What every applet does with your data

The short version

The applets run inside your browser. Whatever you paste, type or drop in is processed on your own machine, none of it is uploaded to us, and it is gone when you close the tab. There is no account, nothing to delete, and no retention period, because there is nothing to retain.

2 applets are exceptions, named here and marked in the table below. Everything else on this page is true of the other 35.

Meta Tag Previewer: The one applet that always reaches the outside world, and it cannot do its job otherwise: showing you what your og:image and twitter:image will look like means loading them, so your browser requests those two addresses from whichever host you pointed them at. That host sees your IP address and the fact that the image was asked for. The tags you paste are never sent anywhere, and nothing reaches a Pivotal server. Pressing Try an example loads a sample image from images.unsplash.com for the same reason.

Email Signature Generator: Only if you choose the hosted logo option. Everything you type stays here, and a logo you upload from your own machine never leaves it. But the second tab under Logo takes the web address of an image instead, and the preview has to load that address to show it to you, so the host it sits on receives a request from your browser and sees your IP address. It is the same request your recipients' mail clients will make when they open the signature, which is the point of the warning rather than an accident of the preview.

What this page does not cover

This is about the applets, not about the pages they sit on. An applet page is part of pivotalpath.co.uk and behaves like the rest of it: it sets a consent cookie recording your choice, and runs cookieless analytics which you can turn off at any time. That is described in the privacy notice, along with everything else the site does.

The distinction matters and is worth being plain about. We can see that a page was visited. We cannot see what you did on it, because the applet never tells us and was not built to.

Who is responsible

The applets are built by Pivotal Labs Ltd, and served on this site by Hayward-Zhu Ltd, which trades as Pivotal Path. Since nothing you put into an applet reaches either company, neither processes it. Enquiries you choose to send us through a form are a separate matter and are covered in the privacy notice.

How to check any of this yourself

You should not have to take our word for it, and you do not need to be a developer to find out. Here are four checks, easiest first. The first one is the strongest, which is unusual and rather satisfying.

1. Turn off the internet

Open an applet and let the page finish loading. Then disconnect: turn off wi-fi, or switch the machine to aeroplane mode, or pull the cable out. Now use the applet normally. Paste your text, drop your file in, convert it, download the result.

It will work. Every applet but one keeps working with no connection at all, because there is nothing for it to connect to. A tool that quietly sent your data somewhere could not do that. This takes about fifteen seconds and needs no technical knowledge whatsoever.

Two honest caveats. Twelve of the applets need a piece of software that is too big to put on every page, so it is fetched separately from this site. Eleven of them do that while the page loads, which is why the instruction above is to let it finish. The twelfth, HEIC Converter, waits until you add your first photo, so give it one photo before you disconnect. And the two applets that load pictures from the web, Meta Tag Previewer always and Email Signature Generator only if you give it a hosted logo, will show those pictures broken with no connection. Everything else about them still works.

2. Watch the network yourself

Every browser will show you every request a page makes. In Chrome or Edge, press F12 and choose Network. In Firefox, F12 then Network. In Safari you first tick Develop in Settings, Advanced, then choose Develop, Show Web Inspector, then Network. Leave it open, reload the applet page and use the tool.

What you should see: the page, its fonts and its code, all from pivotalpath.co.uk. Possibly a file for the tool itself, also from pivotalpath.co.uk. Then, while you paste and convert, nothing new at all.

What you will also see, and should not be alarmed by: one or two small requests with _vercel/insights in the address. That is the visit counter. It records that a page was opened and nothing whatever about what you did on it, and you can switch it off in the cookie settings, after which it stops appearing at all. If you want the cleanest possible test, turn it off first, then watch.

3. Check nothing was left behind

In the same panel, choose Application in Chrome or Edge, or Storage in Firefox and Safari. Look at Local Storage, Session Storage, IndexedDB and Cookies for pivotalpath.co.uk after using an applet.

You will find one cookie, pp_consent, which is the record of your own cookie choice. Nothing else. No trace of your file, your text or your invoice, because none of it was ever written down.

4. Read the code

The applets are not compiled away or hidden. On the applet page, use your browser's View Source or Save Page, or open the Sources panel in the developer tools, and you can read the whole of the tool you are using. The words to search for are fetch, XMLHttpRequest and sendBeacon, which are the three ways a page sends data out, and localStorage and indexedDB, which are two of the ways it keeps things.

You will find no working use of any of them, in any of the 37. You will find the words themselves five times, and we would rather tell you now than have you find them and wonder. Four are ordinary prose: Bulk Blogger and Date Duration Calculator both use the word while promising you they do not do it, Email Signature Generator uses it in the warning about hosted logos, and Clever Git uses it because git fetch is a thing that exists. The fifth is a comment in Meeting Time Zone Planner listing everything that applet deliberately does not use.

We check the same thing on our side, every time the site is built, and the build fails rather than publishes if an applet has started doing something this page does not admit to. That is what keeps this page from being merely true on the day it was written.