Privacy notice
Draft prepared October 2026. Effective date to be set by the owner.
Surfski is an open-source project. This notice explains what happens to your data on this website (surfski.io) and when you use the Surfski software. It is written to be short and literal.
Summary
- This website collects nothing. It is static HTML. It sets no cookies, runs no analytics or tracking scripts, and has no forms or accounts. The docs search runs entirely in your browser.
- The project never receives your email. Surfski is software that you or your organisation run yourselves. It sends no telemetry to the project maintainers.
- Whoever runs a Surfski instance is responsible for the data on it. If someone else runs the instance you use, their privacy policy applies, not this one.
1. This website
surfski.io is served as static files by Cloudflare Pages. When you load a page, Cloudflare processes standard technical information, such as your IP address, browser user agent and the page requested, to deliver the page and protect the service. Cloudflare handles that data under its own privacy policy. The project does not add analytics on top of that and does not use these logs to identify visitors.
The docs pages remember your light or dark theme choice in your browser’s local storage. That value never leaves your device.
Links to GitHub and other sites take you to services with their own privacy policies.
2. The Surfski software
The Surfski software is published under the MIT license at github.com/rayhu/surfski. Anyone can run their own copy, called an instance. The person or organisation that runs an instance, the operator, decides who may use it and controls its data. The project maintainers have no access to any instance they do not run themselves.
A Surfski instance stores, on the operator’s own server:
- the Google account email address of each allowed user;
- for each linked mailbox: its email address, the alias you gave it, and a Google refresh token, encrypted at rest;
- OAuth client registration data for the connected MCP client (for example, Claude), encrypted at rest;
- an audit log of tool calls, recording the tool name, mailbox alias and a short detail, but never message bodies or tokens.
Email content is fetched from Gmail when you ask for it and passed to your MCP client. Surfski does not store message contents. What your MCP client does with that content is governed by that client’s provider (for Claude, Anthropic’s terms and privacy policy).
Surfski’s use of information received from Google APIs is intended to follow the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Operators are responsible for their own compliance.
3. Your controls
- Ask Claude to
unlink_accounta mailbox. The instance revokes its Google token and deletes the stored link. - You can revoke access at any time from your Google Account permissions page.
- For any other request about data on an instance, contact that instance’s operator.
4. If you operate an instance
If people other than you use your instance, you need your own privacy policy that describes your instance. Google’s consent screen asks for one. This page describes the project and this website only, so don’t link it as your instance’s policy.
5. A future hosted service
A hosted Surfski service is planned but does not exist yet. If it launches, it will have its own privacy policy covering mailbox data before it accepts any users.
6. Changes and contact
Changes to this notice will be published on this page with a new date. Questions can be raised as a GitHub issue, or privately via [owner to add a contact email address]. Report security issues as described in SECURITY.md. See also the terms.