Privacy at brighten.video
In brief
Dark footage is often personal: a party, a night out, the inside of someone’s home. So brighten.video is built so that we never see it. Your browser opens the file, brightens each frame and writes the new video back to your device. We count visits to the site with the analytics tools described below, and you can switch the cookie-based one off whenever you like.
What happens to your video
The file is read from your device and decoded by your browser. Grading happens on your device’s graphics chip, or on its processor when that isn’t available, and the finished file is saved locally or handed to your phone’s share sheet. When you press Auto brighten or a quick fix, the tool looks at a few small frames to measure how dark the clip is; that measurement is made and kept on your device too. No frames, sound, file names or metadata are sent to brighten.video or to anyone else.
What your browser keeps
- Work in progress. Whatever you have open, the settings you chose and your latest export are saved in this site’s IndexedDB storage, so a refresh or a crashed tab doesn’t lose them. Pieces of an export that is still rendering are removed when it completes; stray pieces are deleted on a later visit once they are a week old.
- Recent videos. Up to 24 of your latest exports stay on the Recent videos shelf until you remove them or newer ones take their place.
- Small preferences in local storage: light or dark theme
(
vt-theme) and your analytics choice (vt-consent).
Clearing this site’s data in your browser settings removes all of it at once.
Downloads from elsewhere
If your browser can’t decode a file’s format, the tool downloads the open-source ffmpeg.wasm converter from the unpkg.com content network and converts the video on your device. That download reveals your IP address to unpkg.com, as any web request does. The video itself is never part of the request.
Hosting and security
The site is delivered by Cloudflare. To serve pages and keep out abusive traffic, Cloudflare’s servers process standard request information such as your IP address, your browser’s user agent and the address you asked for. We rely on legitimate interests (UK GDPR and GDPR Article 6(1)(f)) for this, because without it the site cannot run safely. Cloudflare describes its handling in its privacy policy.
How visits are measured
Cloudflare Web Analytics and Ahrefs Web Analytics give us traffic totals (page views, referring sites, rough country and device type) without setting cookies.
Google Analytics 4 tells us which parts of the tool and which guides are actually used, so we know what to improve. It records page views and events such as a video being opened, Auto brighten or a quick fix being pressed, a slider being moved or an export finishing, together with rough figures such as the clip’s length and a file-size band. These are linked by a random identifier in a first-party cookie. Google Analytics never receives your video, any picture or sound from it, its name, or any measurement of how bright it is. Advertising features and Google signals are switched off, and the data is kept for 14 months. Google may process it in the United States under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework; see Google’s privacy policy and how Google uses information from sites that use its services.
Our legal basis is legitimate interests in understanding and improving the site (Article 6(1)(f)). The cookie relies on the statistical-purposes exception in the UK’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, as amended by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, which allows analytics cookies used only to improve a service provided you are told about them and can object. For visitors in the European Economic Area and Switzerland, Google Analytics starts with analytics storage turned off, so no analytics cookie is set there.
Cookies, and turning analytics off
There are no advertising cookies. The only cookies are Google Analytics’ _ga
and _ga_*, which last up to two years. A notice mentions them on your first
visit, with a single OK button that just closes it. To object, choose
Cookie settings at the bottom of any page and then
Turn off analytics. Your browser remembers that choice and analytics stay
off on every later visit; Turn analytics on reverses it. A
Global Privacy Control signal from your
browser counts as an objection too. We do not sell personal data.
Who runs the site
brighten.video is an independent, self-funded project. It has no sign-up and no user accounts, and because your footage never reaches us there is no file or profile of yours held on our side.
Your rights
Data protection law lets you ask to access, correct or delete personal data, restrict or object to its use, receive it in a portable form, and complain to a regulator, which in the UK is the Information Commissioner’s Office. In practice, everything the tool stores lives in your own browser, where clearing the site’s data deletes it; analytics can be refused with Cookie settings at any time, and Google offers further controls through its own privacy policy.
Changes
When the way brighten.video handles data changes, this page is updated in the same release and the date at the top moves.