What happens to your photos

The short version

Your photo is sent to our server, forwarded to the model that does the work, and the result is handed straight back to your browser. We never write your photo to disk and we keep no copy of it or of the result. There is no account, so there is nothing to attach a photo to.

The path a photo takes

• Your browser scales the image down if it is larger than 4000px on the long edge, then posts it to https://phai.tools/api/remove-background over HTTPS.
• Our server holds the bytes in memory, checks they really are an image, and passes them to our processing provider, WaveSpeed AI, which runs the background-removal model.
• The resulting PNG comes back through our server to your browser. Both the input and the output are released from memory when the request ends.

The one place a temporary copy exists outside your device is at the processing provider, because the model has to read the file to run. We are confirming their exact retention window and will state it here as a number rather than a reassurance. Until that line reads like a fact, treat it as unconfirmed.

What we never do

• Train models on your photos, or let anyone else do so.
• Look at them. There is no moderation queue and no internal gallery.
• Sell, share or licence them.
• Keep them to show you later. There is no history, because there are no accounts.

What we do log

The server writes one line per job: the time, the truncated client IP address, the input and output sizes, and how long it took. The IP is there for one reason — the rate limit that stops a single client from taking the service down — and it is held in memory for at most 24 hours. No photo content is ever logged.

Cookies and analytics

We use Google Tag Manager, and it starts switched off. On your first visit it loads in a denied state: no cookies are written, no advertising identifiers are read, and the only thing sent to Google is a request with no identity attached to it. Nothing changes until you answer the bar at the bottom of the screen.

• Reject — nothing is stored, ever. The tools work exactly the same. Declining takes one click, the same as accepting.
• Accept — analytics and advertising cookies are allowed, so we can see which tools people finish and whether an ad led to a finished job.
• Choose — pick the categories individually. Analytics is the only one we currently act on.

Your answer is kept in your browser's local storage under phai-consent, not in a cookie, and it is not sent anywhere. Clearing your browser data brings the bar back. Nothing we measure is about the content of your photos — it is which pages get used and where people give up.

Your rights

Since we store nothing tied to you, there is no personal data to export or delete. If you want the temporary copy at our processing provider removed sooner than their retention window, write to hello@phai.tools with the approximate time of your upload and we will chase it.

Changes

When accounts and credits arrive, this page changes materially — stored results, a billing record, an email address on file. That version will be dated and the change described, not slipped in.