Security: your files stay on your device
Total PDF Tools is built so that we never have your documents. Not on a server, not in a database, not in a log.
How it works
What happens when you use a tool
1. You choose a file
Your browser reads the file from your disk into memory. Choosing a file does not send it anywhere.
2. Your device does the work
Our code runs in a background Web Worker on your CPU, using pdf-lib, pdf.js, qpdf (WebAssembly) and Tesseract.
3. The result is checked
Every PDF we create is re-opened and validated before you can download it, so you never get a broken file.
4. Nothing is kept
When you start over or close the tab, the worker is shut down and memory is released. Download links are revoked.
Details
Our security design
No server processing, by architecture
totalpdftools.com is a static website: plain HTML, JavaScript and WebAssembly files. There is no application server and no upload API — so there is nothing that could receive your documents even by mistake. You can verify this yourself: open your browser's developer tools, switch to the Network tab and use any tool. You'll see the page's own scripts load, but your file is never sent.
Heavy engines are downloaded, not your files
Some tools need large engines (for example the OCR model or the encryption engine). These are downloaded to your browser from our asset server (assets.totalpdftools.com) — the direction is always server → you, never your file → server.
Isolation and clean-up
Each job runs in its own Web Worker, which is terminated as soon as the job finishes or you press Cancel. That releases the memory used by your document. Temporary download links (Blob URLs) are revoked when you start over or leave the page. We don't write documents to localStorage, IndexedDB or the cache.
Password protection
The Protect PDF tool uses qpdf compiled to WebAssembly to apply AES-256 encryption — the strongest standard PDF encryption. Your password is used only in your browser and is never stored or transmitted. We can't recover a forgotten password.
Validated output
Before a download is offered, every generated PDF is re-opened with an independent parser (pdf-lib in the worker, and pdf.js) to make sure it's valid. If validation fails, you get an error instead of a broken file.
Optional cloud storage
If you create an account, you can choose to save a finished file to your private cloud with the "Save to cloud" button, or upload files on the Cloud storage page. Only those files are uploaded — directly from your browser to encrypted-at-rest storage — and you can delete them, or your whole account, at any time. Nothing is ever saved to the cloud automatically, and the tools themselves keep working without an account.
Ads
When ads are shown, they run in Google's ad frames and have no access to the files you open. See our privacy policy.
Reporting a vulnerability
Found a security issue? Please contact us — we appreciate responsible disclosure.
Open source
The engines inside
| Library | Used for | License |
|---|---|---|
| pdf-lib | Assembling and editing PDFs (merge, split, rotate, stamps…) | MIT |
| pdf.js (Mozilla) | Rendering pages and extracting text | Apache-2.0 |
| qpdf (WebAssembly) | AES-256 password protection and removal | Apache-2.0 |
| Tesseract.js | Optical character recognition (OCR) | Apache-2.0 |
No AGPL components are used. Full list: open-source licenses.