← Tab Activity

Privacy Policy

Tab Activity browser extension · Effective 4 July 2026

The short version: Tab Activity collects nothing. It has no server, makes no network requests, and never transmits any data anywhere. Everything it records is stored locally in your browser, on your device, under your control.

What the extension records, and where it lives

Tab Activity's single purpose is to measure the time you actively spend on websites and show it back to you. To do that, it records attention sessions: which site's tab was focused, from when to when. Each session stores the site's domain (for example youtube.com — never the full page URL), the tab's title, and start and end times.

All of this is written exclusively to your browser's local storage on your device (IndexedDB and the Chrome extension storage API). It is never sent anywhere, because the extension contains no networking code and requests no host permissions to access website content.

Page titles are kept for a maximum of 7 days to power the daily view, then discarded. Long-term history keeps only per-day totals per domain: date, domain, total focused time, session count, and longest session.

What the extension does not do

No transmission
No data ever leaves your device. There is no server, sync, backup, or account.
No analytics or telemetry
No usage statistics, crash reports, or tracking of any kind — of your browsing or of your use of the extension itself.
No page content
The extension never reads, injects into, or modifies the pages you visit. It does not request permission to access website content.
No full URLs
Only the site's domain is recorded, never the specific page address, query parameters, or anything within the page.
No incognito tracking
The extension does not run in incognito windows unless you explicitly enable that in Chrome's extension settings, and it is not designed to be enabled there.
No third parties
No third-party code, SDKs, ad networks, or data brokers are involved. Nothing is sold or shared, because nothing is collected.

Permissions, explained

Chrome asks you to grant the extension a small set of permissions. Here is exactly why each one is needed:

tabs
To know which tab is focused and the domain and title of that tab. This is the core measurement.
idle
To pause the clock when you step away from the keyboard, so idle time is not counted as attention.
alarms
To run a once-a-minute heartbeat (so sessions are truncated correctly if your machine sleeps) and a nightly aggregation of raw sessions into daily totals.
storage
To save your settings and keep track of the current session locally.
notifications
To show at most one notification per day per limit, if — and only if — you choose to set daily time limits. No limits, no notifications.

Your controls

From the extension's Options page you can: exclude any domain from ever being recorded; delete the recorded history of a single domain; hide domains from the dashboard; export all of your data as JSON or CSV; and delete all recorded data at once. Uninstalling the extension removes its stored data from your browser.

Because there is no copy of your data anywhere else, deletion is genuinely final — and if you move to a new machine, your history does not follow unless you export it yourself.

Children

Tab Activity does not collect personal information from anyone, including children.

Changes to this policy

If a future version ever changes how data is handled, this page will be updated and the effective date revised before that version is published. The promise that defines this extension — no data leaves your device — is not planned to change; a version that broke it would be a different product.

Contact

Questions about this policy or the extension can be raised on the project's GitHub repository issues page.