Most people using NovaClip are teenagers. This page is written to be read by them, not by a lawyer.
Last updated 9 October 2026 · NovaClip · novaclip.org · Terms of Use
Most of NovaClip works without a server at all. These live in your browser's local storage, on the computer or phone you are using:
No API key of any kind is stored here. NovaClip's AI runs through our own server, so you never have to hand a key to a web page — and a version of this site that asked you to has had that box removed.
Clearing your browser data deletes all of it. There is no copy on our side to restore it from, which is the trade for not holding your information.
Signing in to save progress across devices gives you a code — a short string like a link to a shared document. Whoever has the code has the account.
You can also add a username and password on the profile page, so signing in on a new phone is something you remember rather than a code you have to still have. Three things about it, because a password box implies more than this one delivers:
We chose this deliberately. Collecting email addresses and passwords from under-18s means holding data that can be breached, and it means a password a young person has probably reused elsewhere. So we hold neither. What our server stores against your code is the progress you saved and the time you saved it — no name, no email, nothing you did not type in yourself.
One correction, because this page used to say something stronger than the truth. It said the server held "nothing that identifies you". Our leaderboard also has to know who claimed a name, so that somebody else cannot post under it, and for a player with no account that used to be recorded as their IP address — which is information about a person, and it was kept with no end date. That was not what this page promised, so the software changed rather than the promise: the address is now put through a one-way hash with a secret only the server has, so what is stored cannot be turned back into an address, and an anonymous claim on a name expires after 90 days. The addresses stored under the old scheme are replaced the next time each player comes back.
The cost is real and worth saying: lose the code and the account cannot be recovered, because there is nothing to prove it was yours.
On a first visit NovaClip asks you to make a profile. It is a question, not a wall — "have a look round first" is on the same screen, and every tool here works without an account. What an account buys is your progress following you to another device.
NovaClip used to offer sign-in by face, by voice and by typing rhythm. All three have been removed from the site.
They were built to be private and they were: the measurements were taken in the page and stored in your own browser, and nothing was ever uploaded. We removed them anyway. Under UK and EU data protection law, a face or voice measurement used to recognise a particular person is "special category" data — the most strictly protected kind there is — and that is true wherever it is stored, including on your own machine. NovaClip is used by people aged 13 to 18. Holding the most sensitive category of data about children, for a sign-in shortcut nobody needed, was not a fair trade.
The passkey lock has gone as well. For a while what was left of this was a passkey lock on the browser: set one up, and the site asked your device to confirm it was you before any page opened. The passkey itself was never biometric data — the private key is made inside the device's own secure hardware, your phone does the fingerprint check, and nothing of the sort ever reached NovaClip. It was removed for a plainer reason: it locked people out. A device refuses that prompt for a dozen ordinary reasons, and the button that removed the lock was on the Profile page, which was behind the lock.
What happens to data already on your device. If you enrolled a face, a voice, a click pattern or a passkey before these changes, all of it — the measurements, the passkey handle and the encrypted Locker it opened — is deleted from your browser the first time you load a NovaClip page after this update. You do not have to do anything, and you can clear this site's data in your browser settings as well if you would rather not wait. There was never a copy anywhere else, so there is nothing for us to delete at our end.
Signing in is unaffected by any of this. That is your account on the server, with a password that never reaches it, and it never went through the lock.
NovaClip can use your camera and microphone for the video editor, the selfie studio and the voice changer. Your browser asks permission every time and you can refuse; the rest of the site still works.
None of it is uploaded. The video and the audio are processed in the page and stay in your browser.
There is one exception, and you have to switch it on yourself. The editor checks every clip you drop in — how fast it flashes, whether it is blank — and all of that happens on your device. It can also ask the AI to look at the clip and say whether there is nudity in it, which is more accurate than the check that runs for free. That one sends four still frames, at 512 pixels, to our worker and on to Google's Gemini. It is off until you turn it on, it says exactly that before it sends anything, and you can turn it off again in the same place. Nothing it answers is reported to anybody, no account is flagged, and nothing is ever blocked.
NovaClip used to have voice commands, which relied on your browser's own speech recognition — and in Chrome that sends the audio to Google to turn into text. That feature has been removed along with voice sign-in, so nothing on the site listens to you any more.
Everything on this list happens only when you use the feature it belongs to. The one thing that runs on every page without being asked for is Google Analytics, which has its own section below.
| When you… | What is sent | Who receives it |
|---|---|---|
| Ask the AI anything | The text you typed | Our Cloudflare Worker, which passes it to Google's Gemini API |
| Press “Ask the AI to look at this clip” in the editor | Four still frames from that clip, at 512px. Not the video, not the sound, not the filename | The same worker, and on to Gemini. Off unless you turn it on |
| Press “Ask the AI to write the words” in Hype Lab | Four still frames from that clip, at 512px. Not the video, not the sound, not the filename | The same worker, and on to Gemini. Nothing is sent unless you press it — measuring the clip, adding the effects and making the music all happen on your device |
| Check a message with the safety tools | The text you pasted | The same worker; card numbers and codes are stripped out before it is sent |
| Save progress with a code | Your progress and your code | Our Cloudflare Worker (Cloudflare KV storage) |
| Earn a certificate | The name that goes on it — your connected channel's name, or your display name if you have no channel — together with which certificate it is and the date | Our Cloudflare Worker, which signs the certificate and keeps that record so the number on it can be checked later. It is the only way a certificate can be told apart from a document somebody typed themselves |
| Answering the age question while signed in | The age you chose on the wheel | Our Cloudflare Worker, stored against your account. Under 13 the account is closed to NovaClip wherever it signs in — not just in this browser, which is the point: clearing a browser used to clear the answer. A second, older answer does not reopen it |
| A parent saves rules in the Family Dashboard | The daily limit, the quiet hours, which parts of NovaClip are switched off, and a hash of the Family Dashboard PIN — never the PIN itself | The same worker, so the rules apply on every device the account signs in on instead of only the one they were typed on. The hash is what the worker checks before letting anyone change them |
| A parent turns on teaching in the Family Dashboard | The parent's own name and email address, and the child's age — not a birthday, just the number | Our Cloudflare Worker. The name and email are there because any money a lesson earns is paid to the parent and not to the child, and the age is there because below 16 no money may be earned at all. It is the parent who types them, about themselves. Turning teaching off deletes the record |
| Buying NovaCoins | Which pack, and your account's recovery code so the coins reach the right account. The card details go to the payment processor and never to us | Our Cloudflare Worker, which adds the coins when the processor confirms the payment. Coins bought are held on the server rather than in this browser, because a balance kept in a browser is a number anybody can edit |
| Proving you are 16 or older | A face scan — taken by an outside age-checking service, not by NovaClip. We send them nothing but a reference for your account; they do the scan and send back a yes or a no | NovaClip stores only that answer, the date, and the service's reference. No photograph, no estimate of your age and no face ever reaches us or is kept by us. A face is biometric data and the safest place for it is nowhere near this site. The check is only needed to be paid money — teaching for NovaCoins never asks for it |
| Publishing a lesson in the Academy | The lesson you wrote, its title, its price, and the name printed on your certificate | The same worker, which keeps it so other people can buy and read it. The lesson is public once it is up; taking it down hides it from everyone |
| Getting someone else's lesson | That the lesson was taken, and by which account | The same worker, so the lesson opens for you next time and so the person who wrote it can see how many people took it. No message, no contact and no way for either of you to reach the other — the Academy has no messaging in it |
| Someone checks a certificate number at /verify.html | The number they typed | The same worker, which answers with the name, the certificate and the date that number was issued against — and nothing else. Anyone holding the number can do this, which is the point of it: the number is printed on the certificate for exactly that purpose |
| Finish a run in Typing, Flap, Reaction or Aim | The score, and the name the board shows you under — your display name if you set one, otherwise your username, otherwise a connected channel's name. Nothing else about the run, and nothing at all if you have set none of those: the board asks you for a name first rather than sending one you did not choose | Our Cloudflare Worker (Cloudflare KV storage). The board is public, so the name and score on it are visible to anyone playing that game |
| Research trends or connect a channel | The search, or the channel you authorised | YouTube's own API |
| Use the globe or map views | The place being looked at | Google Maps and ArcGIS map tiles |
| Use meme templates | The caption text | memegen.link, which draws the image |
| Open the Photos library in the editor | What you searched for, or the category you pressed | Wikipedia's own API, and the picture you choose is fetched from Wikimedia. No account, no key, nothing about you attached to the request |
| Open the Footage library in the editor | What you searched for, or the category you pressed | Wikimedia Commons' own API, and the clip you choose is fetched from Wikimedia. Same as above — no account, no key. Only clips that are free to reuse are shown, and who made each one is saved on your device under Credits so you can name them |
| Load any page | Nothing extra | Some libraries load from jsDelivr and unpkg. They see your IP address, the way any website you visit does. Nothing about you is sent with the request. Typefaces are no longer fetched from Google Fonts — the two that were have been removed, so the site now uses only fonts already on your device or served from novaclip.org |
| Send a report | Only what you write in the form | Us, by email |
Those companies have their own privacy policies and we cannot make promises on their behalf. What we can say is that we do not send them anything about you beyond what the feature needs to work.
NovaClip uses Google Analytics 4 to count how many people visit and which pages they use. It is the only measurement tool on the site and there is no advertising attached to it.
It is switched off from advertising, explicitly. Every page tells Google that advertising storage, advertising identifiers and ad personalisation are denied, and turns off the two settings that would otherwise let a Google Analytics property feed Google's advertising profiles. Nothing measured here can be used to target an advertisement at you, on this site or on any other. Advertising aimed at under-18s using profiling is banned outright in the EU, and we would not want to do it regardless.
What it records: the pages you open and when, roughly where you are (worked out from your IP address, which Google shortens before storing — it is not kept in full), your browser, device type and screen size, and which site you arrived from.
What it cannot record: your name, your email or your account code, because NovaClip never asks for the first two and never sends the third. Nothing you type — not a message you check for scams, not an AI prompt, not a video — reaches it.
Nothing is counted until you say yes. The first time you open NovaClip a box at the bottom asks, with the same weight on both answers, and the default before you touch it is no. Here is what you chose, and you can change it right now — taking permission back has to be as easy as giving it:
Checking…
You can also block cookies for this site in your browser settings, use your browser's tracking protection, or install Google's own opt-out add-on. NovaClip works exactly the same with it blocked.
Short, because there is not much to account for:
How long: what is on your device stays until you clear it. A saved account and its progress stay until you ask us to delete them. A claimed leaderboard name held without an account lapses after 90 days. The short-lived counters behind the rate limits expire within minutes. There is nothing on our side we keep "just in case".
Where it goes: our workers run on Cloudflare, and the AI features pass your prompt to Google's Gemini. Both are American companies operating in Europe, so some of this is processed outside the EU under the standard safeguards those companies publish. We send them nothing about you beyond what the feature needs.
No profiling, and no decisions made about you by a machine. Nothing here scores you, ranks you or decides anything about you automatically.
NovaClip is for people aged 13 and over. The site asks your age once and will not let you in below 13. If you tell us you are under 13 we do not keep what you typed — you are simply not let in.
If you are a parent and believe a child under 13 has used NovaClip anyway, email us at the address below and we will remove anything connected to their code.
NovaClip is served over HTTPS everywhere. API keys live on the server and are never sent to your browser — there is no box anywhere on this site that asks you for one. Passwords are put through 600,000 rounds of PBKDF2 in your browser and never arrive here at all. The parent PIN is stored hashed. The leaderboard's record of who claimed a name is hashed with a server-side secret. Requests to save progress are rate-limited. No system is perfect, and we would rather say that plainly than claim otherwise.
NovaClip is run by one person, in Portugal, as an independent project — not a company with a privacy department. That person is the data controller for everything on this page, and novacliptools@gmail.com reaches them directly. There is no data protection officer, because at this size the law does not require one and pretending otherwise would be theatre.
If you think we have handled your information badly, you can complain to a regulator, and you do not have to go through us first. In Portugal that is the Comissão Nacional de Proteção de Dados (CNPD) — cnpd.pt. If you live elsewhere in the EU you can complain to your own country's data protection authority instead, and in the UK it is the Information Commissioner's Office. We would rather you emailed us first so we can fix it, but that is a preference, not a condition.
If what NovaClip does changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves. A policy that has drifted from the software is a promise being broken quietly, which is worse than having no policy at all.
Questions, deletion requests, or anything that felt wrong: novacliptools@gmail.com, or use the report form.
NovaClip is an independent project. It is not affiliated with Google, YouTube, Microsoft or any of the services it connects to.