The courier in a trench coat: zero network, and the coat means it

Privacy

What we hook, and why.

Last updated July 31, 2026 · plain language, no legalese

The short version: Pidjn has no accounts, no backend, and makes no network requests. Ever.

Your snips never leave your machine. There is no code path in the app that phones home — no HTTP client, no updater, no analytics SDK. You can verify this yourself with a packet capture: the app is silent on the wire.

Where your snips live

Everything stays on your disk, in your Windows user profile (LocalAppData). Nothing syncs anywhere.

You control deletion. The retention dial in Settings (1 to 30 days, default 7) is the only thing that deletes your snip history. Nothing else touches it.
Snips skip Windows clipboard history. We set the Microsoft exclusion formats so your snips never ride Win+V Clipboard History or cloud-clipboard sync to your other devices.
No content scanning. The app never reads or analyzes what's inside your snips. Delivery rules are about destination apps, not content.

APIs we hook, and why

A tool that snips your screen and types into your apps has to touch low-level Windows APIs. Security software sometimes flags that combination, so here is the complete list and the reason for each:

Mouse hook

How the Alt+drag gesture and spare-mouse-button snip work. We watch for your trigger, nothing else — Pidjn is not a keylogger and does not record your input. (While a snip is in flight, we also check whether Esc is held so you can always bail out — a key-state read, not a hook, and nothing is recorded.)

Foreground-window hook

How the bird knows which app you were working in — that's the delivery target the snip flies back to.

UI Automation (reads)

How we find the text field and caret you were typing in, so the snip lands in the right place. Read-only; we never scrape your documents.

SendInput

How the paste actually happens — the app performs the keystroke for you instead of making you do it.

Screen capture

The snip itself. Capture happens only when you trigger it — there is no background recording, ever.

Clipboard

Where the snip is staged for delivery, with the exclusion formats above so it stays out of clipboard history and cloud sync.

Grabbing text

Version 1.1 adds a second way to hand Pidjn something: select text anywhere, press the text-grab hotkey (Settings → Triggers, Alt+C by default), and it lands the same way a snip does. Here's exactly what that does with your clipboard.

A momentary borrow, not a takeover. Pressing the hotkey copies your current selection, reads it, and restores whatever was on your clipboard before you pressed the key, all within milliseconds. When it's done, your clipboard is exactly as you left it.
Explicit hotkey only. This only happens when you press that specific key combo. Copying text the normal way (Ctrl+C, right-click Copy) never triggers it.
No clipboard watcher exists. Pidjn does not sit and monitor your clipboard in the background. There is no code path that reads it except the one hotkey press described above.
Grabbed text lives under the same roof as your snips. It's written to local files under the same retention dial in Settings (1 to 30 days, default 7). Nothing about text grab changes where things live, how long they stay, or who can see them.

The zero-network claim at the top of this page is untouched: text grab adds no network capability of any kind. It's a clipboard borrow and a local file, same as everything else here.

What we deliberately don't do

No telemetry. Usage insights are computed and stored locally on your machine, for your eyes. If we ever add optional sharing, it will be opt-in and say exactly what it sends.
No auto-updater at launch. An updater is its own attack surface. You download updates from pidjn.app when you choose to.
No ads. Ever.

This website

The email address you give us on the updates form. It's stored by Netlify Forms and used for launch and release news only. Want off the list? Email us and it's done.
The site is static — no analytics scripts, no tracking pixels, no cookies. It loads one font from Google Fonts; that request goes to Google.
One line per download. When you click Download, we record the time, your browser's user-agent string, your country and region, and which page sent you. That's it. No IP address, no city, no cookie, nothing that identifies you. We keep it because a lot of what pulls this installer is AI crawlers, and without the user-agent we can't tell a person from a bot — the download numbers we publish would be fiction. Prefer not to be counted at all? Use the direct link under the checksum on the download page; it skips this entirely.
Founders purchases are handled by Stripe on Stripe's own pages. Your card details never touch anything we run.

Downloads

pidjn.app is the only official download source. Every release is code-signed, and its SHA-256 checksum is published beside the download button. If you got Pidjn anywhere else, or the signature doesn't verify, don't run it — and tell us.

Questions

Ask anything: hello@pidjn.app. Short honest answers, from the person who builds it.