Privacy policy

01Who we are and what this covers

Ontool is a free collection of small online tools published at ontool.xyz. “Ontool”, “we”, “us” and “our” refer to the operator of this website. This policy explains what happens to data when you browse the site and use a tool. It covers the Ontool website and every tool listed on the tools page.

For the purposes of data protection law, the operator of Ontool is the controller of the limited personal data described in this policy. Our contact point for every privacy question or request is the email address in section 15. Where the law requires the operator’s legal name and postal address, we will provide them on request.

This policy does not cover websites we link to, content you receive through Temp Mail, or what happens to a file after you download it from Ontool.

This privacy policy is version 1.0, dated 9 November 2026, and forms part of the terms of use, which are version 1.0 and dated the same day. The version and date at the top of each page identify the document that applies; the two are updated together, and the later-dated version replaces the earlier one for future use.

02Tools that run on your device

Fifteen of the eighteen tools process everything inside your browser using JavaScript and WebAssembly. Your files are read into the page’s own memory, worked on locally, and downloaded back to you. Nothing you open in these tools is uploaded to Ontool.

• Image tools: Image Compressor, Image Resizer, Image Converter, Compress image to 20 KB and Image to Text (OCR).
• PDF tools: JPG to PDF and PDF to JPG.
• Generators and editors: Barcode Generator, QR Generator and Markdown Editor.
• Media: Video Frame Extractor, which decodes the video locally in the tab.
• Reference and money tools: Invoice Generator, Etsy Fee Calculator, Ad Revenue Calculator and Disposable Email Checker. Everything you type in them stays in the page.

Because these tools are local, clearing your browser data or closing the tab is enough to remove what you entered. Loading the page is still an ordinary web request, so our hosting provider sees it and may keep standard server logs — see Hosting, logs and servers. “Local” describes how your files are processed; it does not mean the site itself is offline or request-free.

The OCR tool is the one exception worth knowing about: on your first scan it downloads the recognition engine and language data from a public content delivery network. That request goes to the network and includes your IP address and browser details, but not your image. After the first scan the engine is cached in your browser.

03Temp Mail

Temp Mail is a receive-only disposable inbox. When you open it, Ontool’s server asks a third-party disposable-email provider — currently mail.tm, Guerrilla Mail, mail.gw or 1secmail, tried in order — to create an address for you. The provider creates and hosts the mailbox; Ontool does not run its own mail server.

Ontool makes these provider requests from its own server, so the provider normally sees our server’s connection rather than yours. The provider still receives the address, every message sent to it and ordinary connection metadata, and it may log or retain them under its own policy and for its own retention period. Ontool cannot delete data held by the provider.

What is stored in your browser

The address, the provider name and the provider session token are packed into one encrypted, signed cookie named ontool_temp_mail. It is HttpOnly (page scripts cannot read it), SameSite=Lax, marked Secure when you are on HTTPS, limited to the /api/temp-mail path, and it expires after one hour. Clearing it simply means Temp Mail creates a new address on your next visit; you can also choose New address inside the tool.

What Ontool keeps

Ontool does not keep a mailbox database. When you open the inbox or a message, the server asks the provider for the current data and passes the response back to your browser. Message content is not written to our database or to disk, and no copy is kept after the request finishes. Ontool cannot read your inbox later, cannot recover a deleted message and cannot hand you a transcript.

HTML messages are displayed in a sandboxed frame, with scripts and forms blocked, and remote images stay blocked until you choose to load them. If you do load images, the sender and its image host can see your IP address and browser details, exactly as if you opened the email elsewhere. Attachments are not downloadable in this version. Delivery, uptime and retention depend on the provider and are outside Ontool’s control.

04Explain My Report and Parent Translator

These two tools use Google Gemini to write a plain-language explanation. When you run one, the content you submit is sent from your browser to Ontool’s server, and from there to Google’s Gemini API. That content is the report text you paste or the document or image you upload.

• Explain My Report accepts up to 20,000 characters of pasted text, or a PNG, JPEG or WebP image up to 3 MB, and returns a plain-language summary with findings and questions for your care team.
• Parent Translator accepts a PDF, DOCX, TXT, PNG, JPG or JPEG file up to 4 MB in six languages. Text is extracted from PDF, DOCX and TXT on our server before it is sent to Gemini; images and image-only PDFs are sent as images.

Sensitive information and your consent

A medical report or school document can contain sensitive information, including health data and information about a child. Submitting content is voluntary. By submitting it, you confirm that you are allowed to share it and, where the law requires it, you give your explicit consent to that content being processed to produce the explanation. Do not submit another person’s document without their permission. If you are not able to give that consent, do not use the tool.

You can withdraw consent at any time by not using the tools; withdrawal does not affect processing that already happened, and it cannot recall a request already sent to Google. These tools are not for emergencies. They are informational only, and they do not replace a qualified professional — the terms of use set out the limits in more detail.

What these tools are not

Both tools produce text written automatically by Google Gemini. Automatic output can be incomplete, out of date, or simply wrong, and it is a starting point for your own understanding rather than a substitute for a qualified professional.

• Explain My Report is not medical advice. It does not diagnose, offer a second opinion, recommend treatment or provide emergency help. Please discuss the report and anything that concerns you with your doctor or another qualified health professional before making a decision about your care.
• Parent Translator is not school or legal advice. It is an explanation of a document, not an assessment, a special-education evaluation or a decision by a school. Please check dates, rights and obligations with the school or a qualified adviser.

What is kept

Ontool does not save the submitted text, the uploaded file, the extracted text, the generated explanation or a history of your runs. The request is handled in memory and discarded once the response is returned. No run is attached to your account, so there is no saved result and no history to delete.

The daily limit

Both AI tools allow one free run per day without an account, or three per day on a free account. Without an account, Ontool computes a one-way SHA-256 hash of your IP address with a server-side secret and stores a counter under that hash in a small quota table; the raw IP address is never written there, so everyone on the same network shares that one daily run. When you are signed in, the counter is stored against your account’s Clerk user ID instead, which is what lets the allowance follow you between devices. Ontool stores the run count and the account identifier, nothing about the document or the result. Counters for old days are deleted after seven days, and a separate deployment-wide daily budget caps total AI use.

Google processes what you submit as an independent provider under its API terms and its privacy policy. Those terms may allow Google to retain submitted content for a limited period for abuse monitoring and service operation, and its handling is outside our control. Do not submit records you are not allowed to share, and remove names, addresses, insurance numbers and other identifiers you do not need to include.

We do not use your submission for profiling and do not make solely automated decisions about you. The tools produce text for you to read; they do not decide anything on our behalf.

05Accounts and sign-in

Accounts are optional. Sign-in is handled entirely by Clerk, an authentication provider, so Ontool never receives or stores your password. Clerk receives your email address, the password you set (hashed by Clerk), session data and ordinary security information such as your IP address and browser details, and it uses that to run the sign-in flow and prevent abuse. When you open the sign-in or sign-up page, Clerk loads its interface from Clerk’s own domain, which receives your IP address and browser details.

Ontool’s server reads only your Clerk user ID, which it uses to apply the higher signed-in AI allowance. The account menu in the header shows your email address, read directly from Clerk in your browser. Ontool does not keep a separate profile database at this time, and does not receive your name, photo or other profile details from Clerk.

Accepting the terms during sign-up is recorded in your browser’s local storage (the terms version and a timestamp) and, once the account exists, attached to the account’s metadata held by Clerk. This record exists so there is evidence of which terms version you accepted.

To delete an account, email the address in section 15 from the address on the account. We will remove the Clerk user and any profile record stored against it. AI quota counters keyed to your user ID age out within seven days. Clerk may keep limited records for legal, security and fraud purposes under its own policy, and backup copies may take a short period to disappear. Signing out, or clearing cookies, ends the session on that device.

06Cookies and local storage

Ontool sets no analytics, advertising or preference cookies, and we do not load third-party tracking scripts. The Temp Mail session cookie and the local entries below are the only storage Ontool itself creates. Clerk sets its own cookies when you use the account pages; the names below are the ones it uses at the time of writing, and Clerk may change them.

If you block the Temp Mail cookie, the tool still opens but creates a fresh address on each visit and cannot remember your inbox. Every other tool works normally. You can delete the local entries at any time in your browser’s site-data settings; for the invoice draft, the tool’s New invoice action replaces the saved copy as well, and unpinning a tool removes it from your favourites.

We do not show a cookie banner because we set no optional or tracking cookies. The Temp Mail cookie and Clerk’s strictly necessary cookies — __session,__client_uat, __refresh where enabled, the short-lived handshake cookies, and __clerk_db_jwt in development — are essential for the feature you chose to use, and the invoice draft, terms record and favourites are functional storage you can clear at any time. We do not use your data for cross-site tracking, and because there is no sale or sharing of personal information, browser Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control signals have nothing to switch off.

07Hosting, logs and servers

Ontool runs on cloud infrastructure provided by a third-party hosting provider, and the AI quota counters are stored in a managed Postgres database. Like any website, requests create standard server logs: IP address, user agent, timestamp, requested URL and error details. Those logs are used to keep the site working, to diagnose faults and to detect abuse. They are held by the hosting provider under its own retention policy rather than in an Ontool database, and we do not control how long the provider keeps them.

Ontool does not create user profiles, does not link a log line to a person for marketing, and keeps no mailing list or contact database. The only account record is the one you create yourself on the sign-up page, and it lives with Clerk. If you email support, your message and address exist in our support mailbox, which is provided by Google, for as long as needed to answer you; see How long we keep data.

We may disclose the limited data we hold if we are required to by law, by a valid legal request, or if it is necessary to protect the rights, safety and security of users or the public. Because we do not store tool content, such a request would normally reach only account and quota records and whatever logs the hosting provider holds.

08Third-party services

These providers are involved when you use the parts of Ontool that need them. Each is bound by its own privacy policy, and Ontool only sends what the feature requires. We do not sell personal information or share it with data brokers, advertising networks or social platforms.

Sentry is a processor used only for reliability monitoring. It receives error diagnostics — error type, stack trace, route name and non-identifying tags — and keeps them for 30 days on its Developer plan. Report contents, uploaded files, filenames, prompts and model output are not sent.

These services may process data outside your country, including in the United States. Where that happens, we rely on the provider’s own safeguards for international transfers, such as standard contractual clauses or an equivalent mechanism, together with its security terms. Contact us if you want more detail about a specific provider.

09How long we keep data

We keep as little as possible, for as short a time as possible. This is the full list of what exists and how long it lasts.

Provider-held data — Temp Mail messages, Clerk account records and Gemini request data — is kept under each provider’s own retention rules, which we do not control and cannot shorten.

10Security

Traffic to Ontool uses HTTPS. The Temp Mail cookie is encrypted, signed, HttpOnly and time-limited, and provider API keys and signing secrets exist only on the server. AI content is not written to disk, quota identifiers are hashed, and support access to infrastructure is kept to the minimum needed to run the site.

No website can promise perfect security, and no system is immune to mistakes, outages or legal demands. If a security incident affects personal data in a way that creates a risk to you, we will notify affected users and any authority as required by law. Because email is not private, do not send sensitive documents to the support address.

11Legal bases (EEA and UK)

If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or another region with a similar legal-basis framework, this is why we process the data described above.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have balanced our need to run and protect a free service against your rights, and we minimise the data involved so that impact stays low. You can object at any time using the contact details below. Where we rely on consent, you can withdraw it by not using the relevant tool.

12Your rights and choices

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to ask what personal data is held about you, to have it corrected or deleted, to restrict or object to processing, to receive a copy in a portable format, to withdraw consent, and to complain to a data protection authority. In practice your choices are:

• Clear the Temp Mail cookie in your browser, or use New address.
• Clear local storage to remove the saved invoice draft, terms record and favourites.
• Use the browser-only tools without sending anything anywhere.
• Decide not to run an AI tool, which is the only way text or files reach a model.
• Ask us to delete your account: email the address below and we remove the Clerk user and any profile record saved against it.

Because the quota store holds only a salted hash and server logs are held by our host, we may not be able to connect a request to a specific record. When that happens we will explain what exists, what cannot be identified, and delete whatever we can. We may ask you to verify that you control the relevant account or email address before acting on a request.

We do not sell personal information and do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, because Ontool carries no advertising or tracking at all. California residents therefore have no sale or sharing to opt out of, and Global Privacy Control signals are honoured by default. We do not discriminate against anyone for exercising a privacy right.

13Children

Ontool is a general-audience utility site and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly allow accounts for children below the age at which they can consent to online services where they live — 13 in some countries, up to 16 in others. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children below that age.

Parent Translator may be used on a school document that contains information about a child. Submit such a document only if you are the child’s parent or guardian, or have permission from someone who is. If you believe a child has sent personal information through one of the server-backed tools, contact us and we will help remove what we hold.

14Changes to this policy

This page describes the tools as they exist today. If a tool changes how it handles data, or a new tool needs a server, this policy will be updated and the version number and date at the top of the page will change. An update takes effect from the date and version shown at the top of the page, or from a later effective date stated in the notice. Older versions are available on request.

A change is material if it affects how your data is handled — for example a new category of data, a new provider, or a longer retention period. If a change is material, we will describe it here and give at least 14 days’ notice before it takes effect, with a prominent notice on the site and, for signed-in users, an email to the address on the account. The only exception is where a shorter period is required by law or to address an urgent security or legal risk; in that case we will give as much notice as we reasonably can and explain why. Where the law requires it, we will ask for your consent again rather than relying on continued use; otherwise, continuing to use Ontool after the effective date means you accept the updated policy. If you do not agree, please stop using the affected tool and, if you have an account, ask us to delete it.

If Ontool changes ownership or is merged into another service, the data described here may transfer as part of that change and would remain protected by this policy until it is updated. We do not sell personal data as part of any such transfer.

15Contact

Questions about this policy, or a request about your data, can be sent to ontoolsupport@gmail.com. Include the tool you used, the date and — if you have one — the email address on your account, so we can look at the right service. We aim to answer privacy requests within 30 days. You also have the right to complain to your local data protection authority.