"Your files never leave your device."
Here's how to verify that.
Every converter says it's safe. After the FBI's 2025 warning about malicious file converters, "trust me" isn't good enough. So don't trust us — check us.
1. The airplane-mode test (30 seconds)
Open this site, then turn on airplane mode (or unplug your network). Now drop a video into the converter and convert it. It works — because the conversion runs in your browser, not on a server. A converter that uploads files physically cannot do this.
2. Watch the network tab
Press F12 (or Cmd+Option+I on Mac) to open DevTools and select the Network tab. Convert a video and watch the request list: you will see zero upload requests. No POST with your file, no chunked upload, nothing. The only traffic this site ever generates is downloading the page itself.
3. Read the security policy header
In the Network tab, click the page request and look at the response headers. The Content-Security-Policy header includes a connect-src directive that whitelists only this site, our payment provider's license check, the analytics beacon, and the CDN that serves the optional compatibility engine. Sending your file anywhere else isn't just something we promise not to do — the browser enforces that it cannot happen.
4. Read the source code
The entire conversion engine is open source under the MIT license. You can read exactly what happens to your file: it is decoded by your browser, resized on a canvas, and encoded to GIF — all in a web worker on your machine.
Why this matters more than it sounds
Think about what's actually in the videos people convert: screen recordings with auth tokens and customer data visible, clips of kids, unreleased product demos, private messages. Upload-based converters receive a perfect copy of all of it — and in March 2025 the FBI warned that fake converter sites were actively exploiting exactly this, delivering malware and harvesting uploaded files.
The fix isn't a better privacy policy. It's an architecture where the file can't leave. Modern browsers ship hardware video decoders (WebCodecs), which means conversion no longer needs a server at all. That's what GIF Den is: the converter, minus the upload.
What this site does send
Full honesty about our network traffic:
- Page assets — HTML, CSS, JS, downloaded once and cached.
- Anonymous analytics beacon — cookieless page-view counts (Cloudflare Web Analytics). No file data, no identifiers.
- Pro license check — if you buy Pro, the license key (and only the key) is verified against Gumroad.
- Compatibility engine — for rare codecs your browser can't decode, a one-time ~11 MB software decoder downloads from a CDN. Your file still stays local; only the engine is downloaded.
That's the complete list. Your files are not on it — and can't be.