How your privacy works
Most of this page is one sentence: your file is processed on your device and is never sent to our servers. Here's exactly why that's true, tool by tool.
What happens when you choose a file
The file is read directly by your browser using standard web APIs. SubmitReady's code — which runs entirely on your device, the same as any website's JavaScript — reads the bytes locally to compress, merge, rotate, or otherwise transform the PDF. At no point is the file sent over the network to a SubmitReady server, because there is no upload step in any tool on this site today.
The one exception: text recognition (OCR)
The "Make PDF searchable" tool uses on-device optical character recognition to read text out of scanned pages. The recognition engine itself (a generic language model — not your document) is loaded from SubmitReady's own servers the first time you use that tool. Recognition runs locally in your browser; the recognized text and your document content never leave your device.
What we store about your file
Nothing. We don't store your document, its filename, its extracted text, or a copy of it for debugging. There is no document database, no document history, and no account system that could be tied to a file you processed. (We do keep anonymous usage counts — see Analytics below — but never anything derived from the file itself.)
Analytics
We keep anonymous, aggregate usage statistics — for example, that a compression job started, succeeded, or was downloaded, tagged only with a random ID that's discarded after each job, a tool name, a rough file-size bucket, and an error category if something failed. This never includes your file, filename, extracted or recognized text, or anything that could identify you or your document. It has no cookies and creates no account or profile. It exists purely so we can see, in aggregate, which tools are used and whether they're working — including a daily internal summary email with totals like "how many compression jobs ran today," never anything about an individual file.
Full technical detail
The complete, engineer-level breakdown of this — including exactly which browser APIs are used, what fields analytics can and can't ever carry, and what the fallback behavior is if something fails mid-process — lives in this project's PRIVACY-ARCHITECTURE.md file alongside the source code.