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TLDR: Promnesia extension isn’t collecting any browser data and isn’t transmitting your data to any external site. Not telemetry is collected or sent either.

How Promnesia works

See “How does it work” for the longer explanation, but in summary:

  • promnesia indexer runs against the files on your computer, and stores the results in the intermediate database (also on your computer)
  • promnesia server runs on your computer and exposes a local port (13131 by default), so it can communicate with the browser extension
  • promnesia extension runs in your browser and requests various data from the promnesia server

By default this all happens only within your system. The extension works in local-first/offline mode, which is one of the main goals. (However, if you want, you can set it up on an external domain, with the reverse proxy or something like that).

What data is requested from the promnesia server

There are just a few requests to the Promnesia server the extension is doing at the moment.

  • search/search_around: sends whatever you typed in the search box
  • visits: sends the current tab URL to the server (unless it’s excluded)
  • visited: sends all URLs on the current page to the server (except the excluded ones)

None of the information above is kept by the server, it only reads the data from the database. It is however possible that some of it is retained in the console logs, that would depend on how exactly you’re running the server and the log retention policy of your system.

For the maximum privacy you can use the excludelist feature, this will prevent Promnesia from processing the page/domain.

External requests

  • if you have external excludelists URLs in the extension settings, they will be updated now and then

    These excludelists are downloaded and cached locally, so no information about when and what you’re browsing gets out.

Extension permissions

  • file/http/https: the extension is meant to work on any page, hence such a broad scope this is necessary for webNavigation callbacks to work properly and update icon/sidebar
  • storage: for settings
  • webNavigation: receiving page status updates so extension kicks in on page loading
  • contextMenus: context menu actions

There permissions are required at the moment, but there is an issue for work on possibly making them optional.

  • notifications: showing notifications
  • history: to use local browsing history

    Local history isn’t strictly required, so we could omit this if people prefer.

  • bookmarks: used as one of the sources

    It can already be toggled in the settings, so the permission could be dynamic too

Security

While I have some reasonable understanding of security, I’m no expert, so would be very grateful if you flag potential issues or go through the code (especially extension).

There is some ongoing work on Dockerizing: issues/55.