Privacy Policy

• No account, ever. You don’t sign up, and we don’t ask for your name, email or phone number.
• Your files and text stay on your device for every tool that runs in your browser (which is almost all of them). They are never uploaded to our servers.
• No selling or sharing for advertising. We don’t sell personal data and we don’t run behavioural ad networks.
• Privacy-respecting analytics only — aggregate page views, anonymous interaction counts and performance timings. Never the contents of your files, text or searches. It honours “Do Not Track” and Global Privacy Control, and you can switch it off entirely (see Your choices).

This page explains the details. It applies to theusefulhacks.com and its subdomains.

“Useful Hacks”, “we”, “us” refers to the operator of Useful Hacks, a free collection of online utilities. For any privacy question or request, email privacy@theusefulhacks.com.

We do not collect, and have no way to receive:

• Account details — there are no accounts.
• The contents of files you open in a tool, text you paste, passwords you generate, or search terms you type into a tool.
• Contact information — there is no newsletter, no sign-up form and no contact form that stores data.
• Payment information — every tool is free.

The great majority of Useful Hacks tools — image and PDF tools, converters, calculators, generators, formatters, the password generator, and more — run entirely in your browser using standard Web APIs (Canvas, Web Crypto, WebAssembly). When you open a file or paste text:

• It is read into your browser’s memory on your own device.
• Processing and the download happen locally.
• Nothing about the file’s contents is sent to us or to any third party.

Each such tool states this on its own page (“Processed entirely in your browser”). Close the tab and the data is gone unless you saved the result yourself.

A small number of tools need resources beyond your device. We are explicit about these:

• OCR PDF downloads the open-source text-recognition engine and language model from a public CDN the first time you use it. Your PDF itself is not uploaded — recognition still runs in your browser.
• “Coming soon” tools (for example Office-format conversions) are clearly marked and do not process anything until we ship a real implementation and update this policy.
• Web fonts are served from Google Fonts, which receives your IP address as part of serving the font files.

To understand which tools are used, where people get stuck, and how fast pages load, we use a small set of privacy-respecting measurement tools:

• Google Analytics / Firebase Analytics — aggregate page views, tool-usage events (e.g. “a tool was opened”, “a result was produced”, “a file was downloaded”) and coarse device/browser information. Event payloads carry only identifiers and counts — never the contents of your files, text, passwords or searches.
• Firebase Performance Monitoring — page-load and tool-run timing data.
• Vercel Web Analytics — cookieless, aggregate traffic measurement (page views, referrers, country, device type). It does not use cross-site identifiers.
• Vercel Speed Insights — real-user Core Web Vitals (loading and responsiveness metrics).

All of the above honour your browser’s Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control signals — when either is set, we do not initialise them. You can also disable them for this site manually (see Your choices).

Useful Hacks uses very little browser storage:

• Theme preference — a localStorage value remembering light/dark mode. Set only when you choose a theme.
• Analytics opt-out flag — the uh:analytics localStorage value, if you set it (see below).
• Google Analytics cookies (_ga and related) — set only if analytics is active (i.e. you have not opted out and your browser sends no DNT/GPC signal). They contain a randomly generated client identifier, not personal information.

We do not use advertising cookies or cross-site trackers. Clearing your browser storage for this site removes all of the above.

The site is hosted on Vercel. Like any web host, Vercel processes standard request metadata — your IP address, user-agent string, requested URL and timestamp — to deliver pages and protect against abuse. These logs are retained by Vercel for a limited period under its own policies and are not used by us to build profiles of visitors.

We do not sell personal data and do not share it for advertising. The only recipients are the service providers that make the site work, each acting as a data processor:

• Vercel — hosting and traffic analytics.
• Google (Firebase / Google Analytics, Google Fonts) — analytics, performance monitoring and font delivery.

We may also disclose information if required to by law, or to protect the rights, safety or property of Useful Hacks or its users.

Our providers (Vercel, Google) operate globally and may process the limited data described above on servers in the United States and other countries. By using the site you understand that this limited technical data may be processed outside your country of residence.

• Do Not Track / Global Privacy Control — enable either in your browser and analytics and performance monitoring will not load.
• Manual opt-out for this site — run localStorage.setItem('uh:analytics', 'off') in your browser’s developer console. To re-enable, remove that value.
• Block scripts / cookies — a content blocker or your browser’s privacy settings can prevent analytics from loading at all; the tools still work.
• Clear stored data — clearing site data in your browser removes the theme preference, the opt-out flag and any analytics cookies.
• Access / deletion requests — because we hold no account and no file contents, there is normally nothing to export or delete. For questions about the limited analytics data, contact privacy@theusefulhacks.com and we will help you exercise any rights you have under applicable law (such as the GDPR or Indian data-protection law).

Useful Hacks is a general-purpose utility site and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. Since we collect no personal information beyond the anonymous analytics described above, there is nothing child-specific to remove; if you believe a child has provided us information, contact privacy@theusefulhacks.com.

The site is served exclusively over HTTPS. Because in-browser tools keep your data on your own device, the most effective protection is the one already in place: your files never travel to us. For the small amount of analytics data, we rely on the security practices of Google and Vercel.

We may update this policy as the site changes — for example if we add a feature that needs server-side processing, or change an analytics provider. Material changes will be reflected in the “Last updated” date at the top, and significant changes will be noted on the site. Continued use after an update means you accept the revised policy.

Questions, concerns or requests about privacy: privacy@theusefulhacks.com.