DriveFiler Privacy Policy

Version 2026-08-08

This policy explains what personal information DriveFiler collects, why, what we do with it, and what you can ask us to do about it. It forms part of our Terms of Service.

DriveFiler is operated by Drive Filer Inc., which is the organisation responsible for your personal information — the "data controller" if you are in the EU or the UK. Our address is given in section 10.

The short version

We do not store your documents. They stay in your own Google Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox account. On OneDrive and Dropbox, DriveFiler can reach only its own folder and nothing else in your account. We store the categorization you build around them, your account details, and your billing details. We do not sell your information, we do not use it for advertising, and we do not use it to train machine-learning models.

1. What we collect

Account information — your email address, your name, and the password you choose (stored only as a cryptographic hash, never in a form we can read).

Billing information — your postal address, which we need to determine sales tax and to satisfy our payment processor's requirements. Card details are handled by Paddle, our payment processor, and are never stored on our servers.

Your categorization data — the information you create about your documents: vendor, account, document type, owner, asset and tag names; document dates; file names; the folder paths DriveFiler files them under; and any comments you add.

Some of this is personal information about you, and some may be personal information about other people — an "owner" you file documents against may be a family member, and vendor or account names can reveal who you bank with or who you buy from. We treat all of it as personal information.

Storage connection details — which provider you connected and the account address you connected it with. The access tokens that let DriveFiler act on your storage are held on your own devices, not on our servers.

What DriveFiler can reach in your storage account — this differs by provider, because the providers offer different permissions:

• OneDrive and Dropbox — DriveFiler asks only for access to its own folder. Your provider enforces that limit, so DriveFiler cannot see, open or change anything else in your account. That folder is an ordinary folder in your drive: you can browse, open, copy, move and share what is in it exactly as you would any other file, including if you stop using DriveFiler.
• Google Drive — DriveFiler asks for broader access to your Drive. Google's narrower permission cannot see files that are added to a folder after the fact, which would break the ability to drop a document into your DriveFiler folder from another device and have DriveFiler file it. We use that access only within the DriveFiler folder, but the permission you grant is wider than the use we make of it, and you should know that before you grant it.

Technical information — the IP address a request comes from, which we use to apply rate limits and to record where and when you accepted our terms; device identifiers for the devices you activate; and basic operational logs.

What we do not collect — the contents of your documents. DriveFiler reads your files on your own device to display them and to read a file's name; the contents are never transmitted to us or stored by us.

2. Why we use it, and our lawful basis

We do not rely on consent for the above, because the service cannot be provided without them — with one exception: connecting your cloud storage is consent, given through your provider's own sign-in screen, and you can withdraw it at any time.

We do not send marketing email. The messages we send are transactional: confirm your address, a sign-in code each time you sign in with your password, reset your password, a renewal notice seven days before a charge, and a receipt after one.

3. Who we share it with

We share personal information only with service providers who help us run DriveFiler, and only as far as they need it:

• Hosting and database — our servers and database are operated by Render, in the United States.
• Email delivery — Resend delivers our transactional email.
• Payment processing — Paddle (Paddle.com Market Ltd) acts as the merchant of record for every purchase. They handle card details directly and are responsible for charging sales tax and VAT; we receive only confirmation of payment and the details needed for receipts and records. Paddle's own privacy policy governs what they do with the information you give them at checkout.

Your cloud storage provider (Google, Microsoft or Dropbox) is not our service provider — it is yours. Your relationship with them is governed by their own terms and privacy policy.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for advertising. We may disclose information if the law requires it, and we will tell you when we are permitted to do so.

4. Where your information is held

Our servers and database are located in the United States, and our email provider processes messages there. Paddle, who handle payments, are established in the United Kingdom and process payment information there and in the United States. If you are in Canada, the EU or the UK, your information is transferred outside your country and may be accessible to authorities there under their laws. Where required, we rely on appropriate safeguards for those transfers, including standard contractual clauses with our providers.

5. How long we keep it

• While your subscription is active — for as long as you are a customer.
• After your subscription ends — how long we keep your categorization data depends on how it ended: 90 days if a payment failed and was never recovered, 30 days if you cancelled, and 7 days if you asked us to delete it. We warn the account owner by email before anything is deleted. Full details are in section 9 of the Terms of Service. After the window ends it is permanently deleted and we cannot recover it.
• Billing and tax records — kept for as long as tax law requires, typically six years, even after your account is gone. These are financial records, not your categorization.
• Security logs — kept for a short period for abuse investigation.

Deleting your DriveFiler data does not delete your documents. They are in your own storage account and are not ours to delete.

6. Your rights

You can ask us to:

• Show you what we hold about you.
• Correct anything wrong — most of it you can edit yourself in the app.
• Delete your account and your categorization data.
• Give you a copy in a portable form. You can do this yourself at any time: the desktop app exports your entire categorization to CSV, and it works without a subscription.
• Stop or restrict particular uses, or object to processing based on legitimate interests.

Send us a request through the contact form at www.drivefiler.com/contact and we will respond within 30 days.

If you are in Canada and are unhappy with our response, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. If you are in the EU or UK, you can complain to your local data protection authority.

7. Security

• Your password is stored only as a hash.
• Data in transit is encrypted with TLS.
• The local database on your own devices is encrypted at rest, and on Windows the most sensitive values are additionally protected with the operating system's own encryption.
• Your cloud storage tokens are stored encrypted on your devices, and never on our servers — so a compromise of our servers would not give anyone access to your storage account.
• Access to production systems is limited to those who need it.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your personal information, we will notify you and the relevant regulator as the law requires.

8. Children

DriveFiler is not intended for children, and we do not knowingly collect their personal information. If you believe a child has given us information, contact us and we will delete it.

9. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. Each version is dated and retained. If a change materially affects you, we will tell you by email at least 30 days beforehand.

10. Contact

The organisation responsible for your personal information is:

Drive Filer Inc., 800 Steeles Ave. W. Unit #B10182, Thornhill, ON L4J 7L2, Canada

Use the contact form at www.drivefiler.com/contact. It reaches us directly, and we reply to the address you give.

Version 2026-08-08. Published versions are never edited; a change creates a new dated version.