Privacy Engineering & Data Minimization

1. Principle of Data Minimization

ShareOnline is engineered so that privacy is enforced at the architectural layer rather than merely by policy. Systems are built so that servers do not have access to file payloads:

• Zero File Custody: No file bytes are accepted or stored on application servers.
• No User Accounts: No user records, passwords, or emails are persisted in any database.
• Ephemeral Signaling State: Session records exist only while peers are negotiating connections.

2. Data Lifecycle & State Eviction

The signaling state is strictly time-bounded:

• Room TTL: Signaling records have a 15-minute maximum lifetime. An in-memory cleanup routine or Redis TTL automatically evicts stale rooms.
• Immediate Connection Teardown: When peers complete their transfer or close their browser windows, the session state is deleted.
• Volatile Client Buffers: File chunks reside only in browser heap memory as ArrayBuffer instances and are garbage-collected upon window reload.

3. IP Address Processing

Client IP addresses are extracted in memory solely for rate limiting and network abuse defense:

• IP addresses are not joined with persistent user profiles or tracking cookies.
• Sliding-window rate limiting retains timestamps for a maximum of 1 hour to prevent flooding attacks.

4. Analytics Without Tracking Cookies

ShareOnline uses cookieless, privacy-preserving Vercel Web Analytics. It does not set persistent cookies, read local storage tokens, or profile users across third-party websites. It measures aggregate page performance and coarse geographic region only.