Rize and your privacy
Rize is a web browser for the Mac. It has no account of its own, no server of its own, no analytics and no telemetry. What it keeps, it keeps on your Mac. Data leaves your Mac in three cases: when you browse, when you use the assistant (through your own Claude Code or Codex), and when Rize checks for updates. Each is described below.
What Rize keeps on your Mac
Rize's data folder is ~/Library/Application Support/Rize. It holds:
| What | Where |
|---|---|
| Your open tabs, folders and windows, so they come back when you reopen Rize: their addresses, titles and site icons | session.json |
| Your settings | prefs.json |
| History and bookmarks, one database per profile | history.sqlite, and Profiles/<id>/history.sqlite for other profiles |
| Site icons | Favicons/ |
| Web data: cookies, site storage, the cache, site permissions. This is Chromium's profile, one per Rize profile | Chromium/ |
| Extensions you installed, from the Chrome Web Store | Extensions/, extensions.json |
| The assistant's conversations, one file per tab: your messages, its replies and the steps it took. A conversation is deleted when you close its tab or start a new chat in it | Chats/Saved/ |
| The folder the assistant's model runs in, and the settings that connect it to Rize's browser tools | Chats/ |
| Codex's sign-in and its own records of the conversations, for each ChatGPT account you add in Rize | Codex/, Codex accounts/ |
| Crash reports (see below) | Crashes/; Chromium's in Chromium/pending/ and Chromium/completed/ |
Secrets aren't kept in those files. Your Claude sign-in token and the token for Rize's local agent server are stored in the macOS Keychain, under ai.rize.browser. Development builds store them in secrets.json instead, readable only by you.
Saved passwords. Logins you save with Rize's password manager (Settings › Passwords) are stored in the macOS Keychain on this Mac, as internet passwords. Rize doesn't sync them or send them anywhere.
Downloads go to your Downloads folder, or the folder you chose in Settings. If you ask Rize to import from another browser (Safari, Chrome, Arc and others), it reads that browser's bookmarks and history on your Mac. Nothing is sent anywhere during an import.
Private windows keep nothing. Their pages use a Chromium profile that lives in memory, their history isn't saved, their tabs aren't kept in the session, and their assistant conversations aren't written to disk. All of it is gone when the window closes.
You can delete everything by quitting Rize and removing its data folder. To remove the secrets too, delete the ai.rize.browser items in Keychain Access.
Browsing
Rize shows web pages with Chromium. Like any browser, it sends your requests to the sites you visit. When you type a search into the address bar, the search goes to the search engine you chose in Settings (Google by default). Installing or updating an extension contacts the Chrome Web Store.
This build of Chromium doesn't include Google's services. There's no Google sign-in, no sync and no usage statistics. There's also no Safe Browsing in this version, see the known limitations.
The assistant (Claude or ChatGPT)
The assistant (⌘E) runs on your own Claude or ChatGPT account, through Anthropic's Claude Code or OpenAI's Codex installed on your Mac. Rize has no AI service of its own and doesn't see your conversations on any server. When you send a message, Rize gives Claude Code or Codex the following, and it sends them to Anthropic (Claude) or OpenAI (ChatGPT) under your account and their terms:
- your message, any files you attach, and any text you selected and asked about;
- the text of the tab you're on (unless you removed its chip above the message box), any tabs you added with
@, and the tab's title and address; - with the browser tools, what the model looks at while it works: the titles and addresses of your open tabs, the text and structure of pages, screenshots of pages, and the results of what it does there (opening and closing tabs, clicks, typing, scripts it runs on a page).
Claude Code and Codex also keep their own record of each conversation on your Mac, so a conversation can continue later (Claude Code under ~/.claude, Codex in Rize's Codex folders). Anthropic's and OpenAI's privacy policies cover what those companies do with what they receive.
The assistant does nothing until you send it a message. It can't read your history, your bookmarks or your saved passwords.
Rize's local agent server (MCP)
Rize runs a small server so that agents can use the browser: its own assistant, and agents you run yourself, such as Claude Code in a terminal. It listens only on your Mac (127.0.0.1, port 9230 by default). Nothing on the network can reach it. It needs a token:
- Rize's own assistant uses a token that's new each launch and never shown.
- Agents outside Rize need the token shown in Settings under agent access (on by default). With the token they can do what the assistant can: read and use your open pages. Turn agent access off, or make a new token with New token, if you don't use it.
Chromium's DevTools endpoint (port 9229) is off unless you turn it on in Developer mode. Then it's open on 127.0.0.1 only.
Updates
Rize checks for a new version about once a day, and when you choose Check for Updates…. It does this with Sparkle, which downloads the update feed (appcast.xml) from Rize's releases on GitHub. That request includes your IP address and Rize's version, as any download does. Sparkle doesn't send a profile of your Mac. Updates are installed only if they're signed with Rize's key. You can turn off automatic checks in Settings › About.
Crash reports
If Rize crashes, it writes a crash report on your Mac. That's either Rize's own report (what went wrong, a backtrace, Rize's and macOS's versions) in Crashes/, or Chromium's crash dump in Chromium/pending/ or Chromium/completed/. A dump can contain whatever the crashed process had in memory, including parts of the pages you had open. Chromium's dumps are deleted after 30 days.
Crash reports stay on your Mac. This version of Rize doesn't upload them. After a crash, Rize offers to show you the report in Finder. If a future version can send reports, it will ask you first, and this page will say where they go.