Privacy
What happens to your files
This site exists to strip data people did not know they were sharing. It would be a poor showing to be careless with data of its own, so here is exactly what happens, in plain terms.
The file you upload
When you press Clean or Inspect, the file is sent to the server that runs this site. It is written into a temporary folder, processed for that one request, and deleted immediately afterwards. The delete is not a scheduled cleanup that might not run; the temporary folder is opened as a context manager, so it is removed when the request finishes, including when the request fails with an error.
Files are not stored, backed up, indexed, queued, inspected by a person, used to train anything, or passed to any third party. There is no database on this site and no account to create. Nothing about your file survives the request that carried it.
The Metadata tab is read-only. It parses the file, shows you what is inside, and discards it. It never writes to the file and never keeps a copy.
What is written to a log
Being straight about this matters more than claiming zero logging. The web server in front of this site keeps a standard access log, the same as almost every site on the internet. Each line records:
- your IP address
- the date and time
- which URL was requested, and the response status and size
- the referring page, if your browser sent one, and your browser's user-agent string
These logs rotate daily and are kept for 14 days, then deleted. They exist so the service can be debugged and abuse can be spotted. Filenames are not logged, and file contents are never logged. The application itself records only errors and the request method and path, so a log line says that a clean happened, not what was cleaned.
No cookies, no analytics, no third parties
This site sets no cookies. There is no analytics of any kind, no tag manager, no advertising, no session tracking and no fingerprinting.
There are also no third-party requests at all. The typefaces are served from this server rather than from Google Fonts, which is why the interface renders correctly with no internet connection. A tool whose entire purpose is removing tracking data has no business announcing every page view to somebody else. You can confirm this yourself: open your browser's network tab and reload — every request goes to this domain and nowhere else.
Location data
If a photo you inspect contains GPS coordinates, they are shown to you along with a link to open the location in Google Maps or OpenStreetMap. That is a link you choose to click, not an embedded map. An embedded map would send the coordinates to a tile server the moment the page loaded, whether or not you wanted that. Nothing is sent anywhere unless you click.
If you would rather upload nothing at all
Then do not use the hosted version. The same tool exists as a desktop application that binds to your own machine only and does the identical work with no network involved. Uploading a file to somebody else's server is always a decision, and for genuinely sensitive material the honest advice is to run it locally instead of trusting a page that says it is fine.
Limits worth knowing
Uploads are capped per file type, and one audio or video file is processed at a time. These are there so a single visitor cannot exhaust the server; a rejected upload was never stored either.