Privacy Policy

Effective Date: July 21, 2026

🛡️ Our Core Privacy Guarantee

Tide - Browsing Time Tracker is built with a strict offline-first, zero-telemetry architecture. All browsing duration logs, site statistics, and productivity metrics are calculated and stored 100% locally on your browser. Your data is never collected, sold, transmitted to external servers, or shared with third parties.

1. Information Processed Locally

Tide processes the following information locally on your computer to provide time tracking analytics:

Domain Hostnames: The extension inspects the domain names of your active browser tabs (e.g., github.com) to measure focus duration per website.
Time Duration Logs: Seconds spent per website domain aggregated by day, week, and month.
User Preference Settings: Custom productivity classifications (Productive, Neutral, Distracting) and UI theme settings configured by you.

What We DO NOT Collect: We do not collect names, email addresses, IP addresses, browsing history contents, keystrokes, form entries, credentials, or personal information of any kind.

2. How Your Local Data is Used

All data processed by Tide is used exclusively to display personal analytics directly to you within your local extension interface:

Generating daily and weekly focus time heatmaps and charts.
Calculating your overall Productivity Pulse score.
Creating downloadable PNG image snapshots and PDF report files on your request.

3. Browser Permissions & Justification

Tide requests only the minimal set of browser permissions required to perform local time tracking:

Permission	Purpose
storage	Persists your usage logs and productivity settings locally using `chrome.storage.local`.
idle	Detects when your computer is locked or idle to automatically pause active timers.
alarms	Schedules periodic background heartbeats to flush active timers cleanly.
tabs	Observes active tab switches to assign browsing duration to the active domain.
<all_urls>	Extracts active tab hostnames and loads favicon icons for site identification in your dashboard.

4. Data Storage & User Control

Your data stays under your total control at all times:

Storage Location: All logs remain in your local browser storage (chrome.storage.local).
Data Deletion: You can clear all tracked data at any time by opening the extension Settings page and clicking "Reset All Data", or by uninstalling the extension.

5. Remote Code & Third Parties

In accordance with Chrome Web Store Manifest V3 guidelines, Tide does not execute remote code. All code, scripts, and styling are 100% self-contained within the extension package. No third-party tracking scripts, analytics SDKs, or ad networks are integrated.