Privacy policy

Last updated: August 13, 2026

Without an account

SmartHighlight works without an account. In that mode, no data of any kind leaves your browser. Your word lists, your highlights and your settings are stored on your own machine and are not transmitted anywhere.

What the extension reads

To highlight your chosen words, the extension reads the text of the pages you visit. This reading happens inside the page, in your browser. Page content is never transmitted, never stored, and never seen by us. We do not record which pages you visit.

With an account

If you choose to create an account, the following is stored on our servers so that it can be synchronised between your devices:

• Your email address.
• Either a hash of your password — we never store the password itself — or the identifier of your Google account if you signed in with Google.
• Your word lists and the terms in them.
• Your highlights: the text you highlighted, any note and tags you added, and the address and title of the page it came from.

That is all. We do not store the rest of the page, and we do not store pages on which you highlighted nothing.

Who else sees it

Nobody, except what you publish yourself. Your data is not sold, not used for advertising, and not used for any purpose other than providing the service. There are no third-party analytics or tracking services in this extension.

Shared spaces. If you publish a highlight into a shared space, that passage — with its note, its tags, the address of the page it came from and the name you chose to be shown under — becomes readable by the members of that space, and by anyone holding a read link its administrator has created. Three things are true of that, always:

• Nothing is shared by default, and no list, folder or library is ever shared as a whole. You publish one highlight at a time.
• Unpublishing takes it out of the space everywhere at once, and so does leaving the space or deleting your account.
• A read link can be withdrawn by its administrator at any moment, after which it opens nothing.

Your control

• You can download everything we hold, at any time, in a complete and reusable file, from the extension's Account screen.
• You can delete your account from the same screen. Deletion is immediate and complete: your account and all its data are removed from our servers, not merely marked as deleted.
• You can use the product without an account at all.

Retention

Deleted records and replaced versions are kept for 30 days, so that an accidental deletion or an overwrite from another device can be undone, and are then removed permanently.

Security

Traffic between the extension and our servers is encrypted in transit. Passwords are stored only as salted hashes. Session tokens are stored only as hashes, so a stolen copy of our database yields no working sessions.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what is collected, the change will be announced in the extension before it takes effect.

Contact

Write to support@smarthighlight.extly.io.