PlayWithFiles

How we do it

PlayWithFiles has no upload step. When you merge a PDF, shrink a photo or cut a video, your own browser does the work, using your phone's or computer's processor. The web page brings the program to you; your file never goes back the other way. This page shows how to check that for yourself instead of taking our word for it.

What happens when you use a tool

  1. Your browser downloads the page and the tool's program from our site, like any web page.
  2. You choose a file. The browser reads it from your device into its own memory. It is not sent anywhere.
  3. The tool's program, running in your browser, creates the new file in memory.
  4. You press Download and the browser saves the new file to your device. When you close the page, the memory is cleared.

Check it yourself: the Network tab

Open your browser's developer tools, Network tab, and watch: your files are never sent.

This works in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari on a computer.

  1. Open a tool, for example Compress PDF. Press F12 (on a Mac: Option + Command + I; in Safari, first turn on the Develop menu in Settings → Advanced) and open theNetwork tab.
  2. Clear the list (the 🚫 or trash icon), so you only see what happens next.
  3. Choose a file and press the button. Watch the list: you will see no request that carries your file. Click any request and look at its size and "Request" or "Payload" panel; a file upload would show your file's size and name there.
  4. Try again with a large file. An upload would show a long bar and a big "sent" number; here nothing is sent.

Check it yourself: go offline

  1. Open the tool page, then add your file and run it once, so the browser has fetched every part of the program.
  2. Switch your internet off (airplane mode, or choose "Offline" in the Network tab). Do not reload the page.
  3. Run the tool again with a different file. It still works, because nothing needed the internet. If a tool had to upload your file, it would fail now.

The few things that do use the network

We want to be clear about these, because "nothing leaves your device" would be false without them:

  • Loading the site. Pages, styles and the tool programs come from our host (we use your device's own fonts, so none are downloaded). Parts of a tool are downloaded the first time you use it.
  • Text reading (OCR). The language files for reading scanned text are downloaded from our own site the first time. They contain no personal data and your file is not sent.
  • Hosting. Our host (Cloudflare) sees the technical details of each page visit, such as your IP address, like every website host.

There are no accounts, no advertising and no analytics. No tool uses a server of ours to process your files. If that ever changes for one tool, it will be named here and on that tool's page before it goes live. See also the privacy policy.

Limits of this proof

The Network tab and offline test show that your files are not uploaded while you use the site. They cannot prove what the site's code will do in future versions; each time you load a page you get the current code, and you can repeat the check. Before every release we also run a privacy scan that opens every page and fails if it finds a third-party request, a tracker, a cookie or stored data.

Questions

Found something that does not match this page? Please tell us.