How to know when someone has downloaded your file

You sent the contract, the photos or the password, and now you wait. Did it arrive before the deadline? Can you delete your copy? Should you send it again? Usually the only way to find out is to ask, and “did you get my file?” is a message nobody enjoys sending.

Three moments that get called “downloaded”

1. The link was opened. Someone, or something, loaded the page. Chat apps and mail filters do this on their own: Slack and iMessage fetch a link to draw its preview, and corporate mail scanners open every link they see. On its own, “opened” is mostly noise. What actually consumes a one-time link goes into the details.
2. A download started. A browser asked for the file itself. A person was almost certainly behind it, but the transfer can still break halfway.
3. The file arrived. The last byte reached the recipient’s device. This is the moment you actually care about.

A useful notification tells you about the third one, and says which one it is telling you about.

How the usual tools handle it

WeTransfer emails you a download confirmation. For a link transfer you get one email, the first time the transfer is fully downloaded, however often the link is opened afterwards. Per-download tracking exists too, but it makes every recipient verify an email address before they can download: you learn more by identifying them.

Google Drive doesn’t tell you when someone downloads a file you shared by link. Its notifications are about files shared with you and requests for access.

Dropbox can notify you when files sent with Dropbox Transfer are downloaded, and its forums are full of people asking how to tone those emails down.

The pattern is the same everywhere: the more a service tells you, the more it knows about the person on the other end.

On ttl.space: when it arrived, never who

Neither you nor the recipient needs an account.

On the page you uploaded from. Under the link, the result shows a delivery line: Not downloaded yet, then Download started · 14:02, then Downloaded · 14:03. For a text note it reads Opened · 14:02. The page checks every few seconds at first, then less often, for an hour.

After you close the tab. Press Notify me under the link. When the file has been downloaded to the end, your browser shows a notification, even if the tab is long gone. It travels through the push service your browser already uses: Google’s for Chrome, Mozilla’s for Firefox, Apple’s for Safari, Microsoft’s for Edge. The message is encrypted for your browser, so the push service sees that something reached you, not the file, its link or its name. You get at most one notice an hour per file, so a link passed around a team doesn’t bury you.

Later, or from your phone. My uploads, next to the Encrypt & send heading once you have sent something, lists everything you sent from this browser: how many downloads started, how many completed, and when the last one happened. You can delete a file early from there. Copy status link gives you an address that shows the same numbers on another device.

For a single recipient. With Burn after reading on, the link is used up the moment the first download starts. When the delivery line says the download started, you know the one person who could open it did, and that nobody else can.

What it can’t tell you

Who downloaded it. You see counts and times. No names, no addresses, no places: not in the delivery line, not in My uploads, not in a notification.

Whether they read it. “Downloaded” means the encrypted file reached their device in full. It is decrypted there, with the password you sent. What happens next happens on their machine, out of anyone’s sight, ours included. That is the point of end-to-end encryption.

With Orbit: by email as well

Orbit adds email notices. Turn them on in the dashboard and you get an email when one of your files has been downloaded to the end, and when something arrives in one of your file requests. Like the browser notices, they name the link by its first characters and give the time: no file name, no IP address, no place. At most one an hour per file or request.

Limits

• Notify me needs notifications allowed in your browser; if you block them, the button goes away. A desktop browser that can’t receive push messages still shows the notice while the tab is open, for the first hour. On an iPhone, Safari allows web notifications only for sites added to the Home Screen.
• A notice waits up to 12 hours for a browser that is offline. After that it is dropped.
• My uploads lives in this browser: clearing its site data empties the list, while the files themselves stay until they expire. Keep a status link if you’ll want to check from somewhere else.
• A file only you can download (Orbit’s private files) has no Notify me: nobody else can download it.