What deleted means here, precisely
2026-09-26
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Deleted is one of those words that sounds absolute and rarely is. When a service says your text is deleted, it is fair to ask three things. Deleted from where. Deleted by whom. And which copies were never theirs to delete in the first place.
Here is the precise answer for ours, including the part we cannot do anything about.
What we delete, and when
When you send text, the server creates one record for it, tied to the code. That record has a clock on it.
If nobody opens the text, the record is removed one minute after it was created. If someone opens it, the record is removed one minute after that first open. So the longest a piece of text sits on our server is about two minutes.
Removed means the record holding the text is taken out of our database and the code stops pointing at anything. Type the code afterwards and you get nothing back. There is no history on our side to restore it from, and no button anywhere that brings it back, for you or for us.
One honest caveat: our service runs on a hosting provider's infrastructure, and we cannot personally inspect every layer beneath us. What we can describe is what our own system does, and that is the removal above.
What happens to the code
The digits are not handed out again straight away. After a record is removed, that code is held back for five minutes before anyone else can be given it.
The reason is lateness, not secrecy. If your friend types the code thirty seconds too late, we would rather they see an empty result than a stranger's text that happened to get the same number.
What we cannot delete
This is the part that most descriptions of deletion leave out.
The screen it was shown on. Once the text appears, it lives in that browser tab. If the tab stays open, the text stays visible until someone closes it. We cannot reach into a browser and blank it.
The clipboard. If the reader copied the text, it sits in their clipboard until something replaces it. Some phones and computers keep a clipboard history, and some sync that history to other devices. None of that is ours to clear.
The browser's own memory. The receiving device's history will show that our site was visited, and roughly when. What else that browser remembers about the visit depends on its settings, not on us.
Whatever the reader did with it. A screenshot, a paste into a note, a message forwarded to someone else. In that minute, the text can travel anywhere a person takes it.
Our view of it while it existed. There is no browser-side scrambling yet. For the minute or two the text exists, our server can read it. Deletion shortens that window. It does not undo it.
So what does deletion actually buy you
It limits one specific thing: how long your text sits somewhere you did not choose. It does not make the text unseen, and it does not follow copies out into the world.
A practical habit helps with the rest. Tidy up the receiving side the way you would after typing a password on a borrowed computer. Close the tab. Copy something harmless to overwrite the clipboard. If the device is not yours, clear its browsing history before you walk away.
And if the text is something no one should ever see, such as a recovery phrase, do not put it into any website at all. A one-minute clock does not help with something that should never have been typed in the first place.