Privacy Policy

The short version

The text you paste into this tool is never uploaded, never transmitted, and never stored on a server, because the comparison runs inside your own browser. There are no accounts. The site uses Google Analytics to count visits, and carries Google advertising to pay for hosting: both set cookies, both are described in full below, and neither is ever given the text you compared. Two things can be kept on your device by the tool itself: your light or dark theme preference, always, and a comparison you explicitly choose to save, only when you click Save.

The text you compare

Comparison happens locally. When you paste, type, or drop a file into a panel, that content is parsed and diffed by a Web Worker running on your machine, and the result is rendered from memory. It is not sent to this site or to anyone else.

That is a consequence of how the tool is built rather than a promise layered on top of it: there is no upload endpoint to receive your text. It is also why the tool is usable for a contract, a patient record, or an internal configuration file.

By default nothing is written to disk, and closing the tab is enough to be rid of the content entirely. Two features deliberately change that, and only when you choose them: Save keeps a comparison in your own browser so it survives closing the tab, and Export downloads a file to wherever your browser puts downloads. Both are actions you take, not defaults, and both are described below.

Files are read in your browser with the standard file APIs, whether you drag one onto a panel or pick one with the Open file button. Both do the same thing and neither sends the file anywhere — there is no endpoint here to receive one. The file on your device is not copied, moved, or altered; only the text inside it is read, and only into the panel you chose.

What is stored on your device

The tool itself writes two items, both in localStorage, both on your own machine, and neither ever read by anyone but your own browser. Google Analytics sets cookies of its own in addition to these, which the analytics section below sets out in full.

tct-theme is written whenever you pick a theme. It records whether you chose light, dark, or system, so the page does not flash the wrong theme the next time you open it. It contains no identifier and nothing about your text.

tct-saved is written only when you click Save, and it does contain your text: the two documents you were comparing, along with the settings in force at the time, so that restoring reproduces the same result rather than a different one. Nothing is written to it while you type, paste, or compare. If you never click Save, this key is never created.

Saved comparisons stay on the device that saved them. They are not synchronised, not backed up by this site, and not visible to us — there is no server to send them to. You can remove any of them with the Delete button beside it in the saved list, and clearing your site data removes both keys outright. Because they sit in ordinary browser storage, anyone with access to your browser profile can read them, so a shared or public machine is a poor place to save anything confidential.

Share links

The Share button produces a link that reproduces a comparison. The text is encoded into the part of the URL after the #, and that detail is the whole point: browsers do not send the fragment of a URL to the server. So a share link carries the comparison from you to whoever you send it to without the text passing through this site — it never appears in a request, and therefore never in a server log.

The link is also kept out of the address bar at both ends. Sharing copies it to your clipboard without changing the address of the page you are on, and opening one removes the text from the address before the analytics and advertising scripts described below start. Those scripts record page addresses, so this is what keeps the text out of what they see.

What that does mean is that the link itself contains the text. Anyone who has the link can open it and read the comparison, and it will keep working for as long as they keep it. Treat a share link exactly as you would treat the content it carries: sending one to a group chat puts the text in that group chat. Nothing on this end can revoke a link once it has been sent, because there is nothing on this end holding it.

Very large comparisons cannot be shared this way, because a link long enough to hold them stops surviving being pasted. When that happens the tool says so and points you at Export instead.

Analytics, and what else the page loads

This site uses Google Analytics to measure how many people visit and which pages they open. It and the advertising described in the next section are the only two third-party scripts the site loads. What Analytics reports is ordinary web-traffic information — the page address, a rough geographic region, the referring link, and general device and browser details. It is never given the text you compared, because that text is never sent anywhere by this site at all.

Google Analytics sets its own cookies in your browser, named _ga and _ga_ followed by a property identifier. They hold a randomly generated number that lets a repeat visit be recognised as a repeat rather than a new person. They carry no name, no email address, and nothing about your text. You can remove them by clearing your site data, block them with any tracker-blocking extension or a browser that blocks trackers by default, or install Google's own opt-out browser add-on. Blocking the script has no effect on the comparison tool, which does not depend on it.

Beyond those two scripts there is no tag manager, no social widget, no error reporting, and no font CDN. Web fonts and the language grammars used for syntax-aware comparison are served from this domain, so those never reveal your visit to another company. Advertising has its own section immediately below.

Advertising

This site carries Google advertising to cover what it costs to run. The AdSense script loads on every page here, which is the part worth stating plainly, because it is what sets the cookies described below and it happens whether or not you end up seeing an ad. Where ads are placed is decided automatically by Google rather than by fixed slots written into these pages, so how many appear, or whether any appears on a given page at all, varies.

Ads are served by Google, and possibly by other advertising companies working through Google. Those companies set their own cookies or read device identifiers in order to choose which ad to show, to avoid repeating the same ad at you, and to measure whether an ad was seen or clicked. Some of them use what they already know about your browsing on other sites to pick something more relevant. That is ordinary web advertising, and it is a real change from how this site has worked until now, which is why it is written down plainly rather than folded into a sentence about analytics.

What does not change is the part that matters most here. Advertisers are not given the text you compare, because this site never receives it — the comparison happens in your browser, and that is a property of how the tool is built rather than a promise about who is trusted with the results. An ad on the page cannot read what is in the panels.

Google's own account of how it uses cookies in advertising is more detailed than anything worth restating here, and it is on its advertising and cookies page. You can turn personalised advertising off for your Google account, and see or delete the interests Google has inferred about you, in My Ad Center. Turning personalisation off does not remove ads; it stops them being selected using your history.

If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area, you are asked for your choice before any advertising cookie is set, and you can refuse and change your mind afterwards. That prompt is served by Google's own certified consent tool rather than by anything this site builds, and it is a condition of showing Google ads to visitors there. To be precise about its limits: it governs advertising cookies. The analytics described in the section above is not behind that prompt today, and this policy will not claim otherwise until it is. A tracker-blocking extension, or a browser that blocks trackers by default, covers both — and blocking ads has no effect on the comparison tool, which does not depend on them.

Server logs

Like any website, this one is served by a web host, and hosts keep short-lived request logs for security and reliability — typically the requested URL, a timestamp, a response status, a user agent, and an IP address. That is a property of how the web works, not something this site adds, and those logs record page requests only. They cannot contain the text you compared, because the text is never sent.

That holds for share links too, which is the reason they are built the way they are. A share link keeps the comparison after the #, and browsers do not transmit that part of a URL — so opening one requests the same plain page address as any other visit, and the text is not in the request to be logged.

These logs are used to keep the site up and to investigate abuse or errors. They are not used to build profiles, not combined with anything else, and not sold or shared for advertising.

Your rights

Data protection law gives you rights to access, correct, export, and delete personal data held about you, and to object to its processing. Those rights apply here, and the answer to most requests is unusually short, because the thing people are usually asking about — the text they compared — was never sent to us and so was never ours to hold.

What does exist is the ordinary web-traffic record described above: short-lived host request logs, and the visit statistics Google Analytics collects. Neither is tied to a name or an account, so identifying your own rows in them is not generally possible from an email request — which is why the practical remedies are the direct ones. You can stop analytics collection outright by blocking the script, clear the cookies it set through your browser's "clear site data", and use Google's opt-out add-on to apply that across every site using it.

Your theme preference and any comparison you saved are on your own device and under your own control — we cannot read them, produce them, or delete them for you, and the Delete button beside each saved comparison and your browser's "clear site data" both do it immediately. To ask anything about this, write to admin@textcomparetool.com.

Children

The tool is a general-purpose utility and is not directed at children. It asks no one for personal information, has no accounts, and never receives the text anyone compares, so nothing a child typed here reaches us. The visit statistics described above are collected the same way for every visitor and identify no one individually.

Changes to this policy

This page is kept accurate against what the site actually loads, and the date at the top changes whenever it is corrected. Two revisions are recorded here rather than quietly overwritten. The analytics described above were added after an earlier version of this policy said there were none; that was an oversight in the policy rather than a change of approach. The advertising section was written before any ad script existed, so that a change of that kind was described in advance rather than after the fact; the script has since been added, and that section was moved into the present tense in the same change that added it. If a future feature changes what is collected — an optional server-side comparison, say — this page will say so. Questions go to admin@textcomparetool.com.