Privacy policy
What PDFLink collects, why, who it is shared with, and how long it is kept — including what a document's viewers reveal to the person who shared it.
PDFLink is operated by Zeebo UK Ltd, which is the data controller for everything below. This page says what we collect and why. It is written to be read rather than to survive a lawsuit, and there is nothing in it we would be embarrassed to be asked about.
If you have an account
Your email address. It is how you sign in — we send a one-time code rather than asking you to choose a password, so we never hold one. It is also how we reach you about your account.
Your documents. The files you upload, their names and their versions. We store them so we can serve them at the address you were given. We do not read them, train anything on them, or show them to anybody who does not have the link.
How your links are used. Every time one of your documents is opened we record the time, whether it came from the link or a QR scan, the referring site where the browser sends one, and the pages that were reached. This is the product: it is what you see in your dashboard.
Billing details are held by PayPal. We never see a card number or your PayPal login. We store the payment's PayPal identifier, the amount, the plan it bought and the dates the year runs between.
If you open somebody's document
You are reading something a PDFLink customer chose to share, and what you do is visible to them. Specifically:
- That the document was opened, when, and how far you read.
- The referring site, where your browser sends one.
- Your IP address and user agent, which we record for abuse prevention. These are not shown to the person who shared the document.
- Your email address, if the sender turned on the email gate and you entered one. If you did, they see it, and it may be stamped across the pages you read.
- Any note you leave, and the name you attach to it.
We do not track you across other websites, we do not sell anything about you, and there are no advertising trackers on the documents we host.
Cookies and what runs on which site
Documents (viewpdf.co) carry no analytics and no third-party scripts at all. We use a localStorage entry to remember that you have already passed an email gate, so you are not asked twice.
The website (pdflink.co) uses Pirsch for analytics. Pirsch is privacy-focused, cookie-free and does not build a profile across sites; it is hosted in the EU. We record which pages are visited and a small number of product events — a document uploaded, a plan clicked — so we know which parts of the site work.
Who else sees anything
- Cloudflare — hosting, storage and the network everything runs on.
- PayPal — payments.
- Postmark — the sign-in codes and account email.
- Google Safe Browsing — the links found inside an uploaded PDF are checked against it. The URL is sent; the document is not.
- Pirsch — website analytics, as above.
That is the complete list. Nobody buys data from us because we do not sell it.
How long we keep things
- Documents on a free account: five days. The file is then deleted outright — the address stays, saying the link expired, so nobody following it lands on a 404.
- Documents on a paid plan: until you delete them, or for 90 days after an account is closed.
- View records: 24 months, then deleted.
- Abuse reports and the blocklist: kept indefinitely. A file removed for phishing must stay removable.
- Sign-in codes: minutes.
What you can ask for
A copy of what we hold, a correction, or deletion of the lot. Write to hello@pdflink.co from the account's address and we will do it within 30 days. If you are in the UK or EU you can also complain to your data protection authority, though we would rather you gave us the chance to fix it first.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that matters, account holders are emailed. The date at the top of this page is when it last changed.