Privacy

Your pictures

When you add a picture — by choosing it, dropping it, pasting it or taking a photo — your browser reads the file into this tab. The comparison, the alignment, the text recognition, the visual similarity model, the metadata reading and every export run in the same tab, on your device. ComparePicture has no upload endpoint and no server that processes images, so there is no step at which a picture, a thumbnail, a file name, recognised text, metadata or a measurement could be sent to us.

Closing or reloading the tab discards everything the page made from your pictures.

Every request this site can make

Loading a page requests this site’s own files: the page, its scripts, styles and fonts. Beyond that, a request happens only when you ask for something that needs it:

• Compare text loads the text recogniser (4.0 MB) and one language pack (2.0 MB for English) from this site. Your pictures are handed to it inside the page.
• Visual content similarity loads a WebAssembly runtime and a compact image model (16.7 MB together) from this site, after you press the button that states that size. The model runs on your device.
• Image URL, if you paste one, is fetched by your browser directly from the site that hosts it — never through a server of ours. Many sites refuse such requests; when they do, you are told and nothing is retried another way.
• The contact form sends four values when you press Send: your name, email address, message and this site’s domain, to a Google Form read by the people who run the site. Opening the contact page requests nothing from Google.

What is kept in your browser

If you use them, the text-recognition language data is cached by the recogniser in your browser’s IndexedDB, and the similarity model in its Cache Storage, so the next use is instant. Your sensitivity and view choices are remembered in local storage. One flag in session storage records whether you closed the small notice about the publisher. None of these holds a picture or anything derived from one. The Privacy & data section of the workspace clears the cached models and the remembered settings.

Measurement and advertising

At the time of writing no analytics or visitor-counting script ships with these pages, and no advertising is served yet: the advertising units are switched off until the account is approved. If either is turned on, this page changes in the same release to say what it receives — and in neither case would it receive your pictures, because nothing in the page ever sends them.

The workspace raises a handful of generic event names inside the page (for example “a comparison started”) so that a counter could one day be attached. They are fixed words with no room for a file name, a size, text or any value from your pictures, and today they go nowhere.

No accounts

There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to sign in to. You can compare, inspect and export without telling the site who you are.