Last updated 8 August 2026
| While you're uploading | The file travels over an encrypted connection (HTTPS). |
| While we're reading it | It is held in the server's memory only. It is never written to disk, never put in a database, and never sent to any other company or service. |
| When the page loads | The cleaned copy is embedded in the page that comes back to you, so the download comes from your own browser rather than from us. |
| Straight afterwards | The request ends and the memory holding your file is released. There is nothing left for us to delete, lose, or be asked to hand over. |
This is why uploads are capped at 10MB. A larger cap would mean storing files properly, which would change every answer on this page.
Being straight about this matters more than sounding clean, so here is the complete list.
| Server logs | Our hosting keeps ordinary web logs — the time, the page requested, an IP address and a browser version. Standard for any website, kept briefly, used to keep the site up. Your file's contents are never written to a log. |
| Error reports | If something breaks, we record what went wrong so we can fix it. These record the fault, never the data that was being processed. |
| Your address, for sixty seconds | There's a limit on how often one connection can ask us to read a file or send a message, so one busy script can't take the site down for everybody. Doing that means holding your IP address in memory for up to a minute, purely to count. It is never written to a log, never saved to disk, and it's gone when the minute passes or the machine stops — but it is something we hold, so it's on this list rather than left to be nearly true. |
| Counts of what gets used |
Which page was opened, whether a run worked or was refused, and —
if you arrived by a link someone posted — the website it came
from. No IP address, no browser, no file name, no column name and
nothing out of any cell. It is how we tell a channel that reached
people from one that didn't, and it is a count of events, not a
record of a person: nothing links one of these to another, or to
you.
These counts are also copied into a spreadsheet of our own, in our own Google Workspace, so we can see them over a month rather than losing them when a log ages out. It is the same counts and nothing added — a row says something like “six people opened Inspect between nine and ten”. It is the one thing on this list we keep for longer than a few days, which is why it is spelled out here rather than left inside the word “counts”. |
| Feedback you send | If you use the feedback box, your message is emailed to us and kept in that inbox. Your email address goes with it only if you type one in, and it is used to reply to you and nothing else. This is the one part of the site that keeps what you typed — please don't paste real customer data into it. |
| A file you attach to feedback | Only if you choose to attach one. It is emailed to us with your message and kept in that inbox, and it is used to reproduce the problem you described and nothing else. It is not used to train anything, and it never becomes one of our test files — those are all invented, deliberately. If the file has people in it, run it through De-identify first; we don't do that to it for you, because we can't promise a file is clean and wouldn't want you relying on us having done it. |
| Email you send us | If you email hello@dataninja.au we keep the email, like anyone would. Please don't attach a real spreadsheet — if we need to reproduce a problem, invented data is safer for both of us. |
| Reports we host for our own clients | Separately from this site, we host dashboards and reports for businesses at reports.dataninja.au. That does keep their spreadsheet — on our own server in Sydney — because the report is rebuilt from it each time they open it. It is behind a private link and a passphrase, it is never indexed, and it has nothing to do with a file you upload here. Nothing you do on this site creates one; signing up over there does, and what is kept, who else handles it and when it is deleted is set out in that service's own data processing agreement. |
| No accounts | There is nothing to sign up for, so there is no profile to build. |
| No tracking you across the web | No analytics service, no advertising pixels, no third-party scripts of any kind — nothing on this site talks to another company. We count our own pages, in our own logs, as described above; nobody else is watching you here and there is no profile of you to build. |
| No cookies | The site doesn't set any. |
| No selling or sharing | We have nothing to sell, and we wouldn't. |
| No AI training | Your spreadsheet is not used to train anything — not the one you upload, and not one you choose to attach to feedback. The cleaning is ordinary arithmetic, written down and checkable. |
DataNinja is hosted in Sydney, Australia. Your file is processed in Australia and does not leave the country. That was a deliberate choice, and a more expensive one than the alternatives.
We're a small Australian business. Businesses under the turnover threshold generally sit outside the Australian Privacy Principles, but we've built this as though they applied, because the reason to hold as little as possible isn't the law — it's that data you never collected can't leak. That threshold is under review nationally, and if it changes nothing here has to.
If we ever held your data and it were exposed, we'd tell you and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, promptly and in plain words. Today there is nothing to expose.
Email hello@dataninja.au and we'll answer. If we don't fix it to your satisfaction, you can raise it with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au.
Every chart in a report has a table beside it with the same figures, so nothing is available only as a picture. If any part of this is hard to use with a screen reader, keyboard or magnifier, tell us — that's a bug and we'll treat it as one.
This is a tool for working with business and household records. It isn't aimed at children and we don't knowingly collect anything from them.
The date at the top changes with it. If we ever start storing files — which we would only do to make something work that can't work otherwise — this page will say so plainly and before it happens, not afterwards.
Email hello@dataninja.au with anything at all, including a request to know what we hold about you. Given the above, the answer is usually "nothing", and we'll say so.