Privacy Policy

This document describes how BarePDF handles your data.

Effective date: 2026-07-30. Operator: ponkotools.

TL;DR

• Your PDF files never leave your device. BarePDF processes everything in your browser.
• We do not require an account.
• We use Cloudflare Web Analytics to measure traffic (no cookies, and visitors are not identified individually).
• We display affiliate advertising on the site. Clicking an ad takes you to a third-party site governed by their own privacy policy.

Files you open with BarePDF

• When you open a PDF in BarePDF, it is read into your browser's memory and stored in your browser's local storage (IndexedDB).
• BarePDF does not upload your PDFs, annotations, or saved edit state to any server.

Local storage

BarePDF uses the following storage in your browser:

• IndexedDB — for PDFs you have added, your annotations, your folder layout, and thumbnail caches.
• LocalStorage / SessionStorage — for small UI preferences (e.g. selected tool, language).
• Cookies — only to remember your explicit language choice (cookie name: barepdf-lang).

You can clear all of this at any time by clearing site data for barepdf.ponkotools.com in your browser settings.

Analytics

The website and the web app (/app/) use Cloudflare Web Analytics (provided by Cloudflare, Inc.) to measure traffic.

• What is collected is page-level statistics. The main fields are the URL viewed, the referrer (where you came from), browser / OS type, device type, country, screen size, navigation type, and page-speed metrics (Core Web Vitals). Measuring page speed includes information used to identify what was slow to render — such as the CSS selector of an element, and the URL and size of a loaded image or script. The exact set of fields is defined and changed by Cloudflare; see their documentation for the current list.
• No cookies are used. Visitors are not identified individually and are not tracked across other sites (this includes fingerprinting).
• The contents, file names, and annotations of the PDFs you open are never transmitted. They stay in your browser, exactly as before. The URLs mentioned above are those of BarePDF's own pages and assets; they never point at your files.
• We use this to see which pages actually get viewed, so we can prioritise development. Cloudflare Web Analytics has no mechanism for sending custom events, so we do not measure which features you use inside the app.
• The measurement data is sent to Cloudflare, Inc. See the Cloudflare Privacy Policy for how they handle it.
• If you block this measurement (with an ad blocker, for example), BarePDF continues to work normally.

Affiliate advertising

The site displays advertising banners served from our own server (no third-party ad-network scripts are loaded). When you click an advertising banner:

• You are taken to the advertiser's website in a new browser tab.
• The advertiser may set its own cookies once you arrive on their site.
• BarePDF may record a click count locally for the purpose of choosing which ad to display.

Banners are clearly marked with a PR label per Japanese advertising regulations (景品表示法, October 2023).

Children

BarePDF is intended for general audiences. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children.

Changes to this policy

When the policy is updated, the "Effective date" at the top of this page changes. Substantive changes will be noted in the Changelog.

Contact

A contact address will be published here before launch.