and the update feed. Requests for updates or downloads are handled by GitHub under its own privacy policy.
• Cloudflare serves the addon catalog and packages on our behalf, and processes those requests as our infrastructure provider.
• Flathub and any other distribution channel you install Drift through operate their own services under their own policies.

Links inside the app — to the documentation, the issue tracker or our community server — open in your browser. Once you are there, that site's own policy applies.

There are no advertising networks, no analytics vendors, no crash-reporting services and no data brokers involved in Drift at any point. We have never sold or shared personal data, because there is none to sell.

Children

Drift is suitable for general audiences and does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, including children. There is no account to create, no profile to fill in and no content uploaded to us.

Your rights

Depending on where you live you may have rights to access, correct, delete or restrict the processing of personal data we hold about you. In practice we hold no account, profile or contact record for Drift users — only the transient request logs described above, which are not linked to an identity and which we cannot connect back to an individual person. If you believe we hold something about you, write to us and we will look and tell you honestly what we find.

We are based in Sri Lanka, so when Drift contacts our addon service the request is handled by us there and by our infrastructure providers on servers around the world. If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or another region with its own data protection law, that means the limited data described above is processed outside your region. We apply the same standard to everyone regardless of where they live: no accounts, no profiles, no sale or sharing of personal data, and nothing kept beyond what running the service requires.

Open source

Drift is released under the GPLv3 and the entire source is public. Every claim on this page can be checked against the code — the update check, the addon client and the MCP server are the only networking code in the repository. Read it on GitHub if you would rather verify than take our word for it.

Changes to this policy

If Drift ever gains a feature that sends more than this page describes, we will update this policy before that feature ships and change the date at the top. We will not quietly start collecting something and document it afterwards.

Contact

Questions, corrections or requests: privacy@cutwire.org. Bugs and privacy concerns can also be raised publicly on the issue tracker.

CutWire Studios · Colombo, Sri Lanka