Acceptable Use Policy

PrintFriendly provides tools to make web pages easier to read, save, and print. To keep our platform safe for all users and advertising partners, we maintain this Acceptable Use Policy ("AUP") describing content that PrintFriendly may decline to process.

This policy is about the web pages we fetch and format when you give us a link. It does not cover the files you upload to our PDF tools. We do not inspect those files. They are processed, returned to you, and automatically deleted from our servers within 48 hours. What you may and may not upload is covered by the Prohibited Activities section of our Terms and Conditions.

The point of this policy is to keep people safe. When you open a page in PrintFriendly, you often have not seen what is on it yet. We would rather catch harmful material before it reaches your screen, your printer, or the file you save than after.

By using PrintFriendly, you agree to this policy.

PrintFriendly may refuse to process web pages that contain or primarily feature:

Sexually Explicit Material

Content depicting or promoting pornography, explicit sexual acts, or sexual services. This includes pages whose primary purpose is the distribution or advertisement of adult or sexually explicit material.

Graphic Violence or Gore

Content depicting real-world extreme violence, gore, torture, or death for shock or entertainment purposes. This does not apply to legitimate news reporting, historical documentation, or educational material that covers violent events in context.

Hate Speech and Extremist Content

Content that promotes hatred, discrimination, or violence against individuals or groups based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or other protected characteristics. This also includes content that promotes, recruits for, or provides instructional material for terrorist or extremist organizations.

Exploitative or Abusive Content

Content that exploits or abuses individuals, including but not limited to child exploitation material, non-consensual intimate imagery, or content that facilitates human trafficking.

Other Illegal or Harmful Material

Content that is otherwise illegal, that facilitates serious harm, or that creates significant safety or legal risk for our users or partners, such as pages dedicated to the sale of illegal goods or to instructions for causing serious harm.

When you give us a link, we fetch that web page and check it automatically. Pages identified as likely violations may be blocked, and individual images may be removed from an otherwise acceptable page. As above, this applies to the pages we fetch, not to files you upload.

Text analysis

We analyze the words on the page, including the title, the headings, and the body copy, with attention to context. News reporting, medical information, academic writing, and recovery and support resources routinely use vocabulary that would look alarming on its own, and our checks are built to tell the difference.

AI image analysis

Text alone is not enough. A page can be clean in its wording and still be built around explicit or violent pictures, so images that will appear on the page are checked as well, using AI vision models that consider what an image actually depicts together with its context, such as the site it came from, the page title, and the image’s own caption. That context is how a clinical photograph in a dermatology journal is distinguished from gore, or a museum exhibit from extremist material.

The response fits the problem. A single problem image usually means we replace that one image with a placeholder and show you the rest of the page as normal. Refusing a page outright is reserved for the clearest and most serious cases.

We do not store the images we check. The images are the ones already published on the web page you asked us to format. Each one is fetched, analyzed while the page is being processed, and then discarded. We keep the result of the check, never the image itself.

Where we identify content that we are legally required to report, such as child sexual abuse material, we report it to the appropriate authorities.

When we get it wrong

No automated system is perfect. Our checks can miss content that violates this policy, and they can occasionally flag content that does not. If we blocked something we should not have, or if you encounter content you believe we should have blocked, tell us and we will fix it.

If you believe a page was blocked in error, please contact us at support@printfriendly.com. Include the URL of the blocked page and a brief description of its content. We will review your request and respond as quickly as possible.

Likewise, if you encounter content through our Services that you believe should have been blocked under this policy, please report it to the same address and include the URL of the page. We will review every report.

We may update this policy from time to time. Material changes will be reflected in the "Last updated" date at the top of this page.