How it works
Short version: your browser does the work, and the internet is not involved.
The long version
A normal online converter works like this: your file travels to a company's server, a program on that server changes it, and a link comes back. Somewhere in between, your document exists on hardware you do not control.
privafile removes those steps. This site is a collection of static pages. When you choose a file, your browser reads it into memory and runs a processing library that was written to run in a browser. The result is written to a new file on your machine. The network is used once, to load the page, and never again.
What that changes
- Nothing to leak. No copy of your file is created anywhere else, so there is no copy to breach, sell, or hand over.
- Nothing to wait for. No upload means no upload time. Large files are frequently faster here than on server-based tools.
- Nothing to sign up for. No account, because there is no file store to attach an account to.
- Works offline. Load the page, pull the plug, keep working. That is a good test of whether a tool is really local.
What browsers can and cannot do
This approach handles PDFs, images, and text comfortably. Heavy video transcoding and some audio formats are harder to do well in a browser, so we have kept those out rather than ship something slow or unreliable. Every tool listed on the site is one we believe runs well entirely on your device.