Legal

You do not need an account to use PageComment. Without one, nothing you do is attached to a profile. The name and colour beside your cursor are picked in your browser, and nobody checks them.

A board stores the annotations drawn on it, the address of the page it overlays, the width that page was captured at, and a name if someone gives it one. It also keeps the saved copies of that page described below. Boards are deleted 90 days after they are last opened. Opening one resets that clock, so a board in active use is not removed. A board filed under a team is kept for as long as the team has it.

Whatever you write on a board is visible to everyone who can open it. Treat a comment the way you would treat a message in a shared document.

While people are on a board together, their cursor positions pass between browsers. Voice and video travel directly between the people on the call, and nothing records them.

Signing in is optional, and exists so a group can keep its boards together. You sign in with a link sent to your email address; there is no password. We store the address, the teams you belong to, and a session so you stay signed in.

A sign-in link works once and expires after 15 minutes. An invitation to a team expires after seven days. A session lasts 30 days from when you last used it, and signing out ends it immediately.

We use your address to sign you in and for nothing else. It is not shown to other people on a board, and it is not sent to anyone for marketing.

A board's address contains a 21-character random id, and holding that link is what grants access. Anyone who has it can read the board and add to it. There is no separate password.

That is a deliberate trade. A reviewer can open a link and start typing without an account, which is the point. It also means the link is worth treating like a key, because it can be passed on and because holding it is enough to change or erase what is there.

A board filed under a team is still open to anyone with its link, unless the team sets it to members only. Then only signed-in members can open it, and anyone else is told it does not exist. Changing that setting takes effect at once, including for people who already have the board open.

A board does not show the live site. The first time a page is opened, your browser saves a copy of it as it appeared on your screen, and the board shows that copy from then on. That way feedback keeps pointing at what it was about, even after the site changes. A newer copy is saved only when someone asks for one.

A saved copy is served with every script disabled and every outside request blocked. It cannot run code or contact the site it came from, and it looks only as complete as the capture was.

Copies are kept with their board and deleted with it. Anyone who can open the board can see its copies, so do not annotate a page that shows information the other people on the board should not see.

The PageComment extension for Chrome captures a page as you see it in your browser, for a page PageComment cannot open itself, such as one behind a sign-in. It acts only when you ask: when you click its button, or when you choose Capture with the extension on a board.

When it captures a page, it reads that page and fetches the styles, images and fonts the page uses, signed in as you, so the copy looks as it did. It sends the copy to PageComment, where it is kept as a saved copy of that board, described above. It reads nothing else in your browser, keeps no history of the pages you visit, and sends nothing to anyone but PageComment.

A copy of a page behind a sign-in can show whatever that page showed you. Capture it onto a board only the people who should see it can open.

To let you draw on a page, PageComment fetches it and serves it back to your browser with the headers that would otherwise block embedding removed. Our servers do the fetching, so the request carries none of your cookies, your session, or anything else that would identify you to that site.

Pages behind a login therefore will not appear the way they appear to you. Addresses on a private network or on your own machine are refused outright.

You are responsible for having the right to review the pages you open. A page shown through PageCommentstill belongs to whoever published it.

You can annotate a PDF or an image by uploading it. A file can be up to 25MB. Its type is checked from its contents rather than its name, and SVG is not accepted.

Anyone with the file's link can open it, just like a board. Do not upload anything you would not share with everyone on the board.

Uploads and saved copies share an allowance of 250MB per 30 days, counted per network. To count it, we store a salted one-way hash of your internet address, never the address itself. Everyone behind the same connection, such as an office, shares one allowance.

PageComment is a derivative work of MarkLayer, Copyright Vadym Rusin, used under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Substantial portions of the annotation engine, the realtime room, the page proxy and the shared operation schema originate there and have been modified.

A copy of the Apache License, Version 2.0 is available at apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.

If you sign in, we set one cookie, which keeps you signed in. It cannot be read by scripts, and it is not used to track you on other sites. Without an account, no cookie is set.

Your browser also keeps a few things for itself, and they are not sent to us: annotations you have not finished saving, which microphone and camera you picked, your video quality, and where you moved the video bubbles. Clearing your site data removes them.

To understand how PageComment is used, the server may count events such as a board being opened, someone joining it, or a mark being drawn. There are no third-party trackers or advertising scripts on the site.

These counts are not tied to a person. They record the site a page is on but not the page itself, a rough location (country, region and time zone), and the kind of device. They never include your internet address, what you wrote, or anything you drew.

Boards and projects are deleted 90 days after they were last opened, and their saved copies go with them. Those filed under a team are kept for as long as the team has them, along with any file they show; taken out of the team, one starts a fresh 90-day clock. An uploaded file otherwise has its own clock, and is deleted 90 days after it was last used.

Expired sign-in links, invitations and sessions are removed every day. Once something is deleted, it cannot be recovered.