Drift Privacy Policy

Last updated 28 September 2026

Drift is a travel app for people moving between places on their own schedule. This policy explains what the app collects, why it needs it, who else sees it, and how to get rid of it. It covers the Drift iOS app and this website.

The short version: you can look around Drift without an account, it runs no advertising or analytics trackers, and it sells nothing about you. It asks for your location so it can show what is worth walking to nearby — you can refuse and the app still works. What it stores is the trip you are planning and the preferences you set.

Who is responsible

Drift is an independent app made by a solo developer. For anything in this policy — questions, requests, complaints — write to drift.dev.travel.app@gmail.com . Replies come from a person, usually within a few days.

What Drift collects

An anonymous account, created for you

When you first open Drift it creates an anonymous account so your trip survives closing the app and reinstalling. This account is a random identifier. It is not linked to your name, your email, your phone, or your device's advertising identifier, and Drift does not need any of those to work.

Your email and phone number, when you create an account

To keep your trips and streak safe across phones, creating an account asks for an email address and a phone number. Drift emails you a 6-digit code to confirm the address is yours. The phone number is kept on your account for safety and account recovery; it is not verified by text message and is never shown to other travellers. Both are used to sign you in and to reach you about your account — never to market to you, and never sold or passed on for anyone else's use.

Sign in with Apple, if you choose it

If you sign in with Apple instead, Apple tells Drift a private identifier for you and, the first time only, your name and an email address — which can be a private relay address Apple creates so your real one stays hidden. Drift uses these only to sign you in.

What you put into the app

• Your trip: dates, cities, the stops on each day, and the notes you write.
• Your profile: a display name, a short bio, a photo if you add one, and which companion you picked.
• Preferences: pace, interests, dietary and accessibility needs, distance units, and the answers you gave during setup.
• Places you save, and which days you were out walking, which is what the streak counts.

Some of these are personal in the ordinary sense — a dietary requirement or an accessibility need can say something about your health or your beliefs. Drift asks for them only to shape what it suggests, keeps them on your own account, and never uses them to categorise you for anything else. You can skip every one of those questions and change your answers later.

Photos and video

When you attach a photo or a clip to a post, it is read from your phone and held on your device for that draft. This build does not upload it. Drift never opens your camera roll on its own — you pick the file each time — and it never reads your photo library in the background.

Your voice, only while you hold the button

You can describe a trip out loud instead of typing it. Doing so uses your phone's built-in speech recognition, which on Apple devices means the audio may be handled by Apple under their privacy policy. Drift receives only the text that comes back, keeps no audio, and the microphone is live only while you are holding the button.

Location

Drift asks for your location the first time you search nearby in Explore or tap for the weather, through your phone's own permission prompt. It is used to sort places by how far away they are, to show the city you are in and its weather, and to find photographs of the places around you. Refusing is a normal outcome: search still works, placed roughly by your internet connection instead, and nothing else in the app changes.

When you allow it, your coordinate is sent to Mapbox with each search so results come back near you, and to Wikimedia to look for a photograph of a place. Neither is told who you are — no account, no name, no device identifier travels with it. Drift asks for a coarse position rather than a precise one, and does not track you in the background or record where you have been.

For the weather, the position is rounded to about a kilometre before it leaves your phone; with no location shared, the city your trip is in is used instead.

Posts carry the neighbourhood you tag, never a precise position.

Keeping the community civil

Names, profiles, posts, comments and messages are checked for slurs, sexual content and abusive language before they are saved or sent, and refused if they contain them. The check runs in the app and on Drift's own database; nothing you write is sent to an outside service for this.

What Drift does not collect

• No advertising identifiers, and no tracking across other apps or websites.
• No third-party analytics or advertising SDKs are in the app.
• No contacts, calendar, health, or browsing history.
• No payment card details — if you subscribe, Apple handles the payment and Drift is told only that the subscription is active.

Why Drift is allowed to hold it

If you are in the UK, EU, or somewhere with similar law, the legal bases are: performing the contract you entered when you started using the app (your account, your trip, your saved places); your consent for the optional things you volunteer, including any health-related preference, which you can withdraw at any time by clearing the answer or deleting your account; and a legitimate interest in keeping the service running and secure.

Who else sees it

Drift uses a small number of services to work at all. None of them are given your data to use for their own purposes.

• Supabase — hosts the database and handles sign-in. Your account and trip live here. Data is held on their infrastructure and protected by row-level rules so one account cannot read another's.
• Resend — delivers Drift's emails, such as your sign-up and password-reset codes. It receives your email address and the message being sent, and nothing else.
• Open-Meteo — supplies the weather. It is sent a position rounded to about a kilometre and returns the forecast. No account, name or identifier goes with it.
• RevenueCat — confirms with Apple whether your subscription is active. It sees your anonymous account identifier and your App Store purchase records, never your name or payment details.
• Mapbox — serves the map tiles and the place search. Your device requests tiles for the area on your screen, and sends what you type in the search box along with your approximate position so results come back nearby. Mapbox is not told your account or your identity.
• Wikimedia — supplies the photographs of real places. Drift sends a coordinate and a place name to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons to ask whether a picture of it exists. Nothing about you is sent, and no account is used.
• Anthropic — reads what you write about a trip and turns it into the constraints Drift plans around, for Pro subscribers. The text you wrote is sent; your name, email and account are not. It is not used to train anyone's model.
• Apple — runs the App Store, handles subscriptions, provides Sign in with Apple and on-device speech recognition. Apple's own privacy policy applies to those.

Other travellers see only what you deliberately share: your display name, bio, photo and companion if you make your profile public, and any post you write, to the audience you chose for it. Your preferences, your subscription status, and your unshared trip are never visible to other users.

Drift does not sell personal information and does not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, under the CCPA or otherwise. The only situation in which data would be handed to anyone else is a valid legal order, and the aim would be to tell you unless we are forbidden from doing so.

Where it is kept, and for how long

Data is stored on Supabase infrastructure and may be processed outside your own country, including in the United States. Transfers out of the UK or EEA rely on the standard contractual clauses those providers operate under.

Your data stays for as long as you keep the account. Delete the account and it goes — see below. Drift does not keep a shadow copy of a deleted account to build a profile from.

Deleting your account

Open You → Settings → Delete account. This removes your profile, preferences, trips, journal entries, saved places, streak history and the login itself. It is immediate and it cannot be undone. There is no need to email anyone and no waiting period.

Deleting your Drift account does not cancel an App Store subscription — Apple owns that relationship, so cancel it in your iPhone's Settings under your Apple Account. Backups may hold a copy for up to 30 days before they roll over.

Your other rights

You can see and change almost everything from inside the app. Beyond that you have the right to ask for a copy of your data, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to restrict or object to how it is used, and to have it sent to another service. Write to drift.dev.travel.app@gmail.com and you will get an answer within 30 days. There is no charge. If you are in the UK or EU and are unhappy with the response, you can complain to your national data protection authority.

Children

Drift is meant for people aged 13 and over and is not directed at younger children. It does not knowingly collect anything from a child under 13. If you believe a child has given us their information, write to the address above and it will be deleted.

Security

Traffic to and from the app is encrypted in transit. Access to your data is enforced at the database itself, so a request for someone else's account is refused rather than merely hidden by the app. No system is perfect; if a breach ever affects your data you will be told promptly, along with what happened and what to do.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a way that matters — new data collected, a new third party, a new purpose — the app will say so before the change takes effect, rather than quietly editing this page. The date at the top always reflects the current version.

Questions about any of this go to drift.dev.travel.app@gmail.com.