Privacy Policy

Last updated: 24 August 2026

Notestark collects nothing and transmits nothing. There is no account, no sign-in, no analytics and no third party. Nothing you read, select or write is sent anywhere.

Everything you mark stays on the computer you marked it on.

This policy covers the Notestark extension for Chrome, which is the only Notestark product you can install today, and this website. The Notestark note app is still in development; when it exists, this policy will be extended to describe it before it ships, and the date above will change with it.

What the extension stores

To bring your highlights back when you reopen a document, the extension has to remember where they were. For each highlight it saves, on your device only:

Stored	Why it is needed
The text you selected	To find the same passage again after the page reloads
About 32 characters before and after it	To find the passage again even if the document is edited and it moves
Its position in the document	Checked first, because it is the cheapest way to relocate a mark
The colour and underline you chose	To draw the mark the way you left it
The document address and title	To know which document a set of marks belongs to
A fingerprint of the document text	So renaming or moving a local file does not lose its marks

Being direct about the first row: the passages you highlight are excerpts of the page you are reading, and they are saved. That is unavoidable for a highlighter — but they are saved locally and nowhere else.

Where it is stored

In chrome.storage.local, an area that belongs to the extension on your own machine. Two deliberate choices sit behind that:

Not in cookies. Cookies are attached to requests and sent to servers. Your highlights never are.
Not in the page’s own storage. If they lived there, the website could read them and could erase them.

It is local storage, not Chrome’s sync storage, so your marks are not copied to your Google account and do not travel to your other devices.

Translation, and the one thing that is downloaded

Translation is optional and runs on your device, using the translator built into Chrome. The passage you translate is not sent to a translation service, to us, or to anyone else.

Being precise rather than flattering: the first time you use a language pair, Chrome downloads a language model. That download is made by Chrome, not by this extension, and it carries no page text — it fetches the model, nothing about what you are reading. After it, translation works with no network at all.

If you never press the translate button, no model is ever downloaded.

What is never collected

No browsing history, and no list of the sites you visit
No personally identifying information — no name, email, or account of any kind
No passwords, form input, or anything you type into a page
No analytics, telemetry, usage statistics, crash reports or fingerprinting
No advertising identifiers, and nothing is sold or shared with anyone

Permissions, and what each is for

Permission	Used for
`storage`	Keeping your highlights on the device
`activeTab`	Reading the current tab’s address, only to tell you whether highlighting is available there
`scripting`	Turning the highlighter on for a site after you have enabled it
`file:///*`	The main purpose: local `.md` and `.html` files. Chrome keeps this behind its own switch, which only you can turn on
`:///` (optional)*	Websites. Never requested at install — only when you press the button in the popup, and revocable the same way

You stay in control

Pressing the same colour or underline again removes it.
One button clears every highlight on the page, behind a confirmation step.
Website access can be withdrawn at any time from the extension’s popup, or from chrome://extensions.
Uninstalling the extension deletes everything it stored. Chrome removes the extension’s storage area with it; nothing is left behind, because there was never a copy anywhere else.

This website

The pages on notestark.com are static files. They set no cookies, run no analytics, embed no third-party scripts, fonts or trackers, and ask you for nothing.

As with any website, the server that delivers these pages writes ordinary access logs — IP address, time, the page requested and the browser’s user-agent string. They exist to keep the server running and secure, are not used to build a profile of anyone, are not shared, and are discarded on a rolling basis.

Support runs on a public GitHub issue tracker, so nothing you send us arrives privately and no inbox of contact addresses exists. What you post there is held by GitHub under GitHub’s own privacy policy, and is visible to anyone.

Children

Notestark is not directed at children and collects no information from anyone, including children.

Changes to this policy

If this policy ever changes, the date at the top changes with it. Should a future version of the extension, or the app, ever need to send anything anywhere, it would be described here first, and it would be optional.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or about what Notestark does, can be raised on the public issue tracker: github.com/cansuk/doc-highlighter/issues

It is a public tracker, so what you write there is visible to anyone. There is no contact address that reaches us privately — setting one up would mean holding an inbox of people’s email addresses, which is the one kind of data this project has managed to avoid so far. The support page says what to include, and what to leave out.

The extension source is public under GPL-3.0, so every statement above can be checked against the code.