What Briefly stores, and what leaves your browser

1. The short version

• Briefly does nothing until you click its icon. It has no content script and no background activity, so it is not running on the pages you read.
• On the free tier, we receive nothing at all. Your page text goes from your browser directly to the model provider whose key you configured.
• On Pro, page text reaches our server carrying no identifier of you — the request that proves your licence and the request that carries your reading are separate calls, by design.
• There is no analytics, no tracking and no advertising. We do not sell or share personal information, and there is no pipeline that could.
• Everything you save stays on your device until you delete it.

2. What Briefly stores, and where

All of it is in chrome.storage.local, on your own machine. None of it is uploaded, backed up by us, or readable by us.

3. What is sent on the free tier

One request, to one recipient, and that recipient is the model provider you chose in Settings. It is made only when you click the Briefly icon on a page with a readable article in it.

The request contains:

• the title and article text of the page you are on;
• the model id you selected;
• your API key, as authentication to that provider.

It does not pass through any server of ours. Briefly’s own server is not in the path and receives nothing about it — not the page, not the URL, not the fact that it happened.

Two outcomes send nothing at all: a page with no readable article, and a page short enough that reading it is quicker than summarising it. Both say so on screen.

4. What is sent on Pro

On Pro we run the model, so page text does reach our server. It is deliberately arranged so that the server cannot connect that text to you.

Two separate requests, on purpose

• The licence check sends your install identifier and no page text. It returns an opaque token that records a tier and an expiry and nothing else. The token is valid for one hour.
• The summarise request sends the page title and article text with that token, and no install identifier of any kind. There is no account, cookie, or device value attached to it.

Because the token records only a tier, the part of our server that handles page text is structurally unable to learn whose reading it is handling. This is a build-time guarantee rather than a policy promise: the packaged extension is checked before every release and rejected if an identifier ever appears beside page text.

Abuse limits

To stop one licence being shared across a hundred machines, the server derives a salted hash of a device value. It is not reversible without a secret held only on the server, it is retained for 48 hours and then deleted, and it is never joined to a licence, an email address or a page.

The translation request works the same way: the claim text and the target language, with the same opaque token and no identifier.

Article text is used to produce your summary and is not retained afterwards. It is not stored, logged, used for training, or shared with anyone other than the model vendor that produces the response.

5. What Briefly never collects

• Analytics, telemetry or usage events of any kind.
• Your browsing history, or a record of which pages you summarised.
• Your name, email address or account — there is no account.
• Cookies, advertising identifiers or cross-site tracking.
• Anything at all from pages you did not explicitly click the icon on.

We do not sell, rent or share personal information, and we do not use it for advertising or for training any model of our own. There is no data pipeline in the product that could do either.

6. Permissions, and what each is for

Briefly requests no host access at install. A fresh install can reach nothing, which is why Chrome shows no site-access warning when you add it.

7. Other companies involved

• The model provider you choose (free tier) receives your page text directly, under the API agreement you hold with them. Their privacy terms govern what happens next. Thirteen are offered and you pick one.
• The model vendor behind Pro receives page text from our server to produce your summary, without any identifier of you, under a commercial agreement that excludes training on submitted content.
• Freemius, Inc. is our reseller and Merchant of Record for Pro. They handle checkout, payment, tax and invoicing, and hold whatever billing information you give them. We never receive your card details.

There are no other third parties. There is no analytics vendor and no ad network.

8. How long anything is kept

• On your device: until you delete it. Saved summaries, your key and your settings stay until you clear them or remove the extension.
• Page text on our server (Pro): for the duration of the request that produced your summary. It is not written to storage or to logs.
• The tier token (Pro): one hour, then it expires and is discarded.
• The salted abuse hash (Pro): 48 hours, then deleted.
• Licence records: kept by Freemius for as long as your purchase requires, under their terms.

9. Your choices

Because almost everything is local, most of these take effect immediately and need no request to us.

• Stop Briefly reaching the network: remove your key in Settings, which also withdraws the host permission. Chrome’s own extension settings will revoke site access at any time.
• Delete your data: clear your saved summaries in Briefly, or remove the extension, which deletes everything it stored.
• Revoke a provider’s copy of your key: delete the key in that provider’s dashboard. It stops working instantly, everywhere.
• Ask us anything about your data: email us. Since we hold no identifier for a free install, there is usually nothing of yours for us to find — which is the intended outcome rather than an evasion.

10. This website

These pages set no cookies, load no third-party fonts, scripts or images, and run no analytics. The only thing stored in your browser is your light or dark theme choice, which never leaves it.

Our web host records ordinary server access logs, as every web server does. We do not use them to build any profile of visitors.

11. Children

Briefly is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect information from them. Since the extension collects no personal information from anyone, there is nothing of a child’s for us to hold.

12. Changes, and how to reach us

If this policy changes, the date at the top of this page changes with it and the new version is published here. A change that materially reduces your privacy would be announced in the extension itself, not only on this page.

Briefly is made by WaaFaa. Questions about this policy go to our support inbox.