Why your PDFs should never leave your device
Every time you “upload” a PDF to an online tool, a simple question comes up: where does it actually go? Who sees it in transit? How long does it sit somewhere before being — in theory — deleted? Most of the time, nobody can really answer that. That's the observation that shaped pdfswiss.ch from day one.
What actually happens when you “upload” a PDF elsewhere
On the vast majority of online PDF tools, the process is the same: your file is sent to a remote server — often in the United States, sometimes elsewhere in Europe — processed there, then sent back to you. The company assures you it's deleted afterwards. That's probably true, most of the time. But you have no way to verify it. Your document — a payslip, a contract, a medical record, an internal report — has, if only for a few seconds, existed on a server that isn't yours, in a country whose data protection laws you don't always know.
For a harmless document, that's not a big deal. For a sensitive one, it is.
How pdfswiss.ch does it differently
On pdfswiss.ch, there's nothing to verify, because there's nothing to send. All processing — merging, splitting, compressing, converting — happens directly in your browser, on your own computer. The file never passes through a server. It never exists, at any point, anywhere other than on your machine.
In practice: when you merge two PDFs on pdfswiss.ch, your browser does all the work itself, locally. No document data leaves over the network. That's an architectural difference, not a marketing promise — you can verify it yourself by observing that no network request containing your file is sent during processing.
What that means in practice
For personal use — You can process a payslip, a lease agreement, a medical document, without wondering where it ends up. It doesn't end up anywhere else than where it started: with you.
For professional use — If your company restricts or bans the use of external tools for confidentiality reasons, pdfswiss.ch changes the equation: since no document data is transmitted to a third-party server, there is technically no data transfer to authorize or justify with your IT department. That's a concrete argument to bring to them, not just a personal preference.
And what about the law?
Since September 1, 2023, Switzerland applies a fully revised Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP), which replaced the previous 1992 law. Article 16 of this new law specifically governs the transfer of personal data abroad: when a company has data processed by a service based in a country whose level of protection isn't deemed sufficient, it must follow a verification procedure and, in most cases, put additional contractual safeguards in place for that transfer to remain lawful.
pdfswiss.ch falls outside this framework — not because it complies with it, but because the situation this article regulates never occurs: no data from your document is ever transmitted to a server, Swiss or foreign, at any point.
Swiss, simply
No subscription. No account creation. No collection of your documents. pdfswiss.ch is designed and developed in Switzerland, and hosted with Infomaniak, a Swiss host based in Geneva, ISO 27001-certified for information security, with data centers located exclusively on Swiss territory — and therefore outside the scope of the US Cloud Act. A choice consistent with the spirit of the project: staying what a PDF tool should be — simple, fast, and trustworthy.