Last updated 29 September 2026
MindDrawer is made by Ben Dansby. This policy covers the Mac, iPhone and iPad apps.
MindDrawer has no analytics, no telemetry, no account and no identifier. Your library lives on your own devices. If you turn syncing on, it goes to your own iCloud account — not to a server of mine, because there isn’t one. If you turn on the Claude assistant on the Mac, your questions and the parts of your library needed to answer them go to Anthropic, under an API key of your own.
Everything you file — notes, links, pictures, recordings, videos, documents — is stored on your device, inside MindDrawer’s own folder. Files you drop in are copied there, so the drawer keeps working after you move or delete the original. Nothing is uploaded anywhere as a consequence of filing it.
MindDrawer reads the text in pictures and PDFs, and can transcribe a recording, so that searching finds things by what is in them rather than only by their name. All of that runs on your own device through Apple’s Vision and Speech frameworks. No image, page, recording or recognised word is sent anywhere, and the results are only ever used to answer your own searches.
Syncing is off until you switch it on in Settings. When it is on, your drawers travel through your iCloud account using Apple’s CloudKit private database. That means Apple stores the data on your behalf under Apple’s privacy policy, and I have no access to it: there is no server of mine in the path and no way for me to read what you have filed. You decide whether large files travel with it or stay on the device that has them.
The Mac app can answer questions about your library with Claude, Anthropic’s AI model. The assistant is off until you switch it on in Settings ▸ Claude, and it works only with an Anthropic API key you add yourself — your own account with Anthropic, not one of mine. While it is off, nothing described in this section happens.
When you ask something, MindDrawer sends Anthropic your question, a short description of where you are in the library, and the parts of your library Claude looks up to answer it: the names of items, drawers, cabinets and labels, the text and notes you’ve written, the words read out of pictures and PDFs, and transcripts. Pictures, recordings, videos and other files themselves are not sent. If you let Claude change your library, it does so through MindDrawer on your Mac; the changes are listed under its answer and undo in one step. Exports it makes are written to a temporary folder on your Mac and go wherever you save them — never uploaded.
Those requests go straight from your Mac to api.anthropic.com. There is no server of mine in the path, and I can’t see your questions, your answers or your key. Anthropic handles what it receives under its own privacy policy and the terms of your API account. Your key is kept in this Mac’s Keychain, is never synced, and is sent only to Anthropic.
bendansby.com for its update feed. That request carries the app version and macOS version, which is what any updater needs.That is the entire list. Apart from what you choose to send Claude, nothing about what you have filed is included in any of them.
“Add to MindDrawer” in a Share menu copies what you shared into a private folder the app reads on next launch, and asks which drawer to put it in. It has no network access at all.
If you buy a license for the direct download, activating it sends your license key to Lemon Squeezy, who handle the purchase and validation. Their handling is covered by the Lemon Squeezy privacy policy. MindDrawer stores the resulting receipt locally. If you never buy a license, this never happens. The App Store version has no licensing code in it at all.
MindDrawer requests no screen recording and no accessibility access. Speech recognition is asked for only when you choose to transcribe something.
Deleting an item, a drawer or a cabinet removes it from the library, and the files behind it are cleared out the next time the app launches — not immediately, because an accidental delete is one undo away from coming back. If syncing is on, the deletion travels to your other devices too.
MindDrawer is a utility for keeping track of your own material. It is not directed at children and collects nothing from anyone.
If this policy ever changes, the updated version will appear on this page with a new date. Since MindDrawer collects nothing, any change is likely to be a clarification.
Questions about privacy, or anything else: ben.dansby@gmail.com.