Shredding files and wiping unallocated disk space to minimize data remanence.
Reviewed by Marco Wollank
BleachBit
bleachbit.org 1 rating so far*
Rate BleachBit: No account needed
Threat level
Hardened
A hardened pick. Worth the effort once you have chosen to shrink your footprint on purpose. Enough for most people. Threat levels
Our take
Open-source and free, with the one feature that actually matters for privacy here: shredding files and wiping free space so deleted data doesn’t linger. That focus is its strength and its limit, since it’s a cleaner that can erase, not a polished tune-up suite. The interface is utilitarian and it’ll happily let you delete something you wanted if you tick the wrong box. Pick it when secure deletion is the point, not when you want a pretty Mac optimizer.
GitHub at a glance
bleachbit/bleachbit
Stars
6,244
+ 380 this week
Last commit
10d ago
healthy
License
GPL-3.0
Latest release
v6.0.0
3mo ago
Stars, last 31d
Website at a glance
bleachbit.org
D- score 25
Weak website security headers
Graded by Mozilla HTTP Observatory, tested 14d ago
Inspect this site yourself
Measures the security configuration of the tool's own website, not the privacy of the product itself. A strong tool can still score low here.
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ExifCleaner Removes metadata for the most popular image and video formats. It also supports PDF files and comes with batch-processing to process multiple files at once. Drag and Drop…
ExifEraser File support: JPEG, PNG and WebP.
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BleachBit license, in plain English
GPL-3.0 Strong copyleft
Free to use and modify, but anything you distribute that is built on it must also be open under the same license.
Permits
- Commercial use
- Modification
- Distribution
- Patent use
- Private use
Requires
- Disclose source
- Same license
- State changes
- License and copyright notice
Does not provide
- Liability cover
- Warranty
Why it matters: Strong copyleft keeps every distributed version open. A vendor cannot fold this into a closed product and ship it without releasing their changes.
Plain-language summary of the project's license, not legal advice. Read the full text for the exact terms.
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