Privacy
Your videos never leave your device. Snowcut has no server that could receive them, no account, and no advertising.
What runs where
| Step | Where it happens |
|---|---|
| Reading and playing your video | In your browser, from the file on your device. |
| Scoring sound and motion | In your browser. Plain maths on the sound and a small picture. |
| Telling a shout, a laugh or a cheer from noise | In your browser, with a sound model (YAMNet) that is downloaded once and then runs on your device. |
| Choosing, cutting, joining and encoding | In your browser, with your device's own video tools. For video the browser cannot play, a converter (ffmpeg.wasm) is downloaded once and also runs on your device. |
| What this site sends you | The page, the sound model and the converter. These are the same for everyone; none of them contains anything about you. |
Check it yourself: open your browser's developer tools, go to the Network panel, and save a montage. You will see no video leave.
The test log (this test version only)
While Snowcut is being tested, this version sends a usage log to the person building it, so that a problem seen on a phone can be found and fixed. It lists what the page did and how long it took: which buttons were pressed, timings, the sizes, formats and lengths of videos, and any error messages. It never contains a video, a picture, a sound or a file name (names are replaced with V1, V2 and so on before anything is kept). The log goes away when Snowcut launches, and this paragraph with it.
What the page keeps on your device
These stay on your device and are never sent anywhere. They exist so that a montage can come back if your phone throws the page away while you are in another app, and so your choices are remembered.
- The montage in progress (the clips, your choices, and what was found in each video), in the browser's database for this site, for up to a day. This is what "Welcome back" offers. You pick the videos again; they are matched by name and size.
- Copies of your videos on a phone, in the site's private storage, so a file the phone stops letting the page read can still be used. They are deleted when you start over, remove a video or start a new montage, and anything older than a day is cleared when the page opens.
- Your remembered choices: the Save dialog's settings (where it is going, title, frame rate and so on) if "Remember my choices" is ticked, the Moments list's filters, how picky the finder is, and a note that the sound model has been downloaded.
- What your browser caches: the sound model and the converter, as ordinary web cache files. Your browser's "clear browsing data" removes them.
Clear what Snowcut kept on this device
This removes the montage in progress, the copies of your videos and your remembered choices from this browser. It does not touch your original videos or any file you saved.
Really clear it? A montage in progress cannot be brought back.