Privacy
Last updated 3 October 2026
This page describes what actually happens to a file when you hand it to PhoneForge. It is written to match the software rather than to cover every eventuality, so where it says something is deleted, something deletes it.
The short version. You do not need an account. Whatever you upload is used to do the job you asked for and nothing else. It is deleted on a timer, within six hours at the outside. It is never sold, never shared with advertisers, and never used to build a profile of you.
What each tool sends, and what is kept
| Tool | What leaves your device | How long it is kept |
|---|---|---|
| Contacts | The contact file you upload. | Held for the length of your session and deleted when it ends, at most one hour. |
| Files | The document you are working on. | Deleted six hours after it was last touched. |
| Scanner | The photographs of the pages. | Deleted six hours after it was last touched. |
| Cleaner | Nothing. Your files are read and compared inside your own browser. Only file names, sizes, dates and short fingerprints are sent, so the server can group them and work out which copy to keep. | Nothing is written down. The grouping is worked out and returned. |
What a fingerprint is
A one-way summary. For an exact match it is a SHA-256 digest; for photos it is a 64-bit perceptual hash, a number that describes the broad shape of an image. Neither can be turned back into the file. The folder a file sits in is never sent: the server does not need it, so it does not get it, and your folder names stay on your machine.
Contacts, in more detail
Your contact file is uploaded, cleaned, and handed back. The cleaned result and the original both live in the server's memory for the length of your session. In the phone app, an upload that is still in progress is also written to the server's disk so that a dropped connection does not lose your work; it is deleted with the rest of the session. A background job sweeps expired sessions every minute.
Two different things, kept apart
Most policies blur these together. We do not, because only one of them is a promise we are asking you to take on trust.
- What is in your files is yours. Your phonebook and your documents are not stored by us. They exist for the length of the job and are then deleted, which is set out above and is meant to be checked rather than believed. Anything that moves between your devices through us is encrypted, and only you can open it, with your own password, PIN or code. Nobody at PhoneForge can read it, so nobody at PhoneForge can hand it over.
- Who you are is a different question. If you create a profile, subscribe to the newsletter or pay for a plan, we keep the details that go with it: your name and email address, what you signed up for, and what you have used. We keep it because a business that sells a subscription has to know who is buying, what they are entitled to and what they have used. Those details are yours to see, correct or delete.
What we do not do
- No advertising, no advertising networks and no tracking pixels.
- Nothing is sold or passed to a third party for their own use.
- Your contacts and documents are not read by a person, and are not used to train anything.
- We do not keep your files in order to study them. What we count is how much work was done, the number of pages, the size of an upload, how many contacts, never what any of it said.
How what we do keep is protected
Everything travels over an encrypted connection, and access to the database that holds profiles is restricted to PhoneForge itself. Contacts you have processed are held encrypted at rest, and your account is what opens them again; without one there is nothing kept to open.
Deleting from your profile page bypasses the retention period entirely and removes everything immediately. There is no copy kept to put back.
Cookies
We set no advertising cookies, belong to no advertising network and run no tracking pixels. What we keep in your browser is your own settings, and a note of which documents you have on the server so they can be shown back to you. Neither is sent anywhere.
The one thing worth asking about is the visit counter, because it loads a script from another address of ours. If you turn it off, that script is never requested at all rather than loaded and ignored. You are asked once, and you can change your mind whenever you like from Cookie choices at the bottom of any page.
Measurement
We count visits using Plausible, run on our own server at analytics.taadom.com. It sets no cookies, stores no IP addresses and cannot follow you to another site. What it records is the page, the country, the kind of device and where the visit came from, all in aggregate. There is nothing to opt out of because there is nothing identifying you.
We also count what gets used, because otherwise we cannot tell a tool that works from one nobody can find: which tool was run, which guide article was opened, whether a scan was saved, and on the phone, which screen was shown. Counts are rounded into bands rather than recorded exactly, so a number can never single out one session.
What is never measured is the content. No filenames, no contact names or numbers, no text from a document or a scan, and nothing you type into search. The record is that a thing happened, never what it was about.
The newsletter
If you sign up, we keep your email address and nothing else. No name is asked for and none is required. You confirm by replying to an email first, so an address somebody else typed in never ends up on the list, and every email we send carries an unsubscribe link that works immediately.
PhoneForge is part of Taadom Digital Co. Ltd, and signing up here adds you to both the PhoneForge list and the company one. That is said on the form, not only here. The list runs on our own Listmonk server; the address does not go to a marketing platform. We do not sell subscriber details, and we do not share them with third parties. Unsubscribe and the address is removed from the list.
Who else touches the data on the way
- Cloudflare sits in front of the site and carries your request to our server. It also tells us which country a visit comes from, which is used to guess the right country code for your phone numbers.
- Our own servers, rented from Hetzner, in Germany. That is where the processing happens and where working files briefly sit.
There is no one else. No analytics vendor, no crash reporter, no customer-support tool with a view of your files.
Your rights
If you use the tools without signing up, there is nothing held about you to ask for: the work expires on its timer, and closing the tab is enough. If you want it gone sooner, write to us and we will remove it.
If you have a profile, a subscription or a newsletter sign-up, you can ask us for a copy of what we hold, correct it, or have it deleted, and you can unsubscribe at any time from a link in every email. Deleting your details ends any subscription attached to them. Write to the address below and we will deal with it.
Children
PhoneForge is not aimed at children and does not knowingly collect anything from them.
Changes
If this page changes in a way that affects what happens to your files, the date at the top will change and the change will be described here.
Contact
PhoneForge is made by Taadom Digital, Yaounde, Cameroon. Questions about this page: [email protected].