What the site collects
Two things, and only when you choose to send them through the signup form:
- Your email address.
- Your answer to "How many tabs are open right now?", a rough bucket rather than a number.
Submitting the form sends those fields to Buttondown, an email newsletter service, which stores them as a subscriber record with the tag early-tester. Buttondown then sends a confirmation email. Until you click the link in that email the record stays unconfirmed and receives nothing further.
Why
To send you one email when a test build is ready, and to reply when you write back. The tab-count answer helps choose the first group and shape what ships first. Nothing else is done with either field.
Where the data lives
Buttondown holds the list on our behalf and processes the addresses under Buttondown's own privacy policy. Buttondown records the time of signup and, for sent emails, whether a message was opened, which is standard for newsletter services.
The pages themselves are static files served by GitHub Pages. GitHub keeps ordinary server logs, such as the address a request came from, under GitHub's privacy statement. We do not see those logs and set no analytics of our own.
Fonts load from Google Fonts, which means your browser requests font files from Google when the page opens. Google's handling of those requests is covered by Google's note on fonts and privacy.
What the site does not do
- No analytics or tracking scripts.
- No cookies set by this site.
- No advertising, and no sale, rental, or sharing of addresses with anyone.
- No email beyond the test programme: one message per build, and replies to anything you send.
Leaving
Every email from the list carries an unsubscribe link, which removes you at once. To have the record deleted rather than unsubscribed, reply to any email from the list and say so. Deletion happens within a few days and is confirmed by reply.
If you are in the European Union, the United Kingdom, or another place with a data protection law, you also have the right to ask what we hold about you and to have the record corrected. The same message reaches us for any of those requests.
The extension
The side panel is built so that no page content, note, or address leaves your computer. The extension makes no network requests. Summaries and the /ask command run on Chrome's built-in on-device model inside the browser process. Notes, bookmarks, settings, and page records are kept in the browser's extension storage, and, if you install the optional helper, as plain files in a folder you choose on your own disk.
Page records hold, for each address you open, the page type, a reading time, an outline of headings, and the first 1,500 characters of text. They are capped at 1,500 pages and pruned after 90 days unseen. Settings let you turn background reading off and forget all records. Incognito tabs are never recorded.
Each permission the extension asks for has a stated reason:
| sidePanel | The panel itself |
| storage | Notes, bookmarks, settings, page records |
| tabs | Titles and addresses of open tabs for the command bar and the Tabs panel |
| activeTab | Temporary access to the current tab after a toolbar click |
| scripting | Inject the content script into tabs that loaded before the extension started |
| contextMenus | The Open sidebar entry in the right-click menu |
| nativeMessaging | Talk to the optional helper for the on-disk folder |
| Host access, all URLs | The badge, extraction, and page snapshots on every page. No network requests are made. |
This section will also serve as the privacy policy for the extension's store listing when one exists.
Changes and contact
This page changes when the facts change, and the date at the top moves with each change. Questions go to the same place as everything else: reply to any email from the list.