Terms
A free tool, offered as-is, with no account and no strings. These terms are short because there is very little to agree about.
Last updated
Use
You may use Ghostchars for anything lawful, including commercial work, with no attribution and no permission required. There is no rate limit, no signup and no paid tier. You may not use it to attack the service itself — automated traffic that degrades it for other people is the one thing that is not welcome.
The source and its licence
The engine, the command-line tool and this website are published as open source. Your rights to copy, modify and redistribute that code come from the licence in the repository, not from this page; if the two ever disagree, the licence wins.
Third-party data
Ghostchars carries two tables derived from data published by Unicode, Inc.: the confusables table is generated from Unicode’s confusables.txt, and the character property and name tables are generated from the Unicode Character Database. Copyright © 1991–2024 Unicode, Inc. All rights reserved. Distributed under the Unicode License v3 — https://www.unicode.org/license.txt. The generated files name their source in their own headers, so the notice travels with the data.
No warranty
This tool is provided without warranty of any kind. It is tested against a large fixture corpus and against eleven published steganography schemes, and it is still software: verify anything that matters before you rely on it, and keep a copy of your original text. Cleaning is destructive by nature — it removes characters — and the removal happens in your browser, where there is no undo but the copy you kept.
What it does not claim
Ghostchars finds and removes characters. It does not detect AI-generated writing, it emits no probability, no score and no verdict about authorship, and nothing it reports should be presented as evidence that a person did or did not write something. It does not remove statistical watermarks, which live in word choice rather than in characters, and it does not perform stylometric analysis. Using its output to accuse someone of anything is a misuse of it.
Liability
To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for loss or damage arising from the use of this site — including text you cleaned and cannot recover, or a decision you made on the basis of what it reported. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.
Changes
These terms may change. The date at the top says when they last did, and this page is a file in a public repository, so every change is in the history.