What happens to your files, and what we keep. Short version: not much.
Pathine has two kinds of tool, and it will go on having both. Most of them do their work inside your browser tab: the file is read by the page on your own device, worked on there, and handed straight back. It is not uploaded, so there is no copy of it for us to keep, to lose, or to be asked for.
The rest need a server, because some jobs cannot be done in a browser at all — reading the handwriting in a photograph, or judging what a piece of recovered text would mean to whoever received it. Those tools send what the job requires and nothing else, and they say what that is before you hand them anything.
You never have to remember which is which. Each tool page carries a badge above the tool — “Runs on your device” or “Processed on our server” — and a sentence beside the tool saying what happens to what you give it. Neither is written by hand on this page: both come from the tool's own record, the site refuses to start if a tool has no such record, and a server-backed one has to state what it keeps or the site refuses to start over that too.
For the tools that run on your device, you can check rather than take our word for it. Open your browser's network tab and use one: the network stays quiet. Disconnect from the internet entirely and it still works.
A tool will not quietly change from one kind to the other. If one ever does, its badge changes with it, on the page, before you give it a file.
The tools do not require an account and do not ask for your email address. There is nothing to sign up for in order to use them.
No advertising cookies and no third-party trackers. The site sets a session cookie needed for basic functionality, and remembers a language preference if you choose one.
Some tools remember their own settings — the quality slider on the Image Compressor, for instance. That is stored in your browser's local storage, on your device. It never reaches us, and clearing your browser data removes it.
The same thing every web server sees when you load a page: the address you asked for, your browser's user agent, and your IP address, held briefly in standard request logs. We do not build profiles from it and we do not sell it.
Pathine does not currently show adverts. When it does, this page will be updated first, and will name the provider and what it can see. Advertising will never be given access to your files: the tools that run on your device leave us nothing to hand over, and the ones that use a server keep nothing once they have answered.
Questions about any of this are welcome. Write to [email protected].