Smudge — Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2026-07-04

Smudge is a Chrome extension that lets you add sticky notes, quoted

passages, and drawings on top of any webpage, and saves them so they reappear

the next time you visit the same page.

What we collect

When you use Smudge while signed in, we store:

• A normalized page identifier — a one-way hash of the page's URL (origin

+ path, with common tracking parameters like utm_* stripped). We do not

store your full browsing history, only pages where you've created an

annotation.

• The content you create — sticky note text, quoted passages (the exact

text you selected plus a small amount of surrounding context used to

relocate it later), and drawing/shape data.

• Your Google account email and an internal user ID, obtained via Google

Sign-In, used solely to identify which annotations belong to you.

We do not collect your general browsing activity, page content beyond what

you explicitly select/annotate, or any data when you are signed out (in that

case annotations exist only for your current browser session and are not sent

to our server).

How we use it

Solely to save and restore your own annotations across visits. We do not sell,

share, or use this data for advertising, and we do not use it to train models.

Where it's stored

Annotation data and account records are stored in a Postgres database operated

by the developer (hosted on Neon), served by an application server hosted on

Vercel. Data in transit is sent over HTTPS.

Your controls

• You can sign out at any time from the extension popup; this stops

persistence but does not delete already-saved data.

• You can permanently delete your account and all associated notes/drawings

at any time via Delete my data in the extension's popup or options

page. This is immediate and irreversible.

Permissions

• host_permissions (https://*/*, http://*/*) — required so the overlay

can run on any site you visit.

• identity — used only for Google Sign-In (scopes: openid email profile).
• storage — stores only your local session token and a short-lived

offline-retry buffer for unsaved changes; your actual annotation content is

stored server-side, not in local browser storage.

Contact

Questions or data-deletion requests: claudebachao@gmail.com