Privacy policy

This policy explains how the operator of urlburp.com handles personal information. The operator of this site is the responsible party under South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA). If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, the same choices below are how we handle consent for cookies that are not strictly necessary.

What we collect

• Account email and a hash of your password, if you register. We do not store the password itself.
• The addresses you shorten, the short code, and the time they were created.
• When a preview page is opened: the time, the referring page, the browser type, and a salted hash of the network address. We do not store the raw IP address.
• Your cookie choice, in a first-party cookie named rf_consent.
• A sign-in cookie and a security cookie that keeps forms from being submitted by another site. Those are necessary to run the account. Your sign-in ends after 30 minutes without activity.
• Messages you send on the contact form, and abuse reports, including an email address if you type one.

Why

We use this information to run the shortener, show you your own links, count preview opens, keep the service from being abused, and answer messages. Security logs, such as repeated failed sign-ins or a burst of new links, are kept so an admin can review them.

Creating an account is a service you ask for. Shortening a link is the same. Security processing is a legitimate interest in keeping the service usable. Advertising and measurement cookies are used only with consent.

Advertising and Google

Some pages have a labeled advertising space. Nothing from an ad network is loaded until you allow advertising cookies.

If you allow them, Google may use cookies and similar technologies to serve ads, to measure whether an ad was seen or used, to limit how often you see an ad, and to reduce fraud. Depending on your choice, those ads may be based on your visits to this site and others. If you reject advertising cookies, we do not ask Google to store or read advertising cookies, and the advertising space can stay empty.

Google describes these technologies in its own pages: How Google uses advertising technologies and Google's privacy policy. The list of cookies Google may set is on Google's cookie page. We do not control Google's later processing of data they receive when an ad is allowed to load.

Before any choice, advertising and analytics storage are denied. The site sends that default with Google's consent mode and updates it only after you choose. You can change the choice at any time with Cookie settings in the footer. Necessary cookies stay on, because the site cannot keep you signed in or protect forms without them.

How long we keep it

A short link and its click count stay while the link is live. A link is retired 12 months after it was created: it stops resolving and its count stops growing, though the record is kept so the operator can answer questions and review abuse. You can ask us to delete an account. Deleting an account detaches it from links you created. Security events are kept so abuse can be reviewed, and we aim to keep them for 12 months. Contact messages are kept so we can reply and then for as long as we need a record of the request. The consent cookie lasts 180 days unless you clear it sooner.

Your choices and requests

Your dashboard shows the email address on the account and the links created while you were signed in. You can delete the account from the dashboard if you know the password. For a copy of other information we hold, or for a correction or deletion we cannot do from the dashboard, use the contact form.

You can complain to the Information Regulator in South Africa. If you are in the EEA or the UK, you can also complain to your local supervisory authority.

Children

This site is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly create accounts for children.

Changes

If this policy changes in a material way, the page will be updated. The date of this version is 14 November 2026.