Does Notion sell your data?

Notion's privacy policy and data practices have evolved through several controversies. Here's the 2026 reality.

What Notion says they do NOT do:

• They do not sell your personal data to third parties.
• They do not sell or share the content of your pages (your actual notes, databases, etc).
• They do not use your content to train Notion AI on (post-Nov 2023 policy update — before that, training was opt-out).

What Notion DOES do:

• Sends content to OpenAI when you use Notion AI — Notion AI is powered by OpenAI's GPT models. When you trigger an AI action, the relevant content is sent to OpenAI's API. OpenAI has a 30-day retention policy for API content unless you have a zero-retention agreement (enterprise only).
• Stores all content unencrypted at rest — Notion is not end-to-end encrypted. Notion's employees (and anyone with database access) could technically read your notes. Their internal access controls are presumably strict, but the *technical* capability exists.
• Subject to legal compulsion — because content is decrypted on their servers, Notion can be compelled by law enforcement to hand over your content.
• Tracks behavioral data — page views, clicks, integrations used, etc. — for product analytics. They use Amplitude and Mixpanel.
• Shares aggregated/anonymized data — for benchmarking and product decisions. This is typical SaaS behavior.

The historical controversies:

• 2021: Notion was discovered to have an unprotected pages-by-URL system that exposed private content if someone guessed a URL. Fixed.
• 2023: Notion AI's launch initially used customer content for training. After backlash, Notion changed the policy to opt-out, then to opt-in.
• 2024: Notion expanded data collection for AI personalization, drawing fresh privacy criticism.

Compared to alternatives:

• Less private than: Obsidian (local-first, no server reads), Standard Notes (zero-knowledge), Apple Notes with ADP (E2E encrypted).
• More private than: Evernote (history of breaches), most free Google products.
• About the same as: Mem, Tana, Capacities, Reflect (all cloud-first, all could technically read content).

If you want a private-first Notion alternative in 2026:

• Apple Notes with ADP — free, native, end-to-end encrypted.
• Obsidian with local-only vault — free, fully offline, plugins for extensibility.
• Némos — iPhone-first, on-device AI, CloudKit sync, free tier. Better for capture-heavy workflows than Notion.

Bottom line: Notion doesn't sell your data, but they *can* read it, and they share it with OpenAI for AI features. If that bothers you, use an end-to-end encrypted or local-first alternative.