How does Pieces handle privacy and security?

Pieces describes privacy and security as fundamentals of how it works, and the main privacy control it states explicitly is that clipboard content is captured only with opt-in. Beyond that, the public product page doesn't spell out storage, encryption, or compliance specifics, so anyone evaluating Pieces for sensitive or regulated work should confirm those details in the official privacy and security documentation before rolling it out.

What Pieces captures, and what it doesn't

Pieces runs in the background on your computer and forms memories from the apps you already use, roughly every two seconds. The page breaks capture into three categories, and only one of them is opt-in:

The practical takeaway: screen context from your active app and meeting audio are part of the default memory stream, while clipboard content is not. If clipboard capture is the part you're uncomfortable with, leaving it off is the intended default state.

The scope of capture is broad

The list of supported sources is long and spans personal and work tools — Gmail, Outlook, Chrome, Arc, Safari, Slack, Teams, Google Chat, Discord, Google Meet, Zoom, Google Docs, Notion, Figma, Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Codex, Perplexity, Cursor, VS Code, JetBrains, and Xcode, among others. Each entry is framed around what gets remembered: threads and decisions, research trails, meeting notes and action items, drafts and revisions, prompts and outputs, code edits and debugging trails.

That breadth is the point of the product — it's what makes the memory searchable across time, topic, person, or tool — but it also means the privacy question isn't "does Pieces capture anything sensitive?" so much as "which of these sources do I want feeding a persistent memory, and how is that memory protected?"

What the page does and doesn't tell you

What it states:

• Privacy and security are treated as fundamentals, not add-ons.
• Clipboard capture requires opt-in.
• Context is designed to follow you across every tool.
• There are separate paths for Pieces MCP and for teams & enterprise.

What it doesn't state on this page:

• Where memories are stored (locally, in the cloud, or both).
• What encryption is applied at rest or in transit.
• Retention, deletion, or export controls.
• Compliance certifications or enterprise admin controls.

Those are exactly the details that determine whether Pieces is appropriate for a given team, so treat the marketing framing as a starting point rather than an answer.

How to evaluate it for your situation

If you're an individual trying Pieces for personal use, the opt-in clipboard setting plus a quick review of which apps you connect is a reasonable first pass.

If you're considering it for a team or regulated environment, work through these before committing:

1. Read the official privacy and security documentation and the team/enterprise materials linked from the site.
2. Confirm data residency, encryption, and retention terms in writing.
3. Check whether admin controls exist to restrict which sources can be captured org-wide.
4. Decide whether meeting and screen capture are acceptable for the roles involved, since those are on by default.
5. Verify how memories are deleted when someone leaves or a project ends.

The honest summary: Pieces is explicit that clipboard capture is opt-in and that privacy is a design principle, but the page-level evidence doesn't extend to the storage, encryption, and compliance specifics that most security reviews require. Get those from the official documentation, and treat any gap between the marketing language and the documentation as a question to resolve before deployment.