Check it yourself

You should not have to trust a privacy claim. You should be able to watch it. This page tells you how — including the parts that do not come out in our favour.

Video poster: The Cable — 60 seconds, one unbroken take
The Cable — 60 seconds, one unbroken take. We unplug the network cable and keep working. Watch this — you'll know we're on your side. Video ships shortly — the poster frame is the plan, not a placeholder for hype.

The bet

In local mode, with usage sharing off, nothing about your work leaves your machine. Not your PDFs, not your annotations, not your library structure, not your questions, not the answers. Pull the network cable and keep working — the feature set does not change.

That sentence is scoped on purpose. It is a claim about your work, and it is checked against build 0.9 beta with usage sharing off, which is how it ships by default.

How to check it in about ten minutes

  1. Install SCL. Point it at a folder of PDFs. Do not sign in yet.
  2. Start a packet capture — Wireshark, tcpdump, your firewall log, whatever you already trust.
  3. Work normally: index the folder, ask questions, follow cross-links.
  4. Read the capture. Then do the blunter version: unplug the cable and repeat step 3.

What you will see — including what we would rather you didn’t

  • No content leaving. That is the claim, and it is the part worth checking hardest.
  • A licence sign-in. SCL talks to our licence service so a paid feature knows it was paid for. It exists in every mode. It carries no document content — and unlike the rest of this page, that is a sentence you can verify in your own capture rather than take from us.
  • Update checks. A build that cannot tell you it is out of date is a security problem, not a privacy feature.
  • Nothing from the feedback form — unless you used it. If you send us a message, that message leaves, because you wrote it and pressed send. Say nothing and nothing is said on your behalf.

A policy is a promise. Architecture is a fact. A packet capture is neither — it is evidence.

What this does not prove

  • It proves this build, not all builds. A capture is evidence about the version in front of you. That is why we publish the SHA-256 of every release and why the version is named above.
  • Encrypted does not mean invisible. Traffic to our licence service is encrypted, so you can see that it happened and how big it was, not what was in it. If usage sharing ever ships, packet size could distinguish someone who opted in from someone who did not. We would rather write that sentence here than have you find it later.
  • Anonymised mode is a different question. There, something does leave by design — that is the whole point of it, and the honest accounting is on the privacy page.

If you find something we did not say

Publish it. You do not need our permission, and we would rather be corrected in public than trusted by default. If you want us to answer first, write to founder@shortcut-linking.com — a wrong claim on this page is a bug, and it gets fixed like one, with a dated note on the changelog.