Privacy Policy
Last updated: August 7, 2026
The short version. Your photos are cut into tiles by your own browser and are never uploaded to us or anyone else — that is the part that matters and it has no exceptions. There is no account and nothing to pay for. The site does use Google Analytics to count visits, which sets two cookies; that is the only tracking here, and you can opt out of it.
This policy explains what happens to information when you use freeinstagramgridmaker.com (“the site”, “we”, “us”). It is written to be read rather than skimmed past, and it is short because there genuinely isn't much to describe.
Who this applies to
This policy covers the website at freeinstagramgridmaker.com and the grid-splitting tool hosted on it. It does not cover Instagram, Meta, or any other site you may reach from a link here — those services have their own policies and we have no control over them.
By using the site you accept the practices described below. If you do not agree with them, please stop using the site.
Your photos
Your images are never uploaded. When you choose a photo, your browser reads the file directly from your device and cuts it into tiles using the HTML Canvas API. All of that computation happens inside the page, on your own hardware.
Concretely, this means:
- No copy of your photo is transmitted to us, and we operate no server that could receive one.
- Nothing is written to a database, an object store, or a temporary upload directory.
- The tiles exist only in your browser's memory until you download them or close the tab.
- We cannot see your images, recover them, or share them, because we never have them.
- Because no network is involved in the processing, the tool keeps working with your device offline once the page has loaded.
This is a structural property of how the tool is built, not a promise about how we behave. There is no code path that could send your photo anywhere.
How to verify this yourself
You do not have to take our word for it. Open your browser's developer tools (F12, or Cmd + Option + I on a Mac), switch to the Network tab, then split an image. Splitting and downloading produce no network requests at all — no upload, no background POST, nothing. You can also disconnect from the internet entirely after the page loads and split images normally.
You will see Google Analytics requests shortly after the page first loads, before you touch anything. Those are the page-view measurement described under Analytics; they fire once on load and carry no information about your image.
What we do not collect
To be explicit, the site does not ask for, receive or store any of the following:
- Names, email addresses, phone numbers or postal addresses
- Passwords or account credentials — there are no accounts
- Payment details — the tool is free and there is nothing to buy
- Your photos, or any metadata extracted from them
- Contact lists or precise location
- Advertising identifiers or cross-site tracking data
The one exception to “we collect nothing” is the aggregate page-view measurement described under Analytics, which involves a cookie and a coarse, city-level location estimate. It never involves your images.
Server logs
The site is delivered as static files by a third-party hosting provider. Like essentially every web server, that provider may automatically record technical details of each request: IP address, user-agent string, requested URL, referring page, timestamp and response status.
These logs exist for security, abuse prevention and diagnosing outages. We do not use them to build profiles of individuals, we do not combine them with any other data, and we do not sell or share them. Log retention is governed by the hosting provider's own policy and is typically measured in days or weeks.
Cookies and local storage
The site sets two first-party analytics cookies, both placed by Google Analytics:
| Cookie | Purpose | Expires |
|---|---|---|
_ga | Distinguishes one browser from another so repeat visits are not counted twice | 2 years |
_ga_V6C3HTLQE0 | Maintains the analytics session state for this property | 2 years |
There are no advertising cookies, no session or login cookies, and no cookies from any
other company. Google Analytics also writes a small amount of data to
localStorage and an installation identifier used by the Firebase SDK; nothing
else on the site reads or writes browser storage to identify you.
Your browser may additionally cache the page's static files (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, icons) as it would for any website. That cache lives on your device, is not readable by us, and can be cleared at any time from your browser settings — as can the cookies above.
Analytics
The site uses Google Analytics 4, loaded through Firebase, to understand how many people use the tool and which pages they arrive on. This is the only tracking technology on the site. There is no Meta Pixel, no advertising tag and no third-party tag manager beyond the one Google Analytics uses for itself.
Google Analytics receives, on each page view:
- The page you viewed and the page that referred you
- Approximate location derived from your IP address (city level at most; Google discards the full IP and does not log it)
- Device type, screen size, browser and operating system
- A randomly generated identifier stored in the cookies described above
What it never receives is your images. Analytics runs in a completely separate code path from the splitting tool. No image, no filename, no dimension and no derived data from a photo is sent anywhere, ever. Adding analytics changed how we count visits; it did not change the guarantee in Your photos.
We have configured the property to deny Google's advertising storage, advertising user data and ad-personalisation consent signals. That means the data is used to produce aggregate usage reports for us and is not used to build advertising audiences.
Google acts as our data processor for this, under its own privacy terms.
How to opt out
- Turn on “Do Not Track” or Global Privacy Control in your browser. We check both before analytics loads at all, and skip it entirely if either is set — no script, no cookie, no request.
- Install Google's opt-out browser add-on.
- Block cookies for this site, or use any content blocker. The grid tool works exactly the same either way — it does not depend on analytics in any respect.
Third parties and subprocessors
No advertising networks, social media widgets, embedded videos, third-party fonts, comment systems or chat widgets are loaded on this site. Two companies process data about your visit, and only these two:
| Processor | Purpose | What it receives |
|---|---|---|
| Our static hosting / CDN provider | Serving the page to your browser | IP address and request metadata, as under Server logs |
| Google (Analytics / Firebase) | Aggregate usage measurement | The page-view data listed under Analytics |
Neither receives your images. No other company receives anything about your visit.
Advertising
The site currently shows no advertising and participates in no ad network. Should that ever change, this policy will be updated first and will name the network involved.
Children's privacy
The site is a general-audience utility and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, children included — there is no mechanism on the site through which a user of any age could submit personal information to us.
International transfers
Because your photos never leave your device, no image data crosses any border — that is true regardless of where you are.
The static files that make up the site are served from a content-delivery network with servers in multiple countries, so the request you make to load the page may be answered by a server outside your own. Analytics data is processed by Google, which operates globally and may process and store it in the United States and other countries; Google relies on the European Commission's standard contractual clauses and the EU–US Data Privacy Framework for those transfers. Neither transfer involves your images.
Your rights
Depending on where you live, data-protection law such as the EU/UK GDPR, the California Consumer Privacy Act, or similar legislation may give you rights over personal data an organisation holds about you. These typically include the right to access it, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to its processing, receive a portable copy, and complain to a supervisory authority.
In practice the only personal data connected to you is the pseudonymous analytics record described above. We have no account records, no email list, and no image files — so an access or deletion request usually has very little to act on. Because the analytics identifier is a random cookie value rather than anything tied to your identity, we normally cannot link a request to a specific record; the fastest way to erase it is to clear this site's cookies in your browser, which orphans the identifier immediately.
You can also stop the collection entirely at any time — see How to opt out. If you would like us to investigate anything further, write to the address below.
We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined under California law, and we never have.
Legal basis for processing
Where the GDPR applies, we rely on our legitimate interest in keeping the site available, secure and useful — for the technical logging under Server logs and for the aggregate usage measurement under Analytics. The measurement is limited to what we need to know whether the tool is working for people, and is not used for advertising or profiling.
Analytics cookies are, in several jurisdictions, cookies for which prior consent is normally required. We do not currently show a consent banner. If you would rather not be counted, the browser signals under Do Not Track are honoured as a hard opt-out, and the other routes under How to opt out work too.
Data retention
We hold no user data of our own — no accounts, no images, no contact details. Your photos and the tiles cut from them exist only in your browser's memory and are gone the moment you close the tab.
Analytics records are retained by Google under the property's retention setting, after which event-level data is deleted and only aggregate reporting remains. Hosting-provider request logs are retained by that provider under its own schedule, generally a short period for operational and security purposes.
Security
The site is served exclusively over HTTPS, so the connection between your browser and the server is encrypted. Since your images are processed locally, the most common risk to user-uploaded files — a breach of the server holding them — does not apply here, because no such server exists.
No system can be guaranteed perfectly secure, but the smallest attack surface is the one with no user data on it.
Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control
Some browsers send a “Do Not Track” header or a Global Privacy Control signal. We honour both. Before analytics loads, the page checks for either signal; if one is present, the Google Analytics code is never downloaded, no cookie is set and no request is made. Many sites treat DNT as advisory — here it is a hard switch.
This is checked in the browser, so you can confirm it yourself: enable the signal, reload, and watch the Network tab stay free of any Google request.
Links to other sites
This site links to external sites — Instagram, for example — where that is useful. Once you follow such a link you are subject to that site's privacy policy, not ours. We are not responsible for the content or data practices of any external site.
Changes to this policy
We may update this policy to reflect changes in how the site works or in applicable law. The “last updated” date at the top of this page always reflects the current version. For material changes — introducing analytics or advertising, for instance — we will update this page before the change takes effect, not afterwards.
Contact
Questions, concerns or data-protection requests can be sent to hello@freeinstagramgridmaker.com. We aim to respond within 30 days.
This policy describes our actual practices in plain language. It is not legal advice, and if you need a formal assessment of your own obligations you should consult a qualified adviser.