Privacy policy
Last updated 18 September 2026
Preserve Chat exists to let you show someone part of a conversation. That means you hand us something private, so this page sets out plainly what happens to it. If anything here is unclear, ask before you upload.
What this policy covers
Preserve Chat is operated by DC Software. This policy covers preserve.chat, the marketing site you are reading now, and app.preserve.chat, where you open a chat export and create a shared link. It does not cover WhatsApp itself, or any other site a shared link is later pasted into.
It sits alongside two shorter pages written in plainer language: a walkthrough of what happens to a chat file at each step, and instructions for deleting a link you have already shared. Those pages describe the same behaviour as this one.
Your chat export file
When you open a WhatsApp export in Preserve, the TXT or ZIP file is read in your browser. The file itself is not uploaded to us, and the messages you scroll through, search, and discard never leave your device.
That changes at one point, and only at one point: when you choose a first and last message and create a shared link. The messages inside the range you selected are sent to our servers so that the person holding the link can load the page. Messages outside that range are not sent.
So the practical rule is that we hold what you decided to publish, and nothing else from the file.
What is stored when you share
A WhatsApp conversation almost always contains other people’s words, and sometimes their phone numbers, addresses, or photographs. When you publish a range, you are publishing their information as well as your own. Review the selection before you share it.
- The messages in the range you selected, including sender names, timestamps, and message text as they appear in your export.
- The settings attached to that link, such as its title and whether it is still active.
- A master link for that shared chat, which is what lets you manage or delete it later. There is no account behind it, so we hold no name, email address, or password for you.
- Ordinary server records created when a page is requested, such as IP address, browser user agent, and time of request. These are used to operate and secure the service.
Who can open a shared link
A shared chat link is private. The address is long and unguessable, the page is not listed anywhere public, and search engines are told not to index it. Nobody arrives at one by browsing or searching.
What a link cannot do is stop being forwarded. Anyone holding the URL can open the page, so treat it the way you would treat a photograph of the conversation: send it to the people you mean to read it, and revoke it once it has done its job.
How shared chats are secured
Shared conversations are encrypted in transit over HTTPS and encrypted at rest in our storage. Access to the systems that hold them is restricted to the people who need it to operate the service.
We hold the encryption keys, and that is the part worth stating rather than glossing over. It means we are technically able to decrypt a shared chat, and we would have to in order to answer a lawful order or investigate a report of abuse. Preserve is not end-to-end encrypted, and a service holding its own keys while telling you it cannot read your data is claiming more than encryption at rest delivers.
What we do with that ability is nothing, as a matter of course. We do not read shared conversations, we do not use them to train machine learning models, and we do not sell them or use them for advertising.
How long it is kept
A shared chat stays available until you delete it. There is no automatic expiry, because a link you gave someone a month ago breaking without warning is its own kind of failure.
When you delete a shared chat, the link stops working and the stored messages are removed from the live service. Copies can persist for a short period in routine encrypted backups before those backups age out. We do not restore deleted chats from backups, and we do not use them to bring a link back.
Deleting a shared chat does not reach copies that already exist elsewhere: screenshots, a page someone saved, or a browser cache on a device you do not control.
Measurement on this site
This marketing site uses Google Analytics and Umami to count visits and understand which pages people find useful. These measure the marketing pages, not the contents of your chats. It also loads fonts from Google Fonts, which means your browser makes a request to Google when a page loads.
We do not sell your data and we do not use your conversations to target advertising.
Your choices and your rights
You can delete any chat you have shared, at any time, using its master link or the browser you shared from. Because there is no account, that is also the whole of what we hold that belongs to you: there is no profile to export, correct, or close.
If you have lost both the master link and the browser, write to team@preserve.chat with the public link and we will remove it. Depending on where you live, you may also have the right to complain to a data protection authority.
Age
Preserve Chat is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly create accounts for them. If you believe a child has shared a conversation through the service, write to us and we will remove it.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes in a way that affects what happens to your data, the date at the top of the page changes with it. Continuing to use the service after that means the updated policy applies to you.
Questions about any of this go to team@preserve.chat.