Local Lens - Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy for LocalLens

Effective Date: July 1, 2026

Thank you for choosing to use LocalLens ("we", "us", or "our"). We are committed to protecting your personal information and your right to privacy. Because LocalLens is built with privacy as its core foundational principle, our privacy policy is extremely simple: we do not collect, store, transmit, or sell any of your personal data.

1. Information We Do NOT Collect

LocalLens is a 100% on-device AI extension. This means that:

  • No Account Required: We do not ask for your email, name, or any other identifying information.
  • No Telemetry: We do not track how you use the extension, how many times you click the button, or which sites you visit.
  • No Data Transmission: The text of the web pages you summarize never leaves your local machine. We do not use API keys, and we do not send your data to external servers, cloud providers, or third-party inference engines.

2. How LocalLens Works (Local Processing)

When you click the LocalLens extension to summarize a page, the extension extracts the text from your active browser tab. This text is fed into a Small Language Model (SLM) that runs entirely inside your browser using WebGPU/WebAssembly. The summary is generated locally on your computer's hardware.

The only network activity performed by the extension is a one-time download of the open-source AI model weights from the Hugging Face Hub (approx. 330MB) the very first time you use the extension. These weights are securely cached in your browser's local storage for offline use.

3. Extension Permissions

LocalLens requires certain permissions to function. Here is exactly why we need them:

  • activeTab and scripting: Allows the extension to temporarily access and extract the readable text of the specific web page you are currently viewing only when you explicitly click the extension icon.
  • offscreen: Allows the extension to run the AI model in a hidden document leveraging your computer's hardware acceleration (WebGPU) to generate summaries quickly.
  • storage: Allows the extension to save the AI model locally on your machine so it doesn't need to be re-downloaded, as well as saving local UI states.

4. Third-Party Services

LocalLens utilizes the following open-source libraries, which operate locally:

  • Transformers.js: Used to run the AI models in the browser.
  • Mozilla Readability: Used to cleanly extract article text without ads or navigation menus.
  • Hugging Face Hub: The extension downloads the DistilBART model weights from the Hugging Face Hub upon first initialization.

We do not integrate with any analytics or tracking services (such as Google Analytics).

5. Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this privacy policy from time to time in order to reflect changes to our practices or for other operational, legal, or regulatory reasons. We encourage you to review this policy periodically.

6. Contact Us

If you have questions or comments about this Privacy Policy, please contact the developer via the Chrome Web Store support tab.

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