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Privacy Policy

The cleaned file is the free file. No watermark, no trial length, no account: files up to 45 minutes. A pass adds loudness levelling and a heavier repair pass for rough recordings.

Last updated: 8 October 2026

The short version

You upload a voice recording, CleanGrab removes the background noise, you download the result. Your upload is deleted the moment processing finishes, and the cleaned file is deleted from the server within 45 minutes. We don't have accounts, we don't build advertising profiles, and we never listen to, share, sell or train anything on your audio. The one exception: if you choose to send us a file yourself, we keep it for at most 30 days and one person on our team listens to it. Even then it is never shared or used for training (see below).

What we process

• Your recording: held in memory and temporary storage only as long as needed to clean it. The upload is removed immediately after processing; the resulting cleaned file (MP3 and WAV) is wiped within 45 minutes.
• Basic technical data: IP address and standard request headers, used for rate-limiting (so one user can't monopolise our hardware), for security, and for daily usage counts. Those counts store a shortened, coded form of your IP address, not the address itself, and are deleted after 60 days. Not linked to your audio, not used for profiling.
• “Report a problem”: the feedback button can send a screenshot of the page along with your message. That box is ticked by default and you can untick it before sending. Screenshots are deleted after 30 days.
• If you tick “Also send my file and the result” in that window: the file you chose and the result of your job are stored for 30 days and used only to reproduce and fix the problem you reported. They are not shared, not included in our backups, and you can ask for earlier deletion at info@shinobitools.com. Basis: fixing the problem you reported (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR); the box is ticked by default and you can untick it.

To count returning visitors and understand how the tools are used over time, we set one first-party cookie with a random number. The number is not derived from your IP address or your device, and the cookie lasts 13 months. We store it only in a scrambled form that we cannot link back to the cookie without a secret kept on our own server. It is used for our own statistics only, never shared and never used for advertising or any other purpose. We do not set it if your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control. You can stop it at any time by clearing your cookies or with the opt-out button below. Data of individual visitors is deleted after 13 months; aggregated counts without any identifier are kept. Nothing changes in the short daily code made from your IP address that we use for our other usage counts: those counts are still deleted after 60 days.

Switch statistics off for this browser

To protect the service, if one address sends many rejected uploads in a short time (20 files over the size or format limit within an hour), we block uploads from that address for 24 hours. For this we keep a scrambled form of the address (a different code from the daily one, because the block must outlast the day) for at most 24 hours, and it is never used for anything else.

Files you choose to send us

Next to a result, you can click “Share these 2 files” to help us find mistakes our tests don’t catch. This is entirely optional and off by default.

• What we ask for: the one file you uploaded and the result we gave you, and nothing else: only the part we need: up to 30 seconds of audio, one page of a PDF, or an image with the location data (EXIF/GPS) removed.
• Faces: a separate checkbox, off by default, where you confirm the file shows faces and everyone in it agreed, with no children in it. Without it, faces are blurred or the file is refused.
• Why: to find mistakes our automatic tests don’t catch, and turn real ones into new test cases.
• Legal basis: your explicit consent (Art. 6(1)(a) and, for special-category data such as faces, Art. 9(2)(a) GDPR). For other people who may appear in your file, our legitimate interest with strict minimisation (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).
• How long: at most 30 days, then it is deleted automatically.
• Withdraw any time: you get a one-time code on screen. Enter it whenever you like and we delete the pair, its label and the consent record immediately: as easy as giving it.
• Who sees it: one person on our team, and nothing else. A local AI model only adds a label for the kind of mistake, never a description of a person, and it never leaves our own computer.
• What we never do: we never store your IP address, filename or email with it; never train or fine-tune any model on it; never share it with anyone else, publish it, or offer it through the API; and never use it to identify or score anyone.

Uploads and results are never included in our backups.

What we never do

• No accounts and no tracking of who uploaded what, apart from the random statistics number described above. We only have an email address if you chose to leave one for a discount code or pass codes. See Email list below.
• No sharing or selling of your recording, and no storing it longer than described above.
• No use of your files to train AI models: noise removal runs on our own hardware.

Email list

You can leave your email address to get a free Pro pass by email once a month; how long it runs changes from month to month. That is the only reason we ask for it. The tools work without it: nothing here needs an account, and nothing is hidden behind giving us your address.

We store the address, when you signed up, which site you signed up on, the IP address you used, and the exact sentence that was shown next to the box when you ticked it. That last part is the proof that you asked for this, which is what the law expects us to keep. There is no separate confirmation click. Every email has a one-click unsubscribe link that deletes the address, so if someone else entered yours, one click removes it. The 10% code sets one cookie (shinobi_korting) for 48 hours, only so the checkout knows the discount applies.

The emails themselves are delivered by Resend (Resend, Inc.), which sees the address in order to deliver the message and nothing else. We keep your address until you unsubscribe.

Every email has an unsubscribe link that works in one click, without logging in. Use it and your address comes off the list straight away, emails still waiting to go out are cancelled, and a one-way hash is kept so we can show that we honoured it. Copies of emails we already sent you, which include your address, are still kept in our sending log; ask us and we delete them. We never sell, rent or share the list, and we don't use it to follow you around the web.

Advertising

When ads are shown here, third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this website or other websites. Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads based on those visits. You can opt out of personalised advertising in Google’s Ads Settings, and opt out of some other vendors’ advertising cookies at www.aboutads.info.

CleanGrab is free and kept running by advertising (Google AdSense). Google and its partners may use cookies or similar technologies to show and measure ads; where required, consent is requested through Google's certified consent tools before any such cookies are set. See how Google uses information from partner sites. You can manage ad personalisation at adssettings.google.com.

Who we are, why we process data, and for how long

CleanGrab is run by ShinobiTools, registered with the KvK (Dutch Chamber of Commerce) under number 42147182. Contact: info@shinobitools.com.

• Cleaning your file as you asked, to provide the service you request (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR). Your upload is deleted right after processing; the cleaned file is deleted about 45 minutes after it is ready, with or without a pass. An upload you abandon halfway is deleted after an hour.
• Limits, security and usage counts, our legitimate interest in keeping the tool fair and safe (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). The daily counts are deleted after 60 days.
• Contact form, to answer your message (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). Messages are deleted after at most 180 days.
• “Report a problem”, with an optional screenshot (ticked by default, you can untick it): to see the problem you ran into (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). The screenshot is deleted after 30 days. To sort reports, the text of your message (never the screenshot) can be passed to an AI model, which may be Anthropic's Claude.
• Email list and discount code, your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR). Kept until you unsubscribe.
• Advertising cookies, your consent, asked through the cookie banner.
• Google Fonts, the typeface used on this site is loaded from Google's servers (fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com) as a page opens, so Google receives your IP address and browser details with that request. We use it to show the pages in the intended typeface. See Google's privacy policy.
• Microsoft Clarity, a script from clarity.ms that records how the pages are used, such as clicks and scrolling, so we can see where a page gets in the way. It is loaded only after you agree to it in the cookie banner. Where the cookie banner reports that consent is not required for your location, it is loaded without that step. See Microsoft's privacy statement.
• YouTube, the demo videos on some pages are played by YouTube (Google). Nothing is loaded from the YouTube player until you press play; then the video is loaded from youtube.com, which receives your IP address and may set its own cookies. On some video pages the preview picture is loaded from YouTube's image server (i.ytimg.com) when the page is shown. See Google's privacy policy.
• Cloudflare, the connection to this site runs through Cloudflare, which passes the traffic on to us and provides security. Cloudflare sees your IP address and the pages you request, and may set a cookie of its own, for example when it checks that a visitor is not a bot. See Cloudflare's privacy policy.
• Stripe, if you buy a pass, you pay on Stripe's own checkout page, not ours. Your card details go to Stripe under its privacy policy, and we never see them. We receive confirmation that the order was paid, its order number and the e-mail address you entered.

Where it runs: on computers we operate ourselves. Some heavy jobs, such as the deeper repair layer for pass holders, can run on another computer of our own instead of the web server. Your recording is never sent to an outside service.

Uploads and results are never included in our backups.

Your rights: you can ask to see, correct or delete your data, or object to how we use it, by writing to info@shinobitools.com. You can also complain to the Dutch Data Protection Authority, the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl), or to the supervisory authority in your own country.

Copyright & your responsibility

You may only upload audio you have the right to process. The cleaned file you download is for your own lawful use.

Contact

Questions about this policy: use the contact form or info@shinobitools.com.