Audit
What this tool sends, and what it does not
RedactMy.pics claims that your image never leaves your device. That is a testable claim, so this page publishes the test. Every number below comes from searching the shipped source, not from a marketing review.
The honest limit of this audit: it was performed by reading the code in this repository, not by a third party. You do not have to take it on trust — the source is public, and the browser DevTools network panel will show you the same thing in about thirty seconds.
The network surface is empty
The application source was searched for every browser API capable of transmitting data. The counts below are occurrences in the shipped code, not in tests or configuration.
| API searched | Occurrences |
|---|---|
| fetch( | 0 |
| XMLHttpRequest | 0 |
| sendBeacon | 0 |
| WebSocket | 0 |
| EventSource | 0 |
| <form | 0 |
| localStorage | 0 |
| sessionStorage | 0 |
| indexedDB | 0 |
| route.ts (API route) | 0 |
| middleware.ts | 0 |
| "use server" (server action) | 0 |
There is no server component at all. The site is statically rendered — there is no API route, no server action, and no middleware. A request that would upload an image has nothing to reach.
No analytics, no advertising, no tracking
Each of the following was searched for in the source and in the rendered page. None is present:
- Google Analytics / gtag
- Google Tag Manager
- Meta Pixel
- Mixpanel
- Segment
- PostHog
- Hotjar
- Microsoft Clarity
- Plausible
- Umami
- Matomo
- Sentry
- Datadog
- FullStory
- Amplitude
This is also why the site has no way to report its own traffic. It is a deliberate trade: no measurement script means nothing to measure users with, and no cookie banner to dismiss.
The one outbound request, and why it is not a leak
Auto-detect needs a text recognition engine. That engine is a WebAssembly build of an open-source OCR library, and on first use the browser downloads three static files for it — the worker script, the WebAssembly core, and the English language data.
Those downloads are the only outbound requests the page makes, and they carry no image data. The library does contain a code path that can fetch an image by URL, and it is worth naming rather than hiding: that branch only executes when the input is a string URL. This tool always passes an in-memory canvas element, so the branch is unreachable here.
It follows that this site should never be described as making zero network requests. The accurate claim is the one made everywhere else on this site: no request carries your image.
What redaction actually writes
The default fill is opaque black, painted with a plain rectangle fill operation. There is no global alpha and no compositing mode anywhere in the source, so the fill is fully opaque and replaces the pixel values underneath rather than blending over them.
The pixelate option paints an opaque black base first and then a downsampled mosaic on top, so nothing shows through. It is still built from original pixels at reduced resolution, which makes it weaker than solid fill for short strings. The interface says so, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.
The export is drawn onto a fresh canvas at the original dimensions and encoded from that canvas. Metadata lives in the source file's container rather than in its pixels, so it is not carried across a rebuild. The original file is never copied or re-emitted.
What this audit does not cover
- — Automated detection accuracy. Detection is pattern matching over recognized text, and it misses things. The methodology page documents the rules and the known failure cases.
- — Third-party infrastructure. The site is hosted on a commercial platform, which records standard request logs for the page load. Those logs relate to the request, not to your image, because your image is never part of a request.
- — Browser bugs. This audit describes what the application code does, not what every browser version does with canvas encoding.
- — Independent verification. This is an author's audit. Open DevTools, load an image, and check the network panel yourself. That is a stronger signal than any page like this one.