Privacy Policy

Last updated: 6 September 2026

The short version

Your video is uploaded straight from your browser to our storage bucket, encoded, and then deleted. We do not watch it, train on it, or sell it.
Staged uploads are deleted the moment a job finishes. Results are deleted 2 hours (signed out) or up to 7 days (signed in) after they are made — the file itself, not just the link.
We never see your card number — Stripe handles payments end to end.
Signed-out visitors are counted with a one-way hash of IP + browser, not a stored IP address.
No advertising networks, no data brokers, no selling of personal information.

Who we are

VidSmaller ("we", "us") operates vidsmaller.com, a browser-based video compression service. We are the data controller for the information described here. This policy covers the website, the compressor, and the accounts and payments attached to them.

Questions, requests or complaints: support@vidsmaller.com.

Your videos, specifically

This is the part most people actually care about, so it comes first.

Where the file goes. Your browser uploads it directly to our Cloudflare R2 bucket using a one-time signed URL. It does not pass through the web server that renders this page. The object key is a random UUID, so the address cannot be guessed.
Who processes it. Our encoding provider (FreeConvert) fetches the file from that bucket over HTTPS, runs the FFmpeg job with the settings you chose, and returns a compressed file. Your download is proxied through our server.
What we do not do with it. No human at VidSmaller opens your video. It is not used to train machine-learning models, is not shared with advertisers or data brokers, and is not analysed for anything beyond running the compression you asked for.
What is left afterwards. The staged upload is deleted when the job settles; the result expires on the timer in the retention table below. What remains is the job record — file name, sizes, duration, chosen settings, credits charged — which is what powers your history and support requests.
Don't upload what you can't share with a processor. Compression is inherently a "send the file to a server" operation. If footage is confidential to the point that a third-party encoder is unacceptable, use a local tool instead. We would rather say that than pretend otherwise.

Information we collect

1. Information you give us

Account data — email address, display name and avatar, either typed in or supplied by the sign-in provider you chose. We support Google sign-in (including Google One Tap), magic links and one-time email codes. We do not use passwords, so there is no password to store or leak.
Files and job settings — the video you upload and the compression options you select.
Payment details — entered on Stripe's checkout, never on our servers. We receive and store the resulting order records: plan, amount, currency, status and Stripe identifiers. We never receive your full card number.
Messages — anything you send us by email, plus the newsletter subscription and preferences if you opt in.

2. Information collected automatically

Technical request data — IP address, user-agent, timestamps and requested URL, as in any server log. Used for security, debugging and abuse prevention.
A hashed visitor key — for signed-out compressions we store sha256(IP + user-agent + server secret), truncated. It lets us enforce the free daily limit and return your job to you without keeping your IP address on the record.
Rate-limit counters — short-lived counters in Redis keyed by IP, on a rolling 24-hour window.
Aggregate page analytics — Vercel Analytics, which is cookieless and reports visit counts and page performance in aggregate. It does not build a profile of you across sites.
Traffic analytics — Google Analytics 4, which counts visits and records which page you landed on, which site or search sent you, roughly where in the world you are, and which pages you moved through. It is how we find out that a page nobody reads exists, and that one we never think about is the one people arrive on. It also receives a short list of things that happened on the page: a file was picked, a compression started, finished or failed, a result was downloaded, an account was created, a checkout was started or completed. Those carry sizes, durations, outcomes and amounts — never the filename, the link you pasted, or any part of the video itself. It only loads if you accept in the cookie banner — decline and the script is never fetched.
Product analytics — Microsoft Clarity, which records how the page was used: pointer movement, clicks, scrolling, rage clicks, and a replay of the page structure so we can watch the interaction back. Text on the page is masked by default, so a replay shows the shape of what you did rather than the words on screen. It exists because “the compressor did not work for me” is a report we cannot act on without seeing where it went wrong. It only loads if you accept in the cookie banner — decline and the script is never fetched at all, so there is nothing to record.

We run no advertising network on this site: no ad slots, no conversion pixels, nothing we place is there to sell you something elsewhere. One qualification, because the sentence used to be unqualified and that is no longer honest: Clarity is a Microsoft product, and the cookies it sets include Microsoft identifiers that Microsoft also uses across its own properties, advertising among them. That is Microsoft’s processing under the Microsoft Privacy Statement, not ours, and it is the price of the tool. The cookie list below names them. Google Analytics carries the same qualification: the measurement data lands in Google’s systems under Google’s terms. We have not switched on Google signals or the “Google products and services” data sharing that would let Google reuse it to target ads, and there is no ad tag of any kind on this site.

Why we use it (and the legal basis)

To run the service — accept your upload, encode it, deliver the result, track credits, keep your history (performance of a contract).
To take payment — process subscriptions and credit purchases, issue receipts, meet accounting obligations (contract and legal obligation).
To keep the service up — rate limiting, fraud and abuse prevention, debugging, capacity planning (legitimate interests).
To talk to you — sign-in codes, job or billing notifications, and support replies (contract); product newsletters only if you opted in (consent — unsubscribe in one click from any of them).

How long we keep things

Data	Retention
The video you upload (staged copy in our bucket)	Deleted as soon as the job reaches a final state. A bucket lifecycle rule hard-deletes anything left behind within 24 hours — for example if you close the tab mid-upload.
The compressed result	2 hours for jobs started without an account; up to 7 days for signed-in accounts. After that the download link stops working and we delete the file from our bucket. A bucket lifecycle rule hard-deletes anything the sweep misses within 8 days.
Job record (file name, sizes, duration, format, settings, credits, status)	For as long as your account exists, so your history, billing and support requests make sense. Deleted with the account. Anonymous job rows are pruned once they expire.
Hashed visitor key for signed-out jobs	Stored on the job row and removed with it. It is a one-way hash — we cannot turn it back into your IP address.
Rate-limit counters (Redis)	Rolling 24-hour window, then they expire automatically.
Account profile (email, name, avatar, sign-in provider)	Until you delete your account. Deletion removes your sessions, jobs, credit history and profile within 30 days.
Orders, invoices and payment records	Retained as long as tax and accounting law requires (typically 7 years), even after account deletion. Card numbers are never among them.
Server logs	Kept briefly by our hosting provider for debugging and abuse investigation, then rotated out.

Who else touches your data

We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for advertising. We do use the following processors to run the service — each of them only gets what its job requires:

Processor	What it does	Where
FreeConvert	Runs the actual video encoding, and hosts the compressed result until its download link expires	United States
Cloudflare (R2)	Storage bucket your browser uploads to before encoding, plus the CDN that serves it to the encoder; also hosts account avatars and blog images	Global edge network
Vercel	Application hosting, request routing and aggregate page analytics	United States (us-east-1)
Supabase (PostgreSQL)	Database holding accounts, compression job records, credit ledger and orders	United States (AWS us-east-1)
Stripe	Payment processing, subscription billing and the customer billing portal	Global (Stripe entities)
Resend	Sign-in links, one-time codes, transactional email and newsletter delivery	United States (AWS SES us-east-1)
Upstash (Redis)	Short-lived counters that enforce the free daily limit and block abuse	United States (us-east-1)
Google	Google sign-in and Google One Tap, if you choose to sign in with a Google account	Global (Google LLC)
Google (Analytics)	Traffic analytics: which pages people land on, where they arrived from, and how many of those visits end in a compression	Global (Google LLC)
Microsoft (Clarity)	Product analytics: heatmaps and replays of on-page interaction, used to find where the compressor confuses people	Global (Microsoft Corporation)

We may also disclose information where the law genuinely requires it, or to protect our rights, users and infrastructure from abuse. If VidSmaller is ever sold or merged, account data would transfer with it and you would be told before anything changed.

International transfers

Our servers and processors are primarily in the United States, with Cloudflare serving from the edge location nearest you. If you are in the EEA, UK or Switzerland, your data is therefore transferred outside your country. Those transfers rely on the processors' Standard Contractual Clauses and equivalent safeguards, which they publish in their own data processing agreements.

Security

Everything moves over TLS — uploads, API calls, downloads.
Uploads use short-lived signed URLs, and object keys are random UUIDs (122 bits of entropy) rather than file names.
Downloads are proxied by our server against your job record, so one user's link cannot be reused by another.
Provider webhooks are HMAC-verified before we act on them.
No card data ever reaches us, and no passwords exist to be stolen.

No system is perfect. If you find a security problem, email support@vidsmaller.com and we will get back to you quickly.

Your rights

Depending on where you live (GDPR, UK GDPR, CCPA/CPRA and similar laws), you can ask us to:

Access a copy of the personal data we hold about you
Correct anything inaccurate — name, email and avatar are editable yourself in /dashboard/settings
Delete your account and the data attached to it
Export your data in a portable format
Object to or restrict processing based on our legitimate interests
Withdraw consent for marketing email at any time

Email support@vidsmaller.com from the address on your account and we will respond within 30 days. We do not charge for this, and we will not degrade your service for asking. We do not sell or "share" personal information as those terms are defined under California law.

Cookies

We keep this list short on purpose. The cookies and local storage items this site actually sets are:

Session cookie — keeps you signed in. Strictly necessary; without it there is no account.
NEXT_LOCALE — remembers whether you chose English, 中文 or 日本語.
Theme preference — light or dark mode, stored in your browser's local storage.
cookieConsent — records your answer to the cookie banner for a year.
Google sign-in — if you use Google or Google One Tap, Google sets its own cookies on its own domains under its privacy policy.
Google Analytics — two first-party cookies, _ga (a pseudonymous ID for this site, kept for two years) and _ga_P7WF7P7T27 (holds the state of the current visit). They are not needed to compress a video. Neither is set unless you accept — the tag is not loaded before that.
Microsoft Clarity — two first-party cookies, _clck (a pseudonymous ID for this site) and _clsk (ties the pages of one visit together), plus cookies Microsoft sets on its own domains — among them MUID, a Microsoft identifier shared across Microsoft properties and used for analytics and advertising there. These are not necessary to compress a video; blocking them costs you nothing on this site. None of them are set unless you accept — Clarity is not loaded before that.

Vercel’s page analytics are cookieless; Google Analytics’ and Clarity’s are not. You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings; blocking the session cookie means you cannot stay signed in, but anonymous compression will still work. You can also change your choice at any time in the Cookie Preferences section above.

Children

VidSmaller is not intended for children under 13 (or the minimum age in your country), and we do not knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child has created an account, email us and we will delete it.

Changes to this policy

When we change something material — a new processor, a new retention window, anything that affects your files — we update the date at the top of this page and, for significant changes, email account holders. Continuing to use the service after a change means you accept the updated policy.

Contact

Email: support@vidsmaller.com

Related: Terms of Service · Refund Policy

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