LightDrop / Privacy
Privacy
The honest summary: your files, text and camera frames stay on your devices. Here is precisely what happens, so you don't have to take the summary on faith.
Your content is processed locally
Files are processed locally in your browser. Reading, compressing, encoding, displaying, camera capture, decoding, reassembly and hash verification all run as JavaScript and Web Workers on your device. No file is uploaded to our server. The transfer itself travels as light between a screen and a camera — no network path is used for it.
What the camera permission is for
The Receive page asks for camera access solely to read QR frames. Video frames are analysed in memory and discarded immediately; they are never recorded, stored, or transmitted anywhere. Stopping the camera or leaving the page releases it.
What we store on your device
- App files: after your first visit, the app's pages and scripts are cached so LightDrop works offline. This cache contains our code, never your content.
- Your content: lives only in the page's memory during a transfer. We do not write it to browser storage. "Clear", or closing the tab, discards it.
Analytics: counts, not content
To learn whether this tool is useful we count anonymous, coarse events — a page was viewed, a transfer started, a transfer completed, roughly what size bucket it fell into. We never collect file names, file contents, text you type or paste, hashes of your content, camera imagery, or anything that could reconstruct what you transferred. If a metric could identify your content, we don't collect it.
No accounts, no profiles
There is nothing to sign up for, so there is no profile of you to build, sell or breach. We'd rather not hold data than promise to guard it.
Questions
If anything here seems ambiguous, that's a bug in this page — the source code is linked on the licenses page, and the network tab of your browser's developer tools will confirm the claims above during a transfer.