TAB BUDDY

Privacy Policy

Effective 9 July 2026 · applies to Tab Buddy v1.x

The short version: Tab Buddy has no account, no analytics, and no tracking of any kind. Your tabs and sessions are stored in your own browser. If you turn on the optional sync, your data is encrypted on your device before it leaves — we store ciphertext we cannot read. We don't collect, sell, or share anything, because there is nothing to collect.

Who we are

Tab Buddy is a product from niallcodes, an independent software project operated by Florence Publishing Ltd, United Kingdom. Contact: swingneil@gmail.com.

What Tab Buddy stores, and where

Data	Where it lives	Leaves your device?
Saved sessions — tab URLs, titles, pinned state, tab-group names/colours, window layout, scroll positions	Your browser's local storage (IndexedDB)	Never — unless you turn on encrypted sync (see below) or use Export
Crash-recovery snapshots — rolling automatic captures of your open windows	Your browser's local storage	Never. Snapshots are excluded from sync by design.
Page thumbnails (optional feature, off by default)	Your browser's local storage, downscaled and compressed	Never. Thumbnails are excluded from sync by design.
Settings & preferences	Your browser's local storage	Never
Sync records (only if you enable sync)	Encrypted on your device, then stored on our server (Cloudflare Workers KV)	Only as ciphertext — see "Encrypted sync" below

What we don't do

No accounts, sign-ups, or email collection
No analytics, telemetry, crash reporting, or usage tracking of any kind
No third-party scripts, fonts, or beacons inside the extension
No ads, and no selling or sharing of data with anyone — there is nothing to sell
Favicons are rendered via Chrome's built-in local favicon store, not fetched from third-party favicon services, so your saved URLs are not leaked to anyone for icon lookups

Encrypted sync (opt-in)

Sync is off by default. If you enable it:

Your sessions are encrypted on your device with AES-256-GCM. The key is derived from your passphrase (PBKDF2, 600,000 iterations) and the passphrase never leaves your device.
The server receives and stores only: your random Sync ID, ciphertext blobs, record timestamps, and a one-way hash of an authentication token (which is itself derived from your passphrase and cannot be reversed into it).
The server cannot see tab URLs, titles, group names, or any content — and neither can we. There is no "reset password" because there is nothing we could reset.
Thumbnails and crash snapshots are never synced at all.
Sync data is stored on Cloudflare Workers KV. Cloudflare acts as our infrastructure provider and only ever handles the ciphertext described above (Cloudflare's privacy policy).
Turning sync off stops all network activity. To remove your ciphertext from the server, delete your sessions while sync is on (deletions propagate as tombstones), then turn sync off — or email us your Sync ID and we'll delete the stored ciphertext for that ID.

Browser permissions, explained honestly

Permission	Why Tab Buddy needs it
`tabs`	Read open tabs' URLs, titles, and pinned state to save and restore sessions.
`tabGroups`	Read and recreate native Chrome tab groups — names, colours, collapsed state.
`storage` / `unlimitedStorage`	Keep your sessions, snapshots, and settings on your device.
`alarms`	Schedule the rolling crash-recovery snapshots.
`contextMenus`	The right-click "Save this tab / window" actions.
`favicon`	Show site icons from Chrome's local favicon store (instead of leaking URLs to a remote icon service).
`scripting` + `activeTab`	Save and restore page scroll positions.
"Read all sites" (`<all_urls>`) — optional, off by default	Only requested if you switch on visual thumbnails; capturing a page preview requires it. Captures are downscaled, stored locally, and never transmitted. Decline or revoke it any time — everything else keeps working.

Your data, your exit

Export everything to JSON, CSV, Markdown, or HTML at any time from the manager. Uninstalling the extension deletes all local data (Chrome removes the extension's storage). If you used sync, see above for removing server-side ciphertext.

Legal bases and your rights (UK/EU GDPR)

Tab Buddy is designed so that we do not process your personal data at all in normal use. The only data our server ever holds is opt-in, pseudonymous, client-side-encrypted sync ciphertext, processed on the legal basis of performing the sync feature you requested (Art. 6(1)(b)). You retain all rights under UK/EU data protection law — access, rectification, erasure, portability — though in practice the export button and the deletion steps above give you these directly, without needing to ask us.

Children

Tab Buddy is a general-audience productivity tool and does not knowingly collect any personal information from anyone, including children.

Changes to this policy

If we ever change how Tab Buddy handles data, we'll update this page and the "effective" date above, and call out material changes in the extension's release notes. We will never retroactively weaken the promises above for data you've already stored.