Data policy
Exactly what Sift stores, what it never stores, and how to delete it.
This page describes what the software actually does. It is a technical description, not a legal contract.
What is stored for each pageview
| Field | Example | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Site | example.com | Which registered site the hit belongs to. |
| Timestamp | 2026-11-01T09:14:22Z | Server receive time. |
| Visitor hash | -4823910239847… | Daily-salted 64-bit value. Not reversible to a person. |
| Hostname | app.example.com | Subdomain is kept, www. is stripped. |
| Pathname | /pricing | No query string, no hash. |
| Referrer | https://google.com/ | Full external referrer URL. Internal navigation is dropped to null. |
| Referrer source | Google | Normalized name when recognized. |
| Channel | search | direct, search, social, email, referral. |
| UTM parameters | source, medium, campaign, term, content | Only when present in the URL. |
| Country, region, city | DE, Berlin, Berlin | From the edge request, when available. |
| Browser, OS | Firefox 128, Linux | Parsed from the user agent. |
| Device, screen size | Desktop, 1200px - 1600px | Device from the user agent and viewport width; screen size is a width bucket, not a resolution. |
Sessions add a first and last pageview, a pageview count, a duration, and a bounce flag. Session attribution is first-touch.
What is never stored
- IP addresses. Used in memory to compute the visitor hash, then discarded.
- User agents. Parsed into browser, OS, and device, then discarded.
- Cookies. Sift sets none and reads none.
localStorageidentifiers. The only key read issift_ignore, which you set yourself.- Cross-site data. A visitor hash includes the site ID, so the same person on two sites produces two unrelated hashes.
- Form contents, keystrokes, mouse movement, session recordings. None of it is collected.
Retention
Analytics data stays until you remove it. There is no automatic expiry.
Two ways to remove it:
- Reset statistics on the site — deletes pageviews and sessions, keeps the site and its settings.
- Delete the site — deletes the site, its pageviews, and its sessions.
Deleting your account deletes your sites and their data.
Daily salts are stored per day. They are not personal data on their own: without the original IP address and user agent, a salt cannot be turned into an identifier.
Who can see the data
- You, and anyone you have added to the site.
- Sift operators, who run the database.
- Nobody else. There is no data marketplace, no resale, and no third-party analytics script on your pages.
Where it runs
Ingestion and the dashboard run on Cloudflare Workers. The database is hosted Postgres. Country, region, and city come from Cloudflare's edge geolocation at request time.
Contact
Questions about a specific deployment or a data request: ask the operator of the Sift instance you are using. This documentation site describes the software, not a contract with a company.