Privacy Policy

Last updated: November 2026 • Plain English summary: We do not collect or sell your personal files.

1. Your Photos & Signatures Stay on Your Device

All photo compression, image resizing, and format conversions take place locally inside your smartphone or computer browser using Web Workers and HTML5 Canvas. Your photos, documents, and signatures are never transmitted over the internet to our servers or any third-party storage.

2. Password Breach Checking (K-Anonymity)

When you check whether a password has been leaked in a data breach:

  • Your browser generates a cryptographic SHA-1 hash of the password locally.
  • Only the first 5 characters of this hash are sent to the public Have I Been Pwned API.
  • The API returns a list of matching hash suffixes. Your browser compares the suffix locally.
  • We never know, transmit, or store your actual password.

3. Username Availability Checker

Searches conducted via our Username Checker probe public URLs in real time. We do not maintain a permanent database of searched handles, and search histories are not retained or sold. Temporary in-memory caching is kept for 10 minutes strictly to prevent redundant network requests and enforce rate limits.

4. Cookies & Analytics

alreadytaken.me uses privacy-friendly, cookie-free web metrics (such as Cloudflare Web Analytics). We do not use tracking cookies or collect personally identifiable information (PII).

Local storage (`localStorage`) is used strictly to remember your preferences (such as your light/dark theme preference) on your own device.

5. Third-Party Advertising (Google AdSense Readiness)

To help pay for server hosting, we may display non-intrusive advertisements from third-party networks such as Google AdSense.

  • Google and other third-party vendors may use cookies to serve ads based on prior visits to this website.
  • Users in the European Economic Area (EEA) and the UK will be presented with a Google-certified Consent Management Platform (CMP) before any non-essential cookies or personalized ads are activated.
  • You can opt out of personalized advertising by visiting Google Ad Settings.

6. Contact Us

If you have questions regarding this Privacy Policy, you may contact us at hello@alreadytaken.me.