Browsertrail is a Chrome extension that searches everything you have seen in your browser — your history, your open tabs, tabs you closed, your bookmarks, and, if you turn it on, the text of the pages themselves. It builds that search index on your own computer and searches it there. This policy explains exactly what it handles, what stays on your machine, and what is sent to us.
Browsertrail is operated by Syntaximos LLC, 30 North Gould Street, Sheridan, WY 82801, United States ("we", "us"). You can reach us at support@syntaximos.com or through https://syntaximos.com/contact.
What this policy covers. This policy is about the Browsertrail Chrome extension — the software that runs inside your browser. Our general privacy policy at https://syntaximos.com/privacy-policy covers the Syntaximos website and your Syntaximos account, including what our website collects when you visit it. Where the two overlap, this policy is the more specific one and governs the extension's behaviour. Nothing described on this page applies to our website, and nothing described in the general policy describes anything the extension does.
The short version
- Your browsing never leaves your device. The addresses you visit, the titles of those pages, the text on them, your tabs, your bookmarks and the searches you run against them are written to a database on your own computer. We have no copy of any of it, no ability to see it, and no server that receives it.
- This is enforced, not just promised. The extension ships a content security policy that allows it to connect to its own files and to
api.syntaximos.comand nothing else, so it could not send your browsing anywhere even if a future bug tried to. Our build tooling fails the release if any other host appears in the package. - Incognito is never touched. Not the page, not the address, not the fact that a window was open.
- Sensitive sites are excluded before you configure anything. Banks, webmail, password managers, single sign-on providers and health portals are excluded the moment you install, and sign-in, checkout, password-reset and two-factor pages are never recorded on any site at all.
- Browsertrail requires a free account, so we do hold your email address and the fact that you have a Browsertrail licence. Your email address and your licence status are the only personal data the extension ever causes us to hold.
- No analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no advertising, no third-party scripts are present in the extension.
- Export is free and always will be. You can download everything the extension holds as a JSON file at any time, and delete all of it in one action.
- We never sell your data, and we never share it for anyone else's advertising or marketing.
1. What is stored on your device, and only on your device
Everything in this section is written to a SQLite database held in your browser's private file storage, inside your Chrome profile, readable only by this extension. It is not backed up to us, not synced between your machines, and not readable by us.
1.1 Pages, visits, tabs and bookmarks
| Stored | What it is |
|---|---|
| Page address | The address of the page, plus a normalized form of it used to recognise the same page seen twice |
| Page title and description | The title of the page and its own meta description, so both are searchable |
| When you saw it | The first and last time you saw the page, and one record per visit with its timestamp |
| How often, and how you got there | How many times you visited, how many of those you typed the address yourself, and how you arrived |
| How long you stayed | The time the page was actually in front of you — tab focused, window focused, you not idle — recorded per sitting and in total. Pages you read for a long time rank above pages you glanced at. |
| Your tabs | Which tabs are open and in which window, whether they are pinned or grouped, and a durable log of tabs you closed, so search can jump to a tab you already have open or reopen one you closed months ago |
| Your bookmarks | Bookmark titles, addresses, the folder path they sit in, and when they were added, so a bookmark is findable by its folder as well as its name |
| Your browsing history | Only if you turn it on. It is off when you install, and turning it off again deletes what was imported. |
1.2 The text of pages, which is off until you turn it on
Full-text search over page bodies is the feature Browsertrail exists for, and it is still off when you install. It does nothing until you grant the extension access to sites yourself, from its options page, and it stops the moment you withdraw that access.
When it is on, the extension reads the page in your browser and stores its title, its headings and a length-capped extract of its visible text, on your device, in the same local database. Before a single word is taken, it removes:
- Every input, text area, select, and editable field on the page, including anything marked as a password or a payment field. The contents of form fields, passwords, card numbers and anything you type into a page are therefore never part of what is indexed.
- Scripts, styles, embedded frames and canvases, and anything hidden from view.
- Interface rather than content: navigation, headers, footers, sidebars, forms, dialogs, buttons, menus, toolbars, tabs, tooltips and status messages.
- Cookie banners, consent walls, paywall and newsletter prompts, share buttons, comment forms, and the common advertising and content-recommendation containers.
None of this text is transmitted. It exists so that a search for a phrase you half-remember can find the page that said it.
1.3 Your searches
The extension keeps your recent queries on your device: the text you typed, when you typed it, how many results came back, which result you opened, and how long the search took. They are used to rank a page you have opened before above one you have not, and to offer you a recent query again. You can clear them from the Privacy Center at any time. They are never transmitted.
1.4 Your settings
Chrome's local extension storage holds whether memory is on or paused, whether history indexing and page text are on, your exclusion and allow lists, your retention settings, your theme and how many results you want back.
1.5 Your sign-in state
Chrome's local extension storage also holds a small record of your sign-in: your account's user ID, whether your licence is active, and when it was last checked. That record is signed, so editing it by hand simply discards it. Signing in happens on syntaximos.com in an ordinary browser tab — the extension never sees your password.
1.6 Local usage counters
So that you can see whether the extension is actually earning its place, it keeps a handful of counters: how many searches you have run, how many of them ended in you opening a result, how often you refine a query, the median time between searching and opening, the median time a search takes to return, and how many days you have used it. These are counts and timings only — never a query, an address, a page title or a domain. They live in your browser's local storage, are shown to you in the Privacy Center, and are never transmitted. Section 3.2 covers the one way you can choose to move them.
1.7 Deleting all of it
The Privacy Center can delete everything the extension holds, forget a single site and everything already stored from it, or clear just your recent searches. Removing Browsertrail from Chrome deletes all of it too. The extension sets no uninstall page, so uninstalling it makes no request either.
2. What is never recorded at all
Independently of your settings, and on every plan, the following is never written to the index:
- Anything from an Incognito window. Not the page, not the address, not the fact that a window was open.
- Anything from an excluded site. Browsertrail ships with an exclusion list already populated: retail and investment banks, payment and cryptocurrency services, the major webmail providers, password managers, single sign-on and two-factor providers, and patient and health-record portals. You can add or remove sites at any time.
- Any page whose address indicates a credential or payment step — sign-in, checkout, payment, billing, password reset, verification, one-time-code and two-factor pages — on any site, whether or not that site is excluded.
- Any address carrying a token, authorisation code, session identifier, password, signature or API key as a parameter.
- Anything on
localhost, a private network address, or a.localor.internalname. - The contents of form fields, passwords, or anything you type into a page — see section 1.2 for how that is stripped before extraction.
3. What is sent to our servers
Browsertrail contacts exactly one service: our own, at api.syntaximos.com. It contacts no other server for any reason, and its content security policy permits no other destination. These are the complete set of requests it makes on its own:
| When | What is sent |
|---|---|
| You click "Log in" | A request for a one-time handshake code, and the name of this extension. Nothing about you is sent. |
| You approve the sign-in on syntaximos.com | The handshake code, plus your syntaximos.com session cookie, so we can attach the browser to your account. |
| After sign-in, then at most every 15 minutes while you are using it, and roughly every 6 hours in the background | Your account's user ID and the word browsertrail, so we can answer whether your plan is Free or Pro. |
| You click a locked Pro feature | Your browser opens our pricing page, sometimes with a parameter naming which feature you clicked, so we can see which features people want. This is an ordinary page visit that you initiate by clicking. |
No page, no address, no page title, no page text, no bookmark, no search query, and no count of any of those is included in any of these requests. If our service cannot be reached, the extension keeps your last known plan for 48 hours and then falls back to Free; your data on your device is unaffected either way. Logging out removes the session token from this browser.
3.1 Feedback you choose to send
The extension has a feedback form. If you fill it in and press Send, we receive the message you wrote, which kind of feedback you marked it as, and the identity of the account sending it, so that we can reply to you. Nothing is attached to it automatically. You can see everything you have sent, and our replies, inside the extension, and delete any of it from there.
3.2 Copy diagnostics
Beside the feedback form there is a Copy diagnostics button. It uploads nothing. It places a block of text on your clipboard, and you decide whether to paste it anywhere. Every line of it is a count, a timing, a version or a setting:
- The extension version.
- The usage counters described in section 1.6.
- How many pages, how many of those have text indexed, how many visits, and how many bytes the index occupies.
- The database schema version, the SQLite version, and whether the index reports itself healthy.
- Which optional permissions you have granted — and, for site access, how many sites, never which ones.
- Whether page text and history indexing are on, how many exclusions you have, and your retention setting.
It never contains an address, a domain, a page title, or a search term. It is built only when you press the button, never in the background.
4. Your account
A free Browsertrail account is required to use the extension. When you register at https://syntaximos.com/register we collect:
- Your email address — used to identify your account, to carry your licence between your machines, to send you essential service messages (password resets, licence and receipt information), and to answer you if you contact support.
- Your name, if you choose to provide one.
- A password, which is stored only as a salted one-way hash. We cannot read it.
4.1 Marketing email
At signup you choose whether you want product news and updates. If you say no, we send you only essential service messages. If you say yes, every email we send carries a one-click unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing takes effect immediately. We do not pass your email address to anyone else for their own marketing, ever.
4.2 Payment
Browsertrail Pro is sold through our payment processor, Stripe. Your card details go directly to Stripe and are never seen by, sent to, or stored on our servers. We keep only the fact that a purchase succeeded and what it entitles you to. Stripe's privacy policy is at https://stripe.com/privacy.
4.3 Deleting your account
You can delete your account at any time from https://syntaximos.com/dashboard, or by emailing support@syntaximos.com. Deletion is immediate: your email address, your name and your account record are erased from our systems as soon as the deletion is confirmed. The only thing we keep afterwards is a record of any completed purchase, for the period in section 6, because we are required to be able to account for money we have been paid. Deleting your account does not touch the index on your own computer — that is yours, and you remove it from the Privacy Center or by uninstalling the extension.
5. Free, Pro, and what the difference does not change
Recording never waits for sign-in and never depends on your plan. The index on your device is complete from the first minute, and the 7-day limit on the Free plan is applied when you search, not when pages are stored — which is why upgrading unlocks your older pages retroactively rather than starting a new collection.
We are telling you this plainly because it is a fact about your data: on the Free plan, the extension holds pages on your device that it is not currently showing you. Nothing about them is sent anywhere on either plan, the retention settings in section 6 apply to both, and delete-everything deletes everything on both.
6. How long things are kept
| Data | Retained |
|---|---|
| Visits | On your device, for as long as your retention setting says — 365 days by default. Older visit records are removed automatically. |
| Page text | On your device, 180 days by default, and then dropped only from pages you saw once and barely read. Pages you return to, or spent real time on, keep their text. Text is also trimmed to stay inside a storage budget. |
| Closed tabs | On your device, 30 days. |
| Your searches | On your device, until you clear them or delete everything. |
| Your account record and email address | On our servers, until you delete your account. |
| Feedback you sent us | On our servers, until you delete it or delete your account. |
| Purchase records | 1 year. Stripe keeps its own record of the transaction independently, under its policy. |
| Server request logs | 90 days, then deleted. |
7. Your control over what is stored
- See it. The Privacy Center shows how many pages and visits are stored and how much space they occupy.
- Pause it. One click, or a keyboard shortcut you can assign, stops the extension remembering anything. A badge on the toolbar icon shows when memory is off.
- Exclude a site. Add any site to the exclusion list and nothing from it is ever recorded.
- Forget a site. Deletes everything already stored from that site and stops recording it in future, in one action.
- Export it. Download everything as a JSON file, at any time. This is free, it is not a Pro feature, and it will not become one. You can import that file back later.
- Set how long it is kept. Both retention windows in section 6 are yours to change.
- Delete it. Remove everything the extension has stored, permanently.
8. Why Browsertrail asks for each browser permission
Chrome shows a list of permissions when you install. Here is what each one is for, and what it is not used for.
tabs— Read the titles and addresses of your open tabs, so search can find a tab you already have open and jump to it.bookmarks— Read your bookmarks and their folder names so they are searchable by folder as well as by title.sessions— Read Chrome's own list of recently closed tabs, so you can reopen one.storageandunlimitedStorage— Keep the search index on your device. A full-text index over years of browsing is large, and without the unlimited variant Chrome may silently discard it to reclaim space.sidePanel— Draw the Browsertrail panel alongside your page.offscreen— Host the local database. A Chrome extension cannot run a database engine in its background worker, so it runs in a hidden document belonging to the extension. Nothing is displayed there and nothing is sent from it.idle— Tell whether you are actually at the machine, so time on a page is measured as attention rather than as a tab left open overnight.alarms— Schedule the background cleanup, the history import, and the six-hourly plan re-check, so that our service is not contacted repeatedly.favicon— Show each result's site icon from Chrome's own cache instead of fetching it from the site over the network.scripting— Run the page-text reader described in section 1.2. It grants nothing on its own: without the optional site access below, there is no page it can run on.cookies, plus access tosyntaximos.comandapi.syntaximos.com— Read the one sign-in cookie Syntaximos sets after you approve the extension, and check your plan. These two are the only sites the extension is able to reach; it reads no other cookie on any other site.- Browsing history (optional) — Requested only if you turn it on, from the options page, never at install. It lets the extension search your existing history. Turning it off deletes what was imported.
- Site access (optional) — Requested only if you turn on page-text search, and you choose whether to grant it for all sites or only for particular ones. Withdrawing it stops the reader. Excluded sites stay excluded regardless of what you grant.
9. What Browsertrail does not contain
For the avoidance of doubt, the extension contains:
- No analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no usage measurement sent anywhere, and no "anonymous" statistics.
- No advertising, and no advertising identifiers.
- No third-party scripts, SDKs, tracking pixels, content delivery networks, or fingerprinting. Every file it needs, including its fonts and its database engine, is inside the package you installed.
- No remotely-loaded or remotely-executed code. Everything Browsertrail runs is contained in the package reviewed by the Chrome Web Store.
- No screenshots, no screen recording, no video, no audio, no microphone or camera access.
10. Sharing and disclosure
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for anyone else's advertising or marketing. We could not sell your browsing data if we wanted to, because we never receive it. We disclose personal data only:
- To the service providers who operate our infrastructure and payments on our behalf, and only to the extent they need it to provide that service.
- Where we are legally required to, such as in response to a valid legal request.
- To a successor entity in the event of a merger or acquisition, in which case this policy continues to apply to the data transferred.
11. Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, export, or delete the personal data we hold about you, to object to or restrict how we use it, and to withdraw consent to marketing email at any time. You can exercise all of these by emailing support@syntaximos.com, and we will respond within 30 days. For the data on your own device you do not need to ask us at all — the export and delete controls in section 7 are immediate and unconditional.
If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, our legal bases for processing are: performance of a contract (holding your account so the extension works and your licence follows you), legitimate interests (keeping the service secure and working, and answering the feedback you send us), and consent (marketing email, which you may withdraw at any time). You also have the right to complain to your local data protection authority.
If you are a California resident, you have the rights described in the CCPA/CPRA, including the right to know, delete, and correct. We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined by that law.
Where your data is processed
Syntaximos LLC is established in the United States, and the account data described in this policy is stored and processed there. If you use Browsertrail from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or elsewhere, the account data you give us is sent to and held in the United States, which may protect personal data differently from your own country. Your index is unaffected by this: it never leaves your device, so it is never transferred anywhere.
12. Children
Browsertrail is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has given us personal data, email support@syntaximos.com and we will delete it.
13. Security
Traffic between the extension and our service is encrypted with HTTPS. Passwords are stored only as salted one-way hashes. The extension's sign-in record is signed, so a tampered copy is discarded rather than trusted. Because your index never reaches us, there is no server-side store of your browsing that could be breached.
14. Changes to this policy
If we change this policy we will update the date at the top. If a change materially affects how we handle your personal data, we will tell you in the extension or by email before it takes effect. A change that introduced any form of data collection would be announced in the extension itself before it took effect.
15. Contact
Questions about this policy, or about your data: