Privacy Policy

What Ambient collects

Nothing is collected until you switch a source on. Browsing has its own switch. Gmail and Calendar share one, because they share a single Google connection, so they are turned on and off together. Turning a switch off stops that collection immediately.

• Browsing (only if you install the Mac app). The domain you visited, the page title, and search terms you typed into a search engine, read from the history your browsers already keep. Ambient never reads or stores page content, and never reads a private window. Stored addresses keep only the origin and path; query strings and fragments are removed on your Mac before anything is sent, because that is where access codes and session tokens live.
• Gmail (off by default, needs your Google account). Sender, recipient, subject, labels, thread identifier, and an excerpt of the message body up to 2,000 characters, for messages that pass a relevance filter. One-time passcodes, security alerts, password resets, marketing and newsletters are scored as low value and are not surfaced to you or used to write messages.
• Calendar (off by default, needs your Google account). Event titles, start and end times, location, attendee names, the event description, meeting links, and whether the event repeats.
• Conversations. Messages you send Ambient and the replies it sends you, plus short notes it extracts from what you typed, so it does not ask you the same question twice.
• Bank data (off by default, only if you connect a bank). Connecting a bank goes through Plaid: you sign in to your bank inside Plaid's own screen, and Ambient never sees your bank username or password. Ambient then receives your account names, balances and up to a year of transactions, and uses them to answer your questions about spending and to notice things like a forgotten subscription or a price increase. Access is read-only: Ambient cannot move money or make payments.
• Phone number (only if you link iMessage). Linking iMessage stores the phone number you text the code from, so replies can be matched back to your account. Nothing else about the device is collected, and unlinking removes it.

Google account access

If you connect Google, Ambient requests these scopes and no others:openid,userinfo.email,userinfo.profile,gmail.readonly,calendar.readonly,calendar.events andgmail.send. Reading is the default. The two write scopes are used only when you ask for something and say yes to it: Ambient reads the event or the mail back to you first, and creates or sends it only after you confirm. It cannot delete mail, and cannot move or cancel anything on your calendar. The two profile scopes exist so the service knows your name and address rather than guessing them from your calendar.

Ambient's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Google user data is used only to provide and improve the features described on this page. It is never sold, never used for advertising, and never used to train a generalised machine learning model. No human reads your Google data except you, unless you explicitly ask for support and share it, or the law requires it.

Where the data goes

Collected data is stored in a Postgres database operated by Supabase, on servers hosted by Vercel. To write your messages, the relevant slice is sent to Anthropic and processed by Claude models. So that past conversations can be searched by meaning, each message's text is sent to Voyage AI, which returns a list of numbers (an embedding) that is stored with the message. If you link a chat account, messages are delivered through Telegram or, for iMessage, through LoopMessage — either can see the message text as any messaging service can, and LoopMessage is also given the phone number it delivers to. Google is contacted only to read the data you authorised. If you connect a bank, Plaid Inc. provides the connection under its own End User Privacy Policy; the Plaid access token is stored encrypted with AES-256-GCM and never leaves the server. Ambient has no advertising partners, no analytics vendors, and no data brokers, and does not sell or rent your data to anyone.

How long it is kept

• Activity signals from browsing, mail and calendar: 365 days, then deleted automatically.
• Conversation history: 365 days, then deleted automatically.
• Extracted notes: until they expire, at most 400 days, or until you ask Ambient to forget them.
• Your Google refresh token: until you disconnect or revoke it.
• Bank accounts and transactions: while the bank is connected. Removing a bank on the connect page revokes Ambient's access at Plaid and deletes its accounts and transactions straight away.

Your controls

• Turn browsing off in the Mac app, or quit it. Collection stops at once.
• Disconnect Google from the Mac app, or revoke access at myaccount.google.com/permissions. Revoking stops all future reads immediately.
• Send /pause in the chat to stop messages without losing your setup.
• Delete everything the Mac app has sent, from its settings, in one click.
• Ask Ambient in chat to forget a specific thing, and it is removed.
• Email the address below to have your account and everything attached to it deleted. Removing the Mac app alone does not delete server-side data.

Security, and what this is

Traffic is encrypted in transit. Credentials are held server-side and are never included in exports. Ambient is a small early-access project run by one person, not an established company with a security team, and you should weigh that before connecting a mailbox. No service can promise perfect security, and this one does not.

Ambient is not intended for anyone under 16. If this policy changes materially, the date at the top changes and connected users are told in chat before the change takes effect.

Contact

Questions, data requests and deletion requests: burhanuddinkhatri@gmail.com.