Privacy Policy

Sift helps you clean up your iPhone: you swipe through your photos, contacts, email and Google Drive files, and decide what to keep. To do that, Sift has to see them. This policy explains what Sift reads, what it does with it, and what it keeps. Sift is made by Maty Michalsky (“we”).

The short version

Everything stays on your iPhone. Your photos, contacts, email and files go straight from Apple or Google to your phone. Nothing is uploaded to us.
Nothing sold or shared. We never receive your data, so we can’t sell it or share it with anyone.
You decide. Sift only deletes or changes what you choose.

Photos and videos

Sift reads your photo library on your iPhone, with the access you give it in iOS, to show your photos and videos as cards.
Similar Photos finds near-duplicate shots on the iPhone itself, using Apple’s Vision framework. Your photos aren’t uploaded for this, or for anything else.
When you delete photos, Sift asks iOS to delete them. They go to the Recently Deleted album in Photos, where you can recover them until Photos deletes them for good, after a time Apple decides. When you choose, Sift can also add photos to an album or hide them.
You can change Sift’s access to your photos at any time in the iPhone’s Settings app, under Sift.

Contacts

Sift reads your contacts on your iPhone to find duplicates you could merge, and contacts missing details (like a name or a phone number) you might want to delete.
Nothing changes until you’ve reviewed the changes and applied them. Sift then merges or deletes only the contacts you chose.
Sift doesn’t send your contacts anywhere. If your contacts sync with iCloud, Google or another account, your changes sync there the same way as any edit you make on your iPhone.
You can change Sift’s access to your contacts at any time in the iPhone’s Settings app, under Sift.

Gmail

Connecting Gmail is optional. When you connect it, you sign in on Google’s own page, and Google asks you to let Sift read and organize your email (Google’s gmail.modify permission). Sift uses it only to:

Read the headers of your emails: sender, subject, date, size and unsubscribe details. That’s how Sift groups your mail by sender and shows it as cards.
Show you an email. Sift loads full emails only for the cards on your screen. They’re kept in memory, never saved, and gone when Sift closes.
Trash, archive or label the emails you choose. Sift doesn’t delete email permanently: it moves it to Gmail’s Trash, where you can restore it until Gmail deletes it for good.
Unsubscribe when you ask it to, the way the sender offers: by sending the sender a one-click unsubscribe request, by sending a short unsubscribe email from your Gmail address (you’ll see it in your Sent folder), or by opening the sender’s unsubscribe page. That unsubscribe email is the only email Sift ever sends.

Images in emails

Emails are shown the way they were sent, with their scripts blocked and no cookies kept. Images stored online load by default. As in any email app that loads them, this lets the sender know you opened the email and see your IP address, which can reveal your approximate location. Gmail and Apple Mail hide this by loading images through their own servers; Sift loads them directly, so it can’t hide this. To stop images loading, turn off Load Images in the ⋯ menu of Sift’s Gmail section.

Google Drive

Connecting Google Drive is optional, and separate from Gmail. When you connect it, Google asks you to let Sift see and manage your Drive files (Google’s drive permission). Sift uses it only to:

List the files you own: their names, types and sizes, when they were changed and last opened, whether they’re shared, and folder names. Sift shows them as cards, biggest first (or oldest, or longest unopened). Files other people shared with you aren’t listed.
Show thumbnails, loaded from Google with your sign-in and kept in memory only. Sift never downloads what’s inside your files.
Move files to Drive’s Trash or into a folder, including a new one, when you choose.
Open a file when you tap it. It opens on Google’s own website, inside Sift.

How Sift treats your Google data

Your Gmail and Google Drive data goes straight from Google to your iPhone. It isn’t sent to us: we don’t receive it, see it or store it.
Sift uses it only to show it to you and to do what you ask in the app.
It isn’t sold, used for ads, shared with or transferred to anyone, or used to train AI models. Nobody reads your email or files: nothing reaches us, so nobody could.

Sift's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Disconnecting Google

In Sift: open Gmail or Google Drive, tap the ⋯ menu and choose Disconnect. Sift forgets that sign-in on your iPhone, and disconnecting Gmail also deletes the email headers Sift saved.
When you disconnect the last of the two, Sift also asks Google to revoke its access. If Gmail and Google Drive use the same Google account, Google treats them as one permission, so it’s revoked once both are disconnected.
At Google: you can remove Sift’s access at any time at myaccount.google.com/connections. Sift then can’t reach your Gmail or Drive until you connect again.
Deleting Sift removes everything it saved on your iPhone, but doesn’t revoke its access at Google. Disconnect in Sift first, or remove Sift at the link above.

What Sift keeps on your iPhone

Sift saves a few things on your iPhone, in its own private storage, so you can pick up where you left off:

What you’ve already reviewed: which photos, similar sets, contacts and Drive files you’ve kept or set aside, and totals such as how much space you’ve freed. These are in sift-state.json, similar-state.json, sift-contacts.json and, for each Google account, Drive/<account>.json, in Sift’s Application Support folder.
Email headers, so your mail loads faster: gmail-headers-v3.json, in Sift’s Caches folder. iOS may clear it when space runs low, and Sift deletes it when you disconnect Gmail.
Your Google sign-in, in the iPhone’s Keychain, which iOS encrypts.
Your settings, like the language you picked.

Full emails and Drive thumbnails are only held in memory while Sift is open. Like other app data, what Sift saves can be part of your iPhone’s backups, but it never leaves your phone any other way. We don’t hold any of your data, so there’s nothing for us to hand over, correct or delete: deleting Sift removes everything it saved.

The settings file

Sift downloads one small file from this website, config.json, to know whether its Gmail and Google Drive sections are open yet. The request carries nothing about you. Like any request on the internet, it shows your IP address to the company that hosts this website.

This website

The company that hosts this website, swipesift.com, may keep standard server logs, such as IP addresses, for security.

Children

Sift doesn’t collect personal information from anyone, children included.

Changes to this policy

If Sift starts handling your data differently, we’ll update this page before the change reaches the app, and change the date at the top.

Contact

Questions about your privacy or this policy? Write to privacy@swipesift.com.