Lighter Privacy Policy
Lighter does not collect, sell or share your personal data. Everything it does runs inside your browser, and everything it stores stays on your device. It has no accounts, no analytics and no servers of its own.
What Lighter does
Lighter is a Chrome extension that blocks trackers, ad scripts and heavy media to make pages lighter, and shows an estimate of the data and CO₂ this saves.
Data stored on your device
Lighter saves the following in Chrome's local extension storage (chrome.storage.local).
It never leaves your device, and nobody else (including us) can see it:
- Your settings: which features are on, the country you picked for the carbon estimate,
and any sites where you have paused Lighter (saved as hostnames, such as
example.com). - Daily totals: how many requests, trackers and ad slots were blocked each day, and how many seconds of autoplay video were stopped. These are plain counts. They do not include which pages you visited.
- Green-hosting results (only if you turn on that option): whether a hostname is served from renewable energy, kept for up to 30 days.
You can reset your totals in Lighter's settings. Removing the extension deletes all of this data.
How Lighter reads web pages
To block trackers and ads on every site, Lighter needs permission to run on all websites. It checks network requests against built-in block lists, hides ad slots and pauses autoplaying video on the page you're viewing. This all happens on your device. Lighter does not record, store or send the pages you visit, what's on them or what you type.
Optional green-hosting check
This option is off by default. If you turn it on in settings, Lighter asks the
Green Web Foundation's public Greencheck API
whether the server behind a blocked request runs on renewable energy, so it can make the CO₂ estimate more accurate.
For each lookup, it sends only the bare hostname (for example tracker.example.com). It never sends the full address, the page you were on, cookies or anything that identifies you.
As with any web request, the Green Web Foundation can see your IP address. Their own
privacy statement covers how they handle it.
You can turn this option off at any time.
What Lighter does not do
- It does not collect personal information, browsing history, page content, keystrokes or location.
- It does not use analytics, telemetry or advertising SDKs.
- It does not sell, rent or give user data to anyone.
- It does not use data for anything beyond its single purpose, and never to decide creditworthiness or for lending.
- It does not load or run code from outside the extension package.
Children
Lighter collects no personal data from anyone, including children under 13.
Changes
If this policy changes, we'll update this page and the date at the top. If Lighter ever starts collecting data, we'll ask for your consent first.
Contact
Questions about privacy? Open an issue at github.com/greenethirteen/lighter-privacy.