Privacy Policy

Where your recipes live

Your saved recipes, your cooking progress, and your preferences are stored on the device you are using. Without an account they never leave it, and Sift works completely that way. Asking Ember about a recipe sends that recipe's text off the device for as long as it takes to answer; the next section says exactly what goes and where.

If you sign in, your profile is kept on our servers, and recipe syncing, when it is enabled for your account, keeps a copy there so recipes can reach your other devices. Whatever is stored is readable only by your account. We do not read it, and deleting your account deletes it.

What leaves your device

These, and nothing else:

• Saving a recipe. The address of the page and the page itself, which your phone downloads, are sent to our extraction service so the ingredients and steps can be read out of it. Neither is kept afterwards.
• Searching. Your search words are sent to our search provider to get results back. They are not tied to your account.
• Syncing, if it is enabled for your account. When recipe syncing is on, your recipes are sent to our servers so they can reach your other devices. Otherwise they never leave the device.
• Signing in. Your email address is sent to our email provider so we can send you a sign-in link. With Sign in with Apple, Apple hands us a signed token and the email you chose to share, which may be a relay address Apple manages.
• Asking Ember. Ember runs on our server, and the answer comes from a model at OpenAI. When you use an Ember feature, what you typed (a craving, or a goal like keto) goes to our server along with the recipe in front of you (its title, ingredients and steps, and in Compare the site each version came from), the diets and restrictions you have set, the cook note, which is the short note Sift builds from what you have cooked, saved and starred, and a few words summing up the same evidence. In a conversation, the dishes Ember already dealt go too, so it does not repeat itself. Our server sends that to OpenAI's API and passes the answer back. Your name and email do not go with it, and neither does anything that identifies your account. Our server keeps no copy of the question or the answer. OpenAI does not use what comes through its API to train its models, and keeps it for up to 30 days to watch for abuse before deleting it. Nothing goes to OpenAI unless you ask Ember something, so leaving Ember alone is how you opt out.
• Subscribing. Paying for Sift Pro goes through Apple. Apple sends us a signed record of the purchase, and we keep a transaction identifier, which plan it is, when it was bought and when it expires against your account, so Sift knows Pro is on and when it ends. Your card details stay with Apple. We never see them, and what Apple keeps is covered by Apple's own privacy policy. If you unlocked Pro on the web instead, the same holds: the card went to Stripe, and we hold a payment reference.

Your account

If you create an account, we hold your email address and the name you give us. We use it to identify your account and nothing else. Signed in, we also hold the recipes you have synced and, if you pay for Pro, the purchase record described above.

You can delete your account at any time from your profile. That removes your email, your profile, your purchase record, and any synced recipes from our servers. Recipes on your device are kept unless you ask for those to go too, because they are your work and were never part of your account. Deleting the account does not cancel an App Store subscription; cancel that in your App Store settings first, or Apple keeps billing.

What we do not do

No advertising identifiers. No selling or sharing of your information. No tracking you across other apps or websites. No analytics that identify you. No training of models on your recipes or your questions, by us or by OpenAI.

Recipes belong to their authors

Sift keeps a link to the original recipe on every card and shows the site it came from. Saved copies are for your own use.

Getting in touch

Questions about any of this can go to the contact address on the App Store listing.