Last updated: October 2026 (v4) · Effective immediately
Toombler is a free service that turns PDFs from your own Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive, as well as Google Docs and Google Slides, into embeddable flipbooks. This policy explains exactly what information we collect, why we collect it, and — just as importantly — what we don't collect. We try to be genuinely minimal: if we don't need it, we don't keep it.
Toombler is operated as an independent web service, accessible at toombler.com and toombler.net. If you have questions about this policy you can reach us at privacy@toombler.com.
| Data point | Stored on our servers? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Account identifier from Google or Microsoft (opaque, e.g. "118…") | Yes | To associate your flipbooks with your account |
| Flipbook title | Yes | To display in your dashboard |
| Share URL of your file (Google Drive, Docs, Slides, Dropbox or OneDrive) | Yes | To load and serve your PDF |
| Embed settings (nav, sound, autoplay, etc.) | Yes | To remember your preferences per flipbook |
| Creation timestamp | Yes | To sort your dashboard |
| Sign-in dates (one row per account per day) | Yes | To count how many people use Toombler. Kept for 90 days, then deleted — see “How long we keep things” below |
| Daily totals (how many sign-ins, flipbooks and views per day) | Yes | Anonymous counts only, with no link to any account. Kept indefinitely |
| Your email address | No | Only temporarily in your browser's sessionStorage — never sent to our servers |
| Your name or profile picture | No | Only temporarily in your browser's sessionStorage — never sent to our servers |
| Passwords | No | Sign-in is handled by Google or Microsoft — you never create a password with us |
| Payment information | No | Toombler is free; no payments are processed |
| Your PDF content | No | Your files stay in your own storage account; we fetch them on request and keep no copy of our own. A copy may sit in Cloudflare's edge cache for up to a day so a flipbook loads fast; it is dropped as soon as the flipbook expires, is deleted or its sharing is switched off |
| IP addresses | No | Cloudflare (our infrastructure provider) logs IPs temporarily for security; we do not store or process them |
| Browsing history of your flipbook readers | No | We have no visibility into who views embedded flipbooks |
Your flipbooks and their settings stay until you delete them. Sign-in dates are kept for 90 days and then removed automatically; they exist only so that a person who signs in three times on one day is counted once.
What we do keep indefinitely is the daily totals: how many people signed in that day, how many flipbooks were created, and how many were viewed — split by sign-in method and storage provider. These are plain counts. They contain no account identifier and cannot be traced back to anyone, which is exactly why we are comfortable keeping them: they tell us whether Toombler is growing without keeping a history of any individual.
Per flipbook we also keep two plain counters: how often it was opened each day, and — for each page — how many reading sessions got that far. Both are totals with no reader attached: no visitor identifier, no timestamp, nothing that could tell one reader from another. They let the owner see whether people finish the document; they cannot show who did.
When a share link does not work (while adding a flipbook or in our nightly check), we note per day which kind of link failed and why — the provider and the shape of the address, without the link itself, without file IDs and without who it was — and delete those notes after 90 days.
When you sign in, your name, email address, profile picture and authentication token are stored in your browser's sessionStorage. This is local to your browser tab and is automatically deleted when you close the tab. It is never transmitted to our servers. We also use localStorage in the viewer to remember your last-read page and night-mode preference — this data never leaves your device. The volume and speed you choose for reading aloud are remembered the same way, only on your device.
Sign-in is handled entirely by Google Identity Services or the Microsoft identity platform, whichever you choose. We receive a signed token that we verify server-side against the provider's public keys. We never see or store your password. Their own privacy policies govern how they handle your sign-in: policies.google.com/privacy and microsoft.com/privacy.
Toombler is free. Until October 2026 that was paid for by a single advertisement on the inside cover of each flipbook, served by an ad network. That advertisement is gone: in nineteen measured days it earned nine tenths of a cent in total — not enough to justify a third-party script inside a document you are reading. The inside cover now carries a colophon instead: who made this flipbook and with what. It loads nothing from anyone else and follows no one.
What pays for Toombler now is Google AdSense on our own guide and help pages on toombler.com — never inside a flipbook, never in an embed, never on the public flipbook page at /f/, and never in the dashboard. On those guide pages Google, as a third-party vendor, uses cookies or similar techniques to show ads based on your earlier visits to this and other websites, and to measure them. Visitors from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland are asked for consent first and can change that choice at any time. You can turn off personalised ads in Google's Ads Settings, and read how Google uses information from sites that use its services. We do not choose the individual ads and receive no personal data from Google beyond aggregate revenue reports.
We no longer use Google Analytics. It was removed from every page — including the embedded flipbook player — because it set cookies to count page views that our hosting already counts without any. Nothing replaced it as analytics: what remains is the Cloudflare measurement below, plus our own counters, which record how often a flipbook is opened and how far readers get. Neither can tell us who you are. Google AdSense on our guide pages is a separate matter, described under Advertising above.
We also use Cloudflare Web Analytics, which is built into our hosting and runs on every page we serve — including the public flipbook page at /f/, which carries no other analytics. It records a page view together with the page path, country, referring site, device type, browser, operating system and page load timings. It sets no cookies, does not build a fingerprint, and cannot follow a visitor from one website to another. It tells us how often a page is opened and roughly where from; it cannot tell us who opened it.
The Ahrefs Web Analytics script was removed at the same time and for the same reason: it duplicated what Cloudflare already measured, on fewer pages, at the cost of an extra request to an outside party.
No web font is loaded from anywhere. Every page, including the public flipbook page, uses the typefaces already installed on your device. That page used to fetch one from Google Fonts, which meant your IP address reached Google on every visit; that request is gone.
If you use the JS snippet or Web Component embed method, a small script (embed.js) is loaded from toombler.com in the context of the embedding website. This script does nothing other than create a flipbook iframe — it does not read cookies, access local storage, or collect any information from the host website or its visitors. The resulting iframe loads the same embedded flipbook player described above, so the same analytics and advertising disclosures apply.
Toombler runs on Cloudflare Pages. Your requests pass through Cloudflare's global network, which provides DDoS protection and CDN caching. Cloudflare processes IP addresses and request metadata transiently for security purposes under their own privacy policy. Your flipbook data is stored in Cloudflare's D1 database service (SQLite at the edge) within the EU/US regions.
Regardless of where you are located, you have the following rights with respect to data we hold about you:
EU residents: the legal basis for storing your flipbook data is contract performance (Article 6(1)(b) GDPR) — we need to store it to provide the service you requested. Analytics is based on legitimate interest (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR).
There is no account to keep open or close, so nothing is held “for as long as you have one”. What exists is one row per flipbook: the link, the title, your settings and a counter. Delete a flipbook and that row goes immediately, together with its view statistics. A flipbook that has not been opened for twelve months and is itself older than twelve months is deleted automatically; one with an expiry date is removed ninety days after it expires. When the last flipbook belonging to a sign-in is gone, the sign-in record goes with it — there is nothing left to keep. Those records are in any case deleted after ninety days.
Toombler is not directed at children under 13 (or under 16 in the EU). We do not create accounts: you sign in with a Google or Microsoft account, and the age rules of those services apply before you reach us. Your files stay in your own storage — we never hold them. What we hold is an identifier from your sign-in provider plus the titles and links of the flipbooks made with it, and anyone signed in can delete those at any time from the dashboard. A flipbook left unopened for twelve months is deleted automatically, and when it was the last one, nothing of that sign-in remains.
If we make material changes we will update the "Last updated" date at the top of this page. For significant changes we will also post a notice on the homepage. Continued use of Toombler after a change constitutes acceptance.