Privacy Policy for Fork PDF

Welcome to Fork PDF (accessible at forkpdf.com). We respect your privacy and are committed to protecting the personal data you share with us. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, store, share, and protect your information when you use our website, developer tools, and related services.

1. Data Controller & Business Identity

Fork PDF is designed, built, and legally operated by:

• Entity: Fork PDF
• Location: India
• Contact Email: support@forkpdf.com

In alignment with global data protection principles, we act as the Data Controller for your direct account data, and a Data Processor for the content, templates, and files you upload or process through our APIs.

2. Information We Collect & Processing Principles

We process your data strictly to provide and secure our services based on standard global privacy principles:

A. Account & Profile Information (Performance of a Contract)

• What we collect: Full name, email address, organization name (for org accounts), and password.
• Why we collect it: To create your account, manage API keys, and grant access to the platform.

B. Telemetry & API Logs (Performance of a Contract & Legitimate Interest)

• What we collect: API request metadata, timestamps, and routing telemetry.
• Why we collect it: To provide you with real-time usage logs on your dashboard, secure our infrastructure, and diagnose API errors.
• Retention: Logs are retained under a strict 30-day hard cap before being automatically purged via a scheduled background process.

D. Failed Webhook Payloads (Performance of a Contract)

• What we collect: Data payloads from failed webhook delivery attempts.
• Why we collect it: To allow for automated or manual retries of failed webhook events.
• Retention: Stored temporarily for a maximum of 3 days before being automatically deleted.

3. Information We Explicitly DO NOT Collect or Use

To ensure maximum transparency, we want to be clear about what we do not do:

• No Financial Data: We do not collect, process, or store credit card data. All payments are handled entirely by Paddle (see Section 6).
• No Selling of Data: We do not sell your personal data or user profiles to data brokers or advertising networks.
• No AI Model Training: We never use your uploaded HTML, templates, or generated PDFs to train, fine-tune, or feed Artificial Intelligence models. Your documents belong entirely to you.

4. How We Process and Store Your PDFs

When creating a project, you select a specific geographic region to execute server-side processing. Once selected, your project storage mode cannot be changed.

A. Managed Hosting Mode

• Storage & Generation: Requests are routed through Cloudflare to AWS Lambda in your chosen region. Output PDFs, their .pb spatial data, and failed webhook payloads are stored in a managed AWS S3 bucket in that same region.
• Retention & Deletion: For PDFs, you must select a retention period (24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days). Failed webhook payloads are retained strictly for a maximum of 3 days for retry purposes. All files are automatically purged via S3 Lifecycle policies upon their respective expirations.

B. Bring Your Own Database / Bucket Mode

• Data Flow: Requests pass securely from the client to our Cloudflare Workers, which route the rendering job to AWS Lambda. Once rendered, the Cloudflare Worker directly uploads the generated PDF to your custom, self-managed storage bucket or database.
• Retention & Deletion: We only store basic execution metadata in our database. We do not delete files from your custom storage; you must configure your own lifecycle policies. Metadata on our end is deleted based on your selected retention period (24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days).

Manual Deletion & Backups: You can manually delete single generated PDFs via our API, or delete multiple PDFs directly from the outputs page on your dashboard. Upon manual deletion, the data is wiped from active systems promptly. Please note that we do not perform immediate bulk deletions of generated PDFs (e.g., when deleting an entire project or closing an account); instead, these remaining files will naturally expire and be permanently purged in alignment with your selected project retention lifecycle (24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days). Any residual data retained in secure system backups will also expire on this schedule.

5. Cookies & Tracking (Privacy-First Approach)

We believe in a privacy-first approach and strict data minimization.

• Public Website (forkpdf.com): We do not use cookies, local storage, or third-party marketing trackers. To understand general traffic trends and optimize our documentation, we operate our own first-party analytics system hosted at turnrate.forkpdf.com. This system calculates non-reversible, daily-expiring hashes at the edge to aggregate basic metrics (such as page views, referral sources, general country location, and device types). Raw IP addresses and user-agent strings are dropped immediately from memory and are never stored in our database.
• Dashboard (dashboard.forkpdf.com): We only utilize "strictly necessary" cookies required to keep you authenticated and maintain your session securely. Because these are purely functional and do not track behavior across sites, they do not require a consent banner under global privacy laws.

6. Payment Processing (Paddle Merchant of Record)

All subscription and payment transactions are handled securely by Paddle.com Market Ltd (or its affiliates), acting as our official Merchant of Record (MoR).

Paddle acts as the direct reseller of our software licenses. They collect your financial information to complete transactions and handle tax liabilities. Your payment data is subject to Paddle’s Privacy Policy.

7. Sub-Processors & International Transfers

To provide a globally reliable service, we utilize the following infrastructure partners:

• Cloudflare: Edge routing and API gateway.
• Amazon Web Services (AWS): Regional document rendering instances (Lambda) and Managed S3 storage.
• Neon: Primary PostgreSQL relational database hosting.
• Upstash: Redis layer for fast caching and session handling.

Data Residency & Edge Processing: The rendering and at-rest storage of your PDFs are strictly isolated to the geographical region you select when creating a project. However, because our API Gateway utilizes Cloudflare's global edge computing network, your API requests (including HTML payloads and generated PDFs) are initially received and routed through edge locations closest to the request origin before being securely transmitted to your selected region. Where this global transit involves international data transfers, it is safeguarded by recognized legal mechanisms such as Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs).

8. Data Security Measures

We implement strict technical and organizational safeguards to protect your data:

• Encryption at Rest & In Transit: All data moving between our services utilizes forced SSL/TLS protocols. Databases and managed S3 buckets utilize standard AES-256 encryption at rest.
• Isolated Processing & Ephemeral Environments: Document rendering occurs in isolated, stateless execution environments. Residual temporary data is programmatically purged between execution runs to prevent cross-request leakage.
• Zero-Trust Credential Scoping: To maintain a strict zero-trust architecture, rendering instances (AWS Lambda) are never granted long-lived AWS credentials or direct database access. Instead, Cloudflare Workers handle request authentication and issue short-lived, scope-limited pre-signed URLs directly to execution environments solely for the required storage operations.
• Access Controls: Infrastructure access operates on a principle of least privilege utilizing role-based access control (RBAC). Passwords are cryptographically hashed using modern algorithms prior to storage.

9. Data Minimization & Account Inactivity

To optimize server resources and maintain security, accounts that have been completely inactive for a continuous period of 6 months will be automatically deleted. This includes the permanent removal of all saved user metadata, configurations, and templates.

10. Age Restrictions

Our platform is built strictly for developers and businesses who are at least 18 years of age. We do not knowingly collect personal information from individuals under 18. Underage accounts will be deleted immediately upon discovery.

11. Your Data Rights & Control

We believe in user control. Regardless of your jurisdiction, you possess specific rights regarding your personal data on our platform:

• Access & Portability: Request a copy of the personal data we hold about you in a structured, machine-readable format.
• Correction: Request updates to inaccurate account information.
• Erasure: Request the deletion of your account and linked configurations ("Right to be Forgotten").
• Restriction & Objection: Request that we limit the processing of your data, or object to processing based on legitimate interests.
• Withdraw Consent: Withdraw consent at any time for non-essential processing (like marketing emails).
• Lodge a Complaint: You have the right to file a complaint with your local data protection supervisory authority.

To exercise any of these rights, email support@forkpdf.com. We process all legitimate requests within 30 days.

12. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy to reflect technical or regulatory changes. For material modifications, we will notify registered users directly via the email address tied to their account. We encourage you to review this policy periodically.