TreePad AI

TreePad AI Browser Extension — Privacy Policy

Last updated: July 13, 2026

This policy describes how the TreePad AI browser extension ("the extension") handles information. It applies only to the extension, not to the TreePad AI web app (which has its own policy at https://treepad.ai).

Summary

The extension is a companion to your TreePad AI account. It does not collect, sell, or share your personal information, does not use analytics or advertising, and does not send your browsing activity to us or to any third party. It communicates only with your own TreePad AI home server (*.treepad.ai), and only to retrieve content that you yourself created in TreePad.

What the extension does with data

One-time link tokens. When you click a cited source in TreePad, TreePad opens the source page with a short-lived, single-use token in the URL. The extension reads that token from the tab's address and sends it to your TreePad home server (https://home-server-<n>.treepad.ai/extension/resolve) to retrieve the passage to highlight, the claim being fact-checked, and citation details. The token expires within minutes and can be used only once. No other data is sent to our servers.
Page content. To locate and highlight the cited passage, the extension reads the text of the page you opened, entirely within your browser. This page content is never transmitted off your device — not to TreePad and not to anyone else.
Clipboard. When you click "Copy citation" (or, for administrators, "Debug"), the extension writes text to your clipboard. This happens only in response to your click.

What the extension stores

chrome.storage.session — the per-tab pending token and resolved passage, so the highlight survives redirects. It is cleared when the browser session ends.
chrome.storage.local — your last-used citation format (e.g. "APA"), so the extension remembers your preference. It contains no personal information.

All extension storage is local to your browser and is removed when you uninstall the extension.

What the extension does NOT do

It does not collect or transmit your browsing history, the URLs you visit, or the pages you view.
It does not track you, use cookies for tracking, or contain analytics or advertising code.
It does not sell or share any data with third parties.
It takes no action on pages that were not opened from TreePad — with no token, it reads nothing and changes nothing.

Permissions

The extension requests only the permissions needed for the above: webNavigation (to read the one-time token from the opening navigation), storage (the local storage described above), and access to *.treepad.ai (to call your own home server). Its content script runs on pages you open so it can highlight a cited passage on any site, and no-ops on pages not opened from TreePad.

Data retention and deletion

We retain no extension data on our servers. The one-time token is deleted from the home server the moment it is used (or when it expires, within minutes). To delete all local extension data, remove the extension from your browser.

Contact

Questions about this policy: privacy@treepad.ai (or the contact address published at https://treepad.ai).