Privacy Policy — Reading Trail

Last updated: 28 August 2026

Summary

Reading Trail does not collect, store, or transmit any personal data. There are no servers, no analytics, no tracking, and no third parties involved.

What the extension does

Reading Trail is a visual reading aid. When you switch it on, it highlights the text under your mouse cursor with a highlight that fades out behind you as you read.

To do this, the extension reads the position of your cursor and identifies the text at that position on the page you are viewing. This happens entirely inside your browser, in memory, for as long as the highlight is displayed. This information is never recorded, never saved, and never sent anywhere. Highlights are drawn using the browser's native CSS Custom Highlight API, which means the extension does not alter the content of the pages you visit.

Data we do not collect

• No personally identifiable information (name, email, address, age, identifiers)
• No browsing or web history, no page URLs, no page titles
• No page content — text, images, or any other content of the sites you visit
• No location data
• No keystrokes, clicks, or mouse movement logs
• No authentication, financial, or health information

Settings stored on your device

The extension saves your own display preferences so they persist between sessions:

• The selected mode (word trail or text block)
• The trail length, in characters
• Your chosen highlight colours and whether the gradient is enabled
• Whether the highlighter is currently switched on

These values are stored using Chrome's storage API. They stay in your own browser profile. If you have Chrome sync enabled, Chrome may synchronise them across your own devices under your own Google account — this is handled by Chrome, not by this extension, and the developer has no access to it.

Network activity

The extension makes no network requests of any kind. All code is contained in the extension package; no remote code is loaded or executed.

Third parties

No data is sold, shared, or transferred to any third party, for any purpose. There are no advertising, analytics, or tracking libraries in the extension.

Permissions

• storage — to save your display preferences, as described above.
• Access to the websites you visit — required so the highlighter can work on whichever page you are reading. It is used only to locate the text under your cursor and draw the highlight. It is not used to read, collect, or transmit page content.

Removing your data

Uninstalling the extension removes the stored preferences. There is no other data to delete, because none is held anywhere else.

Changes to this policy

If the extension's data practices ever change, this page will be updated before the change is released, and the date at the top will be revised.

Contact

Questions about this policy: YOUR_EMAIL_HERE