Privacy Policy

Effective 12 October 2026 · Version 2.3 · Applies to pdfswing.com and api.pdfswing.com

We built PDF Swing as a practical set of PDF tools, and we think you deserve a plain answer about what happens to your file after you drop it on a tool. This page is that answer. Every statement below was checked against how the tools actually work on the date shown above. If something here ever contradicts what the app is doing, the app is wrong and we want to hear about it.

At a glance

Who we are and what this covers

This Privacy Policy is issued by PDFSwing, Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India (“PDF Swing”, “we”), the operator of pdfswing.com and its processing backend api.pdfswing.com (together, the “Service”). For the purposes of the EU/UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) we are the data controller for the personal data described here; under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act) we are the data fiduciary.

It covers everything you do on the Service: using a tool, reading a guide, or sending us a message. It does not cover other websites we link to, or the website you may ask our HTML to PDF tool to fetch.

Our Terms of Service explain the rules for using the tools. Where this policy talks about a tool, the description here is the authoritative one.

How each tool handles your file

The table below is the heart of this policy. Browser means the whole job happens inside your browser tab. Server means your file is sent over HTTPS to our processing server. Hybrid means it depends on which mode you use.

Every server-processed tool shows “Uploading to server…” in its progress bar. If a tool ever moves from the browser to the server, we will update this table and the date at the top of this page before the change goes live.

Browser-only tools

For these tools your PDF is opened, modified and saved locally, using open-source libraries (pdf-lib, pdf.js, Fabric.js, Tesseract.js) that run in the tab you are on. No part of the file, its name, its text, or any thumbnail is transmitted to us. You can load the page, disconnect from the internet, and the tool will still finish the job.

Compress PDF

Compress PDF runs in your browser. Our software also contains an optional server-side compression mode (Ghostscript) that can only be switched on from our admin dashboard; it is switched off for visitors and our server logs confirm no visitor compression uploads. If we ever enable it, the tool will display a “Server processing” badge with a one-click switch back to in-browser mode, and this policy will be updated first.

OCR PDF

OCR runs as WebAssembly Tesseract inside your browser. To do that, your browser downloads the OCR engine and the data for the language you need (for automatic language detection, also a small detection model). All of these files are hosted by us on pdfswing.com — no third-party CDN is contacted — and your browser keeps them in its ordinary cache so the next visit is faster. Your PDF, its pages and the recognised text are never sent anywhere; the searchable PDF is put together in the same tab.

Unlock, Sign and Redact

Passwords you type into Unlock PDF, signatures you draw or upload in Sign PDF, and the areas you black out in Redact PDF are handled only in your browser. None of them are sent to us or saved anywhere by us.

Server-processed tools

Some jobs depend on engines that cannot be shipped into a browser. For these, the file you choose is uploaded over HTTPS (TLS) to our processing server, converted, streamed back to your browser, and deleted. Specifically:

• Word, PowerPoint and Excel to PDF — rendered with LibreOffice so fonts and layout match the original.
• PDF to Word, PowerPoint and Excel — converted with LibreOffice and pdf2docx. If PDF to Word detects a scanned (image-only) PDF, it first runs OCR on the server (OCRmyPDF / Tesseract, English) so the Word file contains real text. That OCR text exists only in the temporary working files described below.
• HTML to PDF — rendered with a headless Chromium browser on our server. If you enter a URL, our server fetches that page: the website you name will see a request from our server, not from you. If you paste HTML, only that HTML is sent to us. Do not use this tool with pages you are not allowed to access.
• Protect PDF — encrypted with Ghostscript using the password you enter. The password is passed to the encryption command for that single job and is never written to disk, logged, or stored.

For all of these, the upload and the generated output are written to a temporary directory on the processing server with a random name, in a location no other user can reach. They are deleted automatically as soon as the result has been streamed to your browser, or immediately if the job fails or times out. There is no queue, no backup, no copy to any other system, and no human review. We do not keep file names, file contents, extracted text, or any metadata from these jobs. Maximum accepted file size is 100 MB.

Edit PDF (beta) sessions

The editor has two modes:

• Annotate (draw, highlight, shapes, images, new text boxes): fully in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
• Edit existing text: your PDF is uploaded to open a private editing session on our server so it can parse the document, render page previews with the original fonts, apply your text changes and export the result. The session is identified by a random ID that is not linked to you.

A session is deleted when you click “close” / “start over” in the editor. If you simply close the tab, the session stays on the server only until it is automatically deleted 6 hours after your last activity. That is the longest any uploaded file can exist on our systems. We do not keep a copy after that.

What we collect, why, and for how long

We do not combine any of these sources to build a profile of you, and we never use any of them for advertising or for training machine-learning models.

What we do not collect

• No accounts, sign-ups, passwords or user IDs.
• No cookies for visitors, no tracking or advertising storage, no device fingerprinting, no cross-site identifiers.
• No Google Analytics, Tag Manager, Meta Pixel, Hotjar, or any other third-party analytics or session-recording script.
• No advertising networks, ad cookies or ad measurement of any kind.
• No file names, file contents, page thumbnails or extracted text from browser-only tools — we technically cannot receive them.
• No precise location, no contacts, no camera or microphone access.
• We do not sell, rent or share personal data with anyone, and we do not receive any from data brokers.

Our software has dormant support for Google Analytics and Google AdSense that could be switched on from our admin dashboard. Both are switched off and no such script is present on any page. If we ever switch them on, this policy will be updated first and, where the law requires it, a consent banner will be added.

Cookies and browser storage

Pages served to visitors set no cookies and store nothing in your browser unless you ask them to (the two cases are described below). The only cookie our software uses is a login session cookie for our own staff on the private admin dashboard; it is never set on a visitor’s browser. Because we use no non-essential cookies, no cookie consent banner is required and none is shown.

Saved signatures in Sign PDF. If you press Save on a signature you have drawn, typed or uploaded, Sign PDF keeps it in your own browser’s local storage so it appears under the Saved tab next time. It stays on your device, is never sent to us, and you can remove it from the Saved tab or by clearing this site’s data in your browser. Nothing is saved unless you press Save.

“Continue with another tool”. When you choose to send a result straight to another tool (for example, from Merge PDF to Compress PDF, or from the file you drop on our homepage), your file is kept briefly in your own browser’s storage (IndexedDB) so the next page can open it. It never leaves your device for this, it is deleted as soon as the next tool picks it up, and anything not picked up expires after 30 minutes. Nothing is stored unless you click one of these buttons.

Cloudflare may set a strictly necessary security cookie (for example __cf_bm) when it needs to distinguish real browsers from automated attacks. It contains no personal data and is exempt from consent under the ePrivacy rules.

Third-party services and sub-processors

We keep the list short on purpose. These are the only outside parties that can receive any data when you use the Service:

No other third party receives anything. In particular, there is no analytics provider, no advertising partner, no email-marketing service, and no external AI or conversion API: every conversion engine (LibreOffice, Ghostscript, OCRmyPDF/Tesseract, Chromium, pdf2docx) runs on our own server.

Where your data is processed and international transfers

Our servers are located in a data centre in France, in the European Union. If you are outside the EU (for example in India, the United States or the United Kingdom), a file you send to a server-processed tool travels to the EU for the seconds it takes to process it, then it is deleted.

For visitors in the EU/EEA and the UK: your data stays in the EU except for the edge/CDN services listed above. Where those providers process data outside the EEA, transfers are covered by the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses and/or the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.

For visitors in India: the DPDP Act permits transfer of personal data outside India except to countries restricted by the Central Government; France is not restricted. We apply the same protections regardless of where you are.

How we protect your data

• Encryption in transit. All traffic uses HTTPS (TLS 1.2+). HTTP requests are redirected to HTTPS.
• Isolation. Each server job runs in its own randomly-named temporary directory; files are unreadable to other jobs and are removed on completion.
• Automatic deletion. Cleanup runs in code on every job, plus a background sweep that removes any editing session older than 6 hours.
• Access control. The processing backend accepts jobs only from our own website via a private key. The admin dashboard is protected by authentication and is excluded from search engines.
• Abuse prevention. Rate limiting, a 100 MB upload limit, request time-outs and server-level intrusion protection.
• Minimisation. Our tool-level analytics were deliberately designed to record only a page path — no IP, no identifier. Web-server log archiving is switched off and any stray archive is deleted by a scheduled job after 30 days; our application and proxy logs contain no visitor IP addresses at all.
• No human access. Nobody at PDF Swing opens user files; there is no admin feature that can view them.

No system is perfect. If we ever discover a breach that affects your personal data, we will notify the relevant authority and, where required, affected users without undue delay (within 72 hours for GDPR).

Retention summary

Your rights

Because we hold so little, most requests have a simple answer: for browser-only tools we hold nothing about you; for server tools your file is already gone. Where we do hold personal data (a contact message, or your IP in a server log), you have the rights below regardless of where you live. We will respond within 30 days; we may ask you to write from the same email address you used so we can be sure it is you.

Everyone

• Access — ask what personal data we hold about you and receive a copy.
• Correction — ask us to fix inaccurate data.
• Erasure — ask us to delete your data (for example, a contact message).
• Objection / restriction — object to processing based on legitimate interest, or ask us to limit it.
• Portability — receive the data you gave us in a machine-readable form.
• Withdraw consent — at any time, without affecting earlier processing.
• Complain — to us first, and to a regulator (below) if you are not satisfied.

India — Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023

As a data principal you may exercise the rights of access, correction and erasure, the right to grievance redressal, and the right to nominate another person to exercise your rights if you are unable to. Use the contact form with the topic “Question about privacy or data handling”; our Grievance Officer is named in the Contact section. If you are not satisfied with our response you may approach the Data Protection Board of India.

European Economic Area and United Kingdom — GDPR / UK GDPR

Our legal bases are stated in the table above. You have the right to lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority (for example the CNIL in France, where our servers are, or the ICO in the UK). We do not carry out automated decision-making or profiling.

California — CCPA / CPRA

We do not sell or share personal information (as those terms are defined in the CCPA), have not done so in the preceding 12 months, and do not use or disclose sensitive personal information for any purpose other than providing the Service. Because of this, no “Do Not Sell or Share” link is required, and we honour Global Privacy Control signals by default. You have the rights to know, delete, correct, and to non-discrimination. Categories collected: identifiers (IP address in logs; email if you contact us) and internet activity (aggregate page counts only). Categories of sources: you, and your browser. Categories of recipients: the service providers listed under Third parties.

Other regions

Residents of Brazil (LGPD), Canada (PIPEDA), Australia, Singapore and other jurisdictions with privacy laws have equivalent rights and may exercise them in the same way.

Children

The Service is a general-audience tool and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18 in India (the DPDP Act threshold), under 16 in the EU/UK, or under 13 in the United States, and we have no way to age-verify because we have no accounts. Using a browser-only tool involves no collection at all. If you believe a child has sent us a contact message, tell us and we will delete it promptly.

Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control

We do not track visitors across sites or over time, so there is nothing for a “Do Not Track” or Global Privacy Control signal to switch off — every visitor is already treated as if the signal were on.

Changes to this policy

If we change how a tool works — for example, if a browser-only tool moves to the server, or if we ever enable analytics or advertising — we will update this page, raise the version number and change the effective date before the change goes live. Material changes will also be announced on the affected tool page for at least 30 days. Continued use after the effective date means you accept the updated version.

Contact and grievance redressal

For any privacy question, rights request, or complaint, use the contact page and choose the topic “Question about privacy or data handling”. Messages on that topic go directly to our Grievance Officer, Manish (PDFSwing, Agra, India), who is responsible for privacy and grievance redressal under the DPDP Act, 2023 and the Information Technology Rules, 2021. We acknowledge within 72 hours and resolve within 30 days.

If you need a straight answer before uploading something sensitive, ask first. We would rather answer a question than lose your trust.