Surf Privacy Policy

Effective 11 July 2026 · Last updated 15 October 2026

1. Information we collect

Surf has no account system, no login to us, and no first-party analytics, and MW Supply Limited operates no servers that receive your data. Your browsing data is stored locally in the app's own storage on your device. It is never uploaded to us. The one exception is described in section 4: with a Surf Pro subscription and iCloud sync left on, some of it is also kept in your own iCloud account so it is the same on your other devices — still not on any server of ours. There is no advertising and no third-party analytics, so no data about you is processed off your device by us or on our behalf. If you switch on optional AI assistant access on a Mac through MCP, page content leaves your device to an assistant you have chosen — not to us, and not on our behalf; this is described in full in section 7.

2. The browser & your browsing data

Surf is built on Apple's WebKit. It handles the pages you visit, cookies, cache and information you type into websites; Surf keeps bookmarks, history, Top Sites and tabs in the app's storage, with optional browser-data sync described in section 4. Your browser sends cookies and submitted information, including sign-in details, to the relevant websites. A website's own scripts may also send what you type before you submit a form, under that site's privacy practices. None of this is sent to MW Supply Limited, and we cannot see your browsing or your logins. Surf does not include cookies, cached pages or ordinary form entries in its cross-device sync. A sign-in you explicitly ask Surf to remember can use iCloud Keychain if you enable that separate switch — see below. If you enable Mac automation, ordinary form entries can also be read by the assistant working in that tab and sent to its provider, subject to the safeguards and limits in section 7. You can clear it at any time in the app's Settings using Clear Browsing Data, which wipes your history, cookies, and cache.

Saved sign-ins. Surf can offer to remember a username and password you type into a website, so you do not have to type it again. It always asks first, one site at a time, and you can answer “never for this site”. What you agree to save is stored in your device's keychain, available only while the device is unlocked. By default it stays on the device you saved it on. In Settings you can switch on Sync with iCloud Keychain, which marks your saved sign-ins for Apple's iCloud Keychain — the same store Safari uses for its passwords — so they reach your other devices under your own Apple Account. Whether they actually travel is up to your Apple Account settings; Surf cannot see whether iCloud Keychain is switched on, and does not claim to. Either way they are never sent to MW Supply Limited: we run no server that could receive them, and we have no way to read them. Surf only offers this on secure (https) sites, and only fills a password back into the same site it was saved for. It never saves or fills anything in a private tab, and never in a tab an assistant session is working with (see section 7). Everything saved is listed in Settings, where you can look at one behind Face ID, Touch ID or your device passcode, remove it, or remove all of them. From Surf 1.12 for Mac and 1.9 for iPhone and iPad you can also copy a saved username or password, and add or edit an entry by hand. Copying a password also puts it on the system clipboard, outside Surf. On iPhone and iPad, Surf marks the copy as local to that device and asks the system to discard it after a minute. macOS offers no equivalent: a password copied on a Mac goes to the ordinary system clipboard, which macOS shares with your other Apple devices through Universal Clipboard if you have Handoff switched on. Treat a copy on a Mac as leaving the machine. Surf marks the clipboard entry so that clipboard managers which honour that marking keep it out of their history, but that is a convention rather than a guarantee, and nothing about it sends anything to us. Removing one deletes it here — and, if you have that sync switched on, from your other devices as they catch up. We hold no copy to delete.

Staying signed in. Websites keep you signed in with cookies, and some of those are “session” cookies a browser would normally discard when you quit. Surf can hold on to those so that quitting the app does not sign you out of everything, as Safari and Chrome also do. They are kept in your device's keychain marked this device only: unlike a saved sign-in, a session cookie is never synced, never backed up and never sent to us, and no setting changes that. Private tabs are never included. You can turn this off in Settings, and Clear Browsing Data erases it.

Private tabs. When you open a private tab, Surf keeps no history of it and holds its cookies and site data only in memory — nothing from a private tab is written to your device's long-term storage. Links you follow from a private tab stay private, and when you close your private tabs that in-memory session is cleared. Private tabs are never included in the iCloud sync described in section 4. Private browsing keeps this activity off your device; it does not make you anonymous to the websites you visit, your network, or your internet provider.

3. Ad & tracker blocking

Surf offers an optional on-device content blocker that removes many ads and known trackers from the web pages you load. This runs entirely on your device using rule lists bundled with the app; it does not report the sites you visit to us or to anyone else. Surf itself shows no advertising — see section 6.

4. Your files, your browser data & iCloud

Surf includes a file manager. Files you save or import are stored in the app's own library on your device, and their names, folders, tags, and playback positions are kept in the app's own storage. MW Supply Limited never receives any of it — we operate no servers and there is nothing for us to receive it with.

iCloud sync is on by default so your library is the same on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. When it is on, your files are stored in your own iCloud account, under Apple's terms and your Apple Account settings — not on any server of ours, and we cannot see them. You can turn it off at any time in the app's Settings, which moves your library back onto the device; turning it on moves it into iCloud. On a Mac the library also appears in Finder under iCloud Drive.

Browser data sync (Surf Pro). With Surf Pro access, and only while iCloud sync is left on, Surf also keeps your bookmarks and bookmark folders, browsing history, reading list (including the article text saved for offline reading), per-site preferences, and the list of tabs open on each device in your own iCloud account, so they are the same on your iPhone, iPad and Mac. The tab list is the last one each device published rather than a live view: on a Mac set to open on a new tab, closing the window does not withdraw the tabs it had, so another device may go on listing them until that Mac opens something again. This is stored under Apple's terms and your Apple Account settings; it is not sent to any server of ours and we cannot see it. Turning iCloud sync off in Settings stops it and moves that data back to the device. If a subscription lapses, nothing is deleted — the device simply stops sending changes. Private tabs, cookies, cached pages and anything you type into a website are never included. Saved sign-ins do not travel this way either; if they sync at all it is through Apple's iCloud Keychain, described in section 2.

The Private area. Files you move into the Private area are hidden behind Face ID, Touch ID, or your device passcode, and they are moved out of the part of the container that other apps and the Files app can browse. To be precise about what this is: it is access gating plus your device's own file protection — Surf does not apply its own additional encryption, and the files still sync if iCloud sync is on. It is not a substitute for a dedicated encrypted vault.

5. Subscriptions & payments

Surf Pro is sold through Apple's In-App Purchase using StoreKit, either as an auto-renewable subscription or as a one-time purchase. Your purchase, payment, and renewals are handled entirely by Apple under your Apple Account; MW Supply Limited never sees your name, your Apple ID, or your card or payment details. Subscriptions can be managed or cancelled any time in your Apple Account settings.

6. Advertising

Surf itself shows no advertising, on any tier. The app includes no advertising SDK, and Surf does not collect or transmit advertising or tracking data. Websites you visit may show ads or use trackers under their own policies; Surf’s optional content blocker blocks many of them, not all.

Surf does not track you for advertising and does not ask for Apple's App Tracking Transparency permission.

Surf is funded by optional Surf Pro purchases. Both the free and Pro tiers have no app advertising.

7. Optional AI assistant access through MCP (Mac only)

On a Mac, Surf can let a compatible AI assistant you choose read and act on a web page through MCP (Model Context Protocol). You install and sign in to that assistant yourself. Surf 1.14 for Mac calls these controls AI Assistants; earlier versions call them Claude. The connection and its safeguards apply to compatible local MCP clients. The connector setup guide includes ChatGPT desktop and Codex instructions and explains the current verification limits. The feature is part of Surf Pro, is off until you switch it on, and does nothing at all before you do. It is not available on iPhone or iPad.

The switch is remembered, from Surf 1.12 for Mac. If you leave it on, it is on again the next time you open Surf, and it stays that way through updates until you turn it off — in Settings › AI Assistants (Claude in earlier versions), in … › Add-Ons, or from the Automation › Stop Automation menu, which is always there while it is running. In Surf 1.11 and earlier it was off at every launch and had to be switched on each time. Nothing is remembered until you turn it on yourself; a fresh install, and an install updating from 1.11, both start off.

How it is connected. A small separate program, the Surf Connector, is installed by you and runs on your Mac as a local process started by your assistant software. You can fetch it from its own page yourself; from Surf 1.13 for Mac you can instead press Update in Surf, and Surf will fetch the installer, check it against the checksum published beside it, and hand it to macOS — which still asks for your administrator password, because the connector is installed outside Surf. Surf talks to the connector over your machine's loopback interface — traffic that never reaches a network. Nothing about Surf is reachable from another machine, and with that program not running there is no connection at all.

Remembering permission to verify the connector. From Surf 1.14 for Mac, build 138, choosing the connector stores a local security bookmark requesting read-only access to that file, without requesting parent-folder permission. This lets Surf inspect the selected file after relaunch. Verification only reads the file, never writes it, and balances each successful scoped-access call afterwards. It does not run the connector to determine its build. If an older selection has no usable permission, Verify Installed Connector… opens the chooser so you can select the installed program once; no reinstall is needed for this step. The bookmark, selected path and file hash stay on your Mac and are not uploaded to MW Supply Limited or an assistant provider by this check. Unavailable access is shown as unverified, rather than proof that an update is needed.

One part of this does reach the network, and we would rather name it than have you find it. So that you are told when your connector is out of date — which otherwise goes unnoticed for months — the connector asks our download page for one small file, connector.json, a few seconds after it starts; and from Surf 1.13 for Mac Surf asks for the same file once when it launches, but only if you have ever set up a connector, because for anyone else the request could not produce a single sentence on screen. From Surf 1.14 for Mac, build 137, if a connector is on record, Surf also checks when you open AI Assistants in Settings or Add-Ons, after you choose a connector, and when you turn update checks back on. The Check Now button requests a fresh comparison too. These Surf requests obey the same update-check switch. Neither request includes a Surf identifier, local connector path or bookmark, build number, browsing data, cookie or query string. Like any web host, GitHub receives ordinary connection information such as your IP address. The comparison happens on your machine, on what comes back. That file is a static page on GitHub Pages, so GitHub sees the request as any web host sees any request; MW Supply Limited receives nothing from it and operates no server involved in it. You can switch it off: in Surf, in Settings › AI Assistants (Claude in earlier versions); for the connector, by setting SURF_CONNECTOR_NO_UPDATE_CHECK=1 in its entry in your assistant’s MCP configuration (for example .mcp.json for Claude Code or ~/.codex/config.toml for ChatGPT desktop and Codex), which stops it opening a socket at all.

What Surf can hand over, while it is switched on. For a page in a tab the session is working with: its address and title, the visible text, a description of the elements on it — links and where they point, buttons, and form fields including anything already typed into an ordinary one (an address, a name, a message you were part-way through) — a picture of the page, and the messages and network requests that page produced while you were on it. It can also click, type, scroll and drag, go back and forward, open and close its own tabs, and resize its working page. From Surf 1.14 for Mac, resizing a detached background tab changes only that tab’s viewport. Resizing an assistant-owned tab that you are viewing changes its visible browser window. Earlier versions can resize the visible window even for a background tab. It can cause a file to be saved to your Mac, the same way following a download link yourself would; Surf reports each one to the session by name and path. Surf hands all of this to the connector on your Mac only when your assistant asks for it.

What happens next is not ours, and we want to be exact about it. Your assistant sends the page content and other tool results it receives to the provider you use with that assistant for processing — for example Anthropic for Claude, or OpenAI for ChatGPT and Codex configured with OpenAI. That processing is under the provider's terms and privacy policy and your account with them — not ours. Surf can neither see that nor limit it. Read your assistant's own policy before switching this on. It is the reason this feature is off until you ask for it, is Surf Pro only, and can be stopped from the menu bar at any moment.

What Surf refuses, in its own code, whatever it is asked. Private tabs are never exposed — not their content, not their addresses, and not their existence: they are left out even of the count of tabs an assistant is told it cannot see. Password fields are never filled, and Surf also refuses any field it recognises as a payment card, security code or one-time code. What you have typed into one is never read either: it is left out of what an assistant is told, and Surf hides it for the moment a picture of the page is taken, so it is not in that either. Recognition beyond a password field relies on how the site marks it up, so treat it as a strong safeguard rather than a guarantee. A session can only see and act on tabs it opened itself, or a tab you have explicitly handed to it, and it cannot switch itself on, create a private tab, or reach the tabs of another session.

Whose browser it is working in, which we want to be equally exact about. Those limits are about tabs. Behind them, a tab an assistant session opens is an ordinary tab in your ordinary browsing session, using the same cookies as the rest of Surf — there is no separate, signed-out browser hiding behind this feature, and none is claimed. So a site you are signed into is a site the session is signed into: it can reach your account pages there, read what is on them, and act as you. It runs the other way too — a sign-in or a sign-out a session performs, or persuades a site to perform, is one your own browsing keeps afterwards, not one that disappears when the session stops. Private tabs are the exception on both counts, as above: they hold their cookies only in memory, and they are never exposed to a session at all. None of this sends anything to MW Supply Limited — we still receive nothing — but what a signed-in page shows is page content, and page content is what goes to your assistant's provider as described above. It is part of why the feature is off until you switch it on, why it is confined to tabs the session opened or you handed over, and why Automation › Stop Automation stays in the menu bar the whole time it is running.

A limit worth stating plainly. Any program running on your Mac as you can present itself to Surf as an assistant session. No secret would change that — a program running as you could read it. This is why the feature does nothing until you switch it on, why every connected session is listed by name in the app's Add-Ons panel, with a pill in the toolbar and a tinted border on any page being acted on whenever a Surf window is open, and why the refusals above are enforced by Surf rather than requested politely. Those on-screen signals need a window to appear in: Surf keeps running with its window closed so that downloads finish, and a session connected at that moment is not drawing anything anywhere. Automation › Stop Automation stays in the menu bar the whole time, which is why the menu-bar switch rather than the on-screen signal is the one to rely on. It is also why a remembered switch is one you can always revoke from the menu bar, without opening a settings pane to do it. And it is why a web page's own text can attempt to influence an assistant that is reading it; Surf is not immune to that, and no browser is.

The App Store privacy label is unaffected. Surf still collects no data. The update check retrieves a static file without uploading the local connector bookmark, path, build identity or browsing data. The persistent read permission is stored locally, not collected by MW Supply Limited. The connector is not part of the app, we receive nothing from it, and your assistant's provider is not processing anything on our behalf.

8. Third-party websites & your responsibility

Surf is a general-purpose web browser and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any website you visit. The websites you load have their own privacy practices and terms, which are outside our control. You are responsible for complying with the terms of service of the sites you visit and with applicable law.

9. Data we do NOT collect

Surf does not collect or transmit your browsing history, bookmarks, tabs, Top Sites, or search terms to us; it has no account and asks for no personal information; and it performs no first-party analytics or crash tracking. The app requests no access to your photos, contacts, camera, microphone, or location. No data of any kind is sent to MW Supply Limited. The only things that leave your device are the web requests made when you browse, including cookies, information you submit and requests made by website scripts; — if you leave iCloud sync on — your own files, and (with Surf Pro) the browser data listed in section 4, syncing to your own iCloud account, which we cannot see; — if you switch on iCloud Keychain sync for saved sign-ins — those sign-ins, going to your own iCloud Keychain and no further; and — if you switch on Mac AI assistant access — the page content described in section 7, going to the assistant you chose and its provider; and — if you copy a saved password on a Mac (Surf 1.12 and later) — that password, going to the system clipboard and, through Universal Clipboard, to your other Apple devices. On iPhone and iPad a copied password is marked local to the device instead. And — on a Mac, if you have ever set up the Surf Connector — the request for connector.json described in section 7, which asks our download page whether a newer connector exists and sends nothing about you with it. And — when Surf checks which day it is, so that a free daily save is counted against the right day — a request that reads the time from the reply. Depending on the installed version, this request goes to mwsupplylimited.github.io or, in older releases, google.com. It carries no cookies, browsing history or personal identifier and is not cached. As with any network request, the receiving host can observe connection information such as your IP address. And — to draw the small site icon beside a bookmark, a history row or a Top Site — a request to that site for its own /favicon.ico, made to that site and to nobody else. None of it comes to us.

10. Children

Surf is not directed to children under 13 and is age-rated accordingly in the App Store, because it provides unrestricted access to the web. The app shows no advertising and collects no personal data, consistent with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and similar regulations worldwide.

11. Changes to this policy

If we change how Surf handles data, we will update this page and the “Last updated” date above. Material changes will also be reflected in the App Store privacy labels for the affected version of the app.

12. Contact

Questions about this privacy policy can be sent to mwsupplylimited@gmail.com.