Privacy

MCP Inspect telemetry records argument paths, never argument values. Learn what is collected, what is rejected and what usage evidence cannot prove.

Privacy here is a product feature, not a compliance checkbox. The people using this are instrumenting servers that carry other people's data, and "what exactly does this send?" is the first question any of them asks. The answer has to be short, checkable, and enforced.

Recorded	Never recorded
That `search` was called	What was searched for
That `query` and `limit` were present	The value of either
That it took 42 ms and succeeded	What it returned
That the caller called itself `claude-desktop`	Who the end user was
An anonymous per-process session id	Any stable user or device identifier

#How it is enforced

One chokepoint. summarizeArguments() is the only function ever handed raw arguments, and it returns field paths. It walks into nested objects — filters.owner is a field a schema change can break — but not into array elements, because items[3].owner is data.

The server refuses values. Ingest returns 400 for a payload containing arguments, input, output, result or content. The SDK runs on your machine, so trusting it would make the guarantee unverifiable.

Paths must look like paths. Each entry must match a property-path shape or it is dropped, so a sentence or an address cannot arrive labelled as a "path". That is a shape check, not a secret detector, and is not presented as one — a token shaped exactly like an identifier is indistinguishable from a property name. The real guarantee is the chokepoint above, which structurally cannot emit a value.

Nothing is inferred. No IP geolocation, no fingerprinting, no cross-server correlation of "the same user".

#Snapshots

A surface snapshot is your server's public interface — the tool names, descriptions and schemas every client already receives. It is stored verbatim.

An MCP surface may legitimately vary by authorization, so a snapshot taken with a privileged credential can describe tools most callers never see. Snapshots record the cacheScope of each list and warn when one was private, and the console labels such a surface as authorization-scoped. Credentials used to take a snapshot are never stored — they are read from the environment at capture time, and the snapshot records only that a header was set, not its value.

#Retention

Data	Retention
Surface snapshots	Life of the project. They are the product.
Invocation stream	~90 days, then rolled up
Daily rollups	Your plan's window. Counts only.
Client records	Name, version, first and last seen

Deleting a project deletes its rows and its stored documents.