Your last photo probably knows where you live
Check before you share.
Photos carry the coordinates where they were taken. Word files carry the name of whoever wrote them and the text they deleted. IncognitoShare finds all of it — plus faces, license plates, card numbers and API keys in the picture itself — before you post it, email it, or paste it into ChatGPT. Nothing is uploaded; the check runs in your browser.
- Files never leave your device
- 27 checks, all on
- No account needed
Drag the handle — the right-hand side is what leaves your device.
The problem
What your files reveal
None of this is visible when you look at the file. All of it travels with it.
Where the photo was taken
Phones write GPS coordinates into every picture. Posted publicly, they point at your home, your workplace or your child’s school.
What is in the background
House numbers, street signs, a school uniform, a reflection in a window. Details nobody notices while taking the photo.
Documents and screenshots
Passports, driver's licenses, boarding passes and card numbers, photographed to send to someone and then forgotten about.
Hidden data in office files
Author names, review comments, text someone deleted but the file still remembers, and worksheets hidden from view.
Pasting a screenshot into ChatGPT?
Files you upload to an AI chatbot may be stored on its servers, and on many plans they can be reviewed by people to improve the service. A screenshot of an invoice or a contract carries far more than the part you wanted help with.
Run it through IncognitoShare first. You will see what is in it, and can send a cleaned copy instead.
Why it matters
Three places a file goes, and what goes with it
The gap between what you think you are sharing and what actually leaves your device.
Posting to social media
You think you are sharing: You are sharing a picture of your dog in the garden.
What actually goes: The file also carries the GPS coordinates the camera recorded, to within a few meters — your garden. Plus the faces of anyone in shot, the house number behind them, and the plate on the car in the drive.
Some platforms strip location on upload. Some do not, and none of them strip the things that are visible in the picture itself.
Uploading to ChatGPT, Claude or another AI tool
You think you are sharing: You are asking a chatbot to read a screenshot or a document for you.
What actually goes: Whatever is in the frame goes with it — a colleague’s email address, a customer list, an API key in a terminal window, the patient name at the top of a form.
Once it has been sent it has been sent. Check what is in the picture before it leaves, not after.
Forwarding a Word document
You think you are sharing: You are passing on a document somebody sent you.
What actually goes: Word files keep tracked changes, review comments, the author’s name, and text that was deleted before it reached you. A black rectangle drawn over a paragraph usually leaves the paragraph underneath it, selectable.
This is the most common accidental leak in documents sent outside an organisation, and the sender almost never knows it happened.
How it works
Three steps, about ten seconds
- 1
Drop your file
Or pick one. It is read in your browser and goes no further.
- 2
See what is risky, and why
Every finding comes with a plain sentence about what it could be used for.
- 3
Download a cleaned copy
Hidden data stripped out, faces covered if you want. Photos keep their quality.
What we detect
In plain language
Every check is a real test — a checksum, a format rule — not a guess. Where something is a heuristic, we say so.
Checked by maths — these are not guesses
Each of these has a checksum or a format rule built into the standard, so a match can be verified rather than estimated. A false positive here is close to impossible.
- Credit and debit cards
- IBANs
- Passport MRZ
- US Social Security numbers
Matched by pattern
Strong, well-defined shapes. These are reliable in practice, and each one is validated beyond "it looks about right".
- Email addresses
- Phone numbers
- API keys and secret tokens
- IP addresses
- Boarding passes
Judgement calls — we tell you when it is one
Things with no checksum to lean on. We show you the box and let you decide, rather than quietly deciding for you.
- License plates
- Street addresses
- Dates of birth
- Faces
- Signature blocks
- Personal names
Inside Word documents
A different pass entirely. None of this is visible when you open the file, and all of it travels with it.
- Tracked changes
- Review comments
- Hidden content
- Embedded files
- Fake redactions
- Author names
And what we don’t catch
- Text recognition is English only. Text in other scripts is not read, so nothing is found in it. If your document is in another language, treat the result as "we checked the hidden fields" and read the picture yourself.
- License plates need a visible vehicle. No car in the picture means no plate search. That is deliberate: it is what stops us drawing a black box over plate-shaped graffiti on a wall and calling it somebody’s registration.
- Very small pictures skip the models. Below 64 pixels there is no readable text and no recognisable face, so we do not download twenty megabytes of model to prove it. The hidden-field check still runs — a thumbnail can still carry GPS.
- Hidden worksheets are reported, never deleted. Removing one can turn a working spreadsheet into a page of #REF! errors. We tell you it is there and leave the decision to you.
What it protects
What this actually protects
Protect your home and family
A holiday photo can say where you live and that you are not there. Strip the location before it goes online.
Avoid identity theft
A card number, a date of birth and an address are most of what someone needs to impersonate you. We find them before you send them.
Keep work out of AI tools
Client names, salary columns and internal comments travel inside files. Check before a document goes into a chatbot.
Your files are checked on your device and never uploaded to our servers.
When a check finishes we send ourselves one anonymous line: the kind of file, which categories of thing were found, and the risk level. No filename, no content, no previews, no cookie — nothing that could be tied back to you or to your file.
Read the privacy pageComing soon
On your phone and in your browser
The mobile app checks a photo before you post it. The browser extension warns you before you attach a file to an email or drop one into a chatbot. Both work the same way as this site: on your device.
FAQ
Questions worth asking
Checking and cleaning files on this site is free, with no account. There is a paid API for teams who want to do it from their own software.
No. The checking runs inside your browser, in a background thread, using code that cannot make network requests — a rule we enforce with automated tests. There is no server of ours that accepts files. Close the tab and your file is gone; we never had it.
Today: images and word documents. PDFs and spreadsheets are next — the engine already reads them and is tested against them, they are simply not switched on in this release.
No, and we will not pretend otherwise. No checker can. That is why, when nothing matches, the result says "no issues found" rather than "safe": it means our checks did not match anything, which is not the same as there being nothing there. You know your situation; we only know the bytes.
Turning off location in the camera helps, and it is worth doing. It does nothing about the faces in the shot, the house number behind you, the card on the table, or the author name inside a Word file you were sent and are forwarding on.
No. Metadata is stripped at the byte level, so the image data is copied through untouched and loses no quality. Covering a face does have to redraw the picture — and so does the mark free downloads carry; signing in removes it.
A browser extension and mobile apps are being built. The extension will warn you before you attach a file to an email or drop one into a chatbot. Both will work the same way as this site: on your device.