Last updated 26 August 2026
Privacy policy
Your shelf stays on your device. No account. No clip uploads. No screenshot processing server. No content analytics.
Kipside has no servers. There is no backend to send anything to, which is why none of the above is a policy decision that could quietly change in a future release — it is a property of how the extension is built.
What Kipside stores, and where
Everything is stored locally, in your browser's own storage, on your device:
| Data | Where | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Clip text, code, links, colours | IndexedDB (local) | So you can find and reuse them |
| Screenshots and images | IndexedDB (local) | Same |
| Source page URL and title | IndexedDB (local) | So a clip can tell you where it came from |
| Text read from images by OCR, if enabled | IndexedDB (local) | So screenshots are searchable |
| Your settings | Browser extension storage | Theme, retention, excluded sites, pause state |
None of this is transmitted anywhere. There is no sync in this version.
What Kipside never does
- Collect copied text for analytics
- Upload screenshots for any purpose
- Send source URLs to any service
- Build a profile from the sites your clips came from
- Sell or share usage information
- Inject advertising
- Monetise clipboard content
- Access sites unrelated to capture
Chrome Web Store policy requires that any data an extension collects be strictly necessary to its disclosed single purpose. Kipside's single purpose is to capture, retain and retrieve clipboard items and user-initiated captures while browsing — and all of the data above is used only for exactly that, only on your machine.
Analytics
There is no analytics SDK in this extension. No product analytics, no crash reporting, no usage telemetry, no remote configuration.
If measurement is ever added it will be opt-in, off by default, and will never carry clip content, source URLs, page titles, OCR output, or any part of what you copied.
Local OCR
If you enable “Read text in screenshots”, Kipside reads the text in captured images so you can search for it. This runs entirely on your device using a text-recognition engine bundled inside the extension. No image is sent anywhere. The feature is off by default.
Site access
Kipside requests no access to any website when you install it.
Screenshots and Pick Text work through Chrome's activeTab mechanism: pressing a Kipside shortcut or using its right-click menu grants temporary, one-off access to that page and nothing else. If you want Kipside to automatically capture what you copy on a particular site, you grant that site individually and can revoke it at any time in Settings.
Permissions, one by one
| Permission | Why it's needed |
|---|---|
clipboardRead | Reading an image or text you paste into Kipside, on your explicit action. It is never polled. This is the only way to support image clipboard history, because a page's copy event cannot expose image bytes. |
clipboardWrite | Putting a clip back on your clipboard when you click it. |
sidePanel, storage | Being the side panel, and keeping your shelf and settings. |
offscreen | A hidden document for clipboard writes when no Kipside window is focused, and for running local OCR. |
activeTab, scripting | Temporary access to the current page after you press a Kipside shortcut or use its menu, so it can capture a region or pick text. |
contextMenus | The three right-click items: save selection, save image, capture region. |
alarms | Running retention cleanup on schedule. |
unlimitedStorage | Screenshots are large; without it the browser may evict your shelf to reclaim space. |
nativeMessaging | Optional. Requested only if you connect Kipside Bridge. |
Kipside deliberately does not request the tabs permission, which carries a “read your browsing history” warning, nor broad site access at install.
Sensitive content
Clipboard history can contain passwords, API keys, one-time codes and customer data.
Kipside does not attempt to detect secrets automatically. No tool can do this reliably, and claiming otherwise would be unsafe. What it gives you instead:
- A list of sites that are never captured. Several password managers are on it by default, and you can add your own.
- Pause, from the panel header or with a keyboard shortcut. While paused the clipboard is not read at all.
- Retention — clips expire on their own, in 7 days by default.
- Clear everything, at any time, in one action.
- Incognito windows are excluded unless you explicitly enable Kipside for them in Chrome.
Two pages the extension opens
Kipside opens kipside.site/hello once, when you first install it, and Chrome opens kipside.site/bye if you uninstall it. Both are ordinary web pages on this site.
Being precise, because the rest of this policy is: loading any web page means the server hosting it sees a request — an IP address and a timestamp — the same as visiting any page here. Neither URL carries an identifier, a version, an install age, or anything else about you or your clips. They are plain addresses with no query parameters, and there is no account to tie a request to. We do not use those requests to count, profile or contact anyone.
Kipside Bridge
If you install the optional Bridge, it runs on your computer and communicates with the extension over Chrome's native messaging channel — a local, on-device channel. It sends clipboard items and screenshots to the extension on the same machine. It makes no network connections.
Your data, on your terms
- Export everything to a single file, at any time. Export is free and always will be.
- Delete everything, at any time, from Settings.
- Uninstalling the extension removes its local storage.
Children
Kipside is a general-purpose utility, is not directed at children, and collects no personal information from anyone.
Changes to this policy
This document describes the behaviour of the extension as built. Any change to it will appear here and in the release notes before it ships, with the date above updated.
Contact
Questions about this policy: privacy@kipside.site