Privacy Overview

Welcome back! In this lesson, we’re exploring Cursor AI’s Privacy Mode and how it protects your code while using AI features. Whether you’re working on personal projects or sensitive client work, keeping your data secure is critical. Privacy Mode ensures your code stays private. Privacy Mode is available on all plans, even the free version. However, OpenAI and Anthropic retain prompts for 30 days for safety reasons. For Business Tier users, no data is stored at all, and you get a dedicated encrypted database. While Privacy Mode is the most important setting, there is more to it than that. Cursor's data indexing uploads small chunks of your code to create searchable data, helping you quickly find and work with specific parts of your codebase. If you prefer enhanced privacy, consider disabling data indexing; you can still index it manually using the Compute Index button. When indexing is disabled, Cursor won't compute embeddings over new codebases, though this means your code won't be indexed. Decide for yourself. Another consideration is API Key usage. When using your own API key, requests still go through Cursor’s backend, a necessary step for completing the final prompt, so keep this process in mind when choosing to use your own key. To be fair, this is the policy at the moment and may change over time. You can read the privacy policy here: https://cursor.com/privacy. In the next lesson, we will look at how to enable these settings.