This policy explains what Upload Pulse does with information when you use this website, available at Upload Pulse. It is written to describe what the site actually does, rather than to cover every possibility — where we do not collect something, we say so plainly.
The short version
- There are no accounts. You never sign in, and we never ask for your Google or YouTube credentials.
- We do not ask for your name, email address or phone number to use any tool.
- We set no cookies of our own and use no analytics software.
- Advertising is the only third party that may track you here, and only once ads are enabled on the site.
- Your IP address is used for one thing: stopping abuse of our request limits.
What you send us
When you paste a link or an ID into a tool and submit it, that text is sent to our server, which extracts the YouTube video or channel identifier from it and asks the YouTube Data API for that item's public information. The result is shown to you. We do not write what you looked up into any log, and we do not connect it to you.
Two tools never send anything at all. The Thumbnail Downloader and the Hashtag Generator run entirely in your browser: the thumbnail images come straight from YouTube's own image servers to you, and the hashtag sets are built from a list that ships with the page. Nothing you type into either one reaches us.
Separately, if you email us, we keep your message and the address it came from for as long as we need it to answer you. That is the one place on this site where something you have written is kept indefinitely, and you can ask us to delete it at any time.
What is collected automatically
When your browser makes a request to a tool, we read the IP address attached to it and use it to count how many requests have come from you in the last minute. This is a rate limit — it is what keeps one visitor, or a script, from exhausting the daily quota that makes the tools free for everyone else. The count is stored by our caching provider against that address and expires on its own.
Our hosting provider also keeps standard server logs, as any web host does, for security and reliability. We do not build profiles from them and we do not use them to identify individual visitors.
Cookies and similar technologies
This site sets no cookies of its own. It stores nothing in your browser's local or session storage, and it has no tracking pixels or web beacons of its own. If you block cookies entirely, every tool on this site still works.
Cookies may be set by Google once advertising is active, as described in the next section. Those are set by Google, not by us, and we cannot read them.
Advertising
Upload Pulse is free because it is funded by advertising rather than subscriptions. We use Google AdSense to serve those ads.
Google and its partners use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this website or other websites. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to this site and/or other sites on the internet. Third-party vendors, including Google, may show our ads on sites across the internet and may use cookies such as the DoubleClick cookie for this purpose.
You can turn personalised advertising off in Google Ads Settings — ads will still appear, but they will no longer be based on your interests. Google also explains how it uses information from sites that use its services.
We do not receive any personal information from Google about who saw or clicked an ad, only aggregate performance figures.
Use of the YouTube API Services
This site uses the YouTube API Services to read publicly available information about videos and channels. By using any tool here you also agree to be bound by the YouTube Terms of Service, and Google's Privacy Policy applies to the data Google processes on its side.
We only ever read data that YouTube already makes public. We do not use OAuth, we never ask you to authorise access to your account, and we therefore have no ability to read private videos, analytics, messages or anything else that requires you to be signed in. Because we never hold such an authorisation, there is nothing here for you to revoke — but you can review and remove any third party's access to your Google account at any time at Google's security settings.
What we cache, and for how long
To stay inside YouTube's API quota and keep the tools fast and free, the public data returned for a given video or channel is cached on our servers and reused for the next visitor who looks up the same thing. A cache entry is keyed on the public video or channel identifier — never on you, your address or your session.
Cached entries expire automatically, and nothing is kept for more than 48 hours. We do not keep a history of lookups, and there is no record connecting any lookup to any visitor.
Who processes data on our behalf
We rely on a hosting provider to serve the website, a caching provider for the temporary cache and the request counter described above, and Google, which supplies the YouTube Data API the tools read from and serves the advertising. These providers operate internationally, so the limited information described in this policy may be processed in a country other than your own, including the United States. We do not sell, rent or trade information about you to anyone.
Why we are allowed to do this
If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area, our legal bases under the GDPR are: legitimate interests for delivering the tool you asked for, for keeping the service available, and for the rate limiting that protects it from abuse; and consent for personalised advertising, which you give or withhold through the controls linked in the Advertising section above.
Your rights
Start from what actually exists, because it is very little: there are no accounts, so nothing here identifies you. The only two things we handle at all are a short-lived request count against your IP address and, if you have written to us, your email. We do not sell personal information. Serving personalised ads may count as "sharing" for advertising purposes under California law, and you can stop that using the Google controls above.
Over whatever we do hold, you keep the rights the law gives you — depending on where you live, to ask for access to it, to have it corrected or deleted, to restrict or object to how it is used, to receive a copy, and to withdraw consent. In California that includes the right to know what is collected, to ask for deletion, and to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information. Email us at hello@uploadpulse.com and we will act on it. You may also complain to your local data protection authority.
Children
This site is meant for creators, marketers and researchers, and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13, or under 16 in the European Economic Area — and because the tools ask for nothing but a public YouTube link, there is no field anywhere on this site in which a child could identify themselves. If a child has emailed us, tell us and we will delete the message.
Security
The site is served over HTTPS, so traffic between your browser and our servers is encrypted in transit. Because there are no accounts, we hold no passwords, and because nothing on this site is paid for, we never see payment details. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, but there is very little here to lose.
Do Not Track
We do not track you across websites, so there is nothing for a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal to switch off on our side. How Google responds to those signals for advertising is governed by Google's own policies, linked above.
Links to other sites
Tool results link out to YouTube and to whatever addresses creators put in their own descriptions. We do not control those destinations and are not responsible for their privacy practices.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes, the new version will be posted here with a new date at the top. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the updated policy.
Contact
Questions about this policy, a privacy request, or a request to clear cached data about content you own can be sent to hello@uploadpulse.com, or through our contact page.