Privacy policy.

Written by the developer, not by a law firm. Plain language, the full picture, nothing buried. The technical companion — every permission and every network call — lives at /transparency.

§01Who is behind this

Simple = Select + Search (SSS) is an independent browser extension, built and run by its developer since 2011 — not a company with a data department. This policy covers the two things we operate: the browser extension (Chrome, Firefox, Edge) and this website (simpleselectsearch.com). The fastest way to reach a human about any of it is the contact form.

§02The extension: what leaves your browser

Your searches don’t.When you select text and pick an engine, your browser opens that engine’s URL directly — exactly as if you had typed the query into its search box. The selected text is never sent to us, to Google Analytics, or to anyone other than the engine you chose. Your engines, sets, and settings are stored in your browser’s local extension storage. We don’t run a server that holds your configuration.

What we do count: usage, pseudonymously. The extension sends a small event to Google Analytics 4 when you use one of its features, so we know what is actually being used and which engines matter to people. It never includes what you search or the sites you visit — but because the events share a persistent install identifier (see the field table), we call this pseudonymous data, not anonymous. That is five events in total — this is all of them, and there are no others:

Every one of them carries the same short list of fields, and nothing beyond it:

Notice what is not there: no page addresses, no engine names you wrote, no counts of how many engines or sets you keep, and above all nothing you selected or typed. The open events say only that a window was opened, never what was in it.

The honest caveat. It applies to one field, search_engine_domain. We send only the hostname of the engine you used — never the full URL template, its path, or its parameters. But if you created a custom engine pointing at a private or intranet host, that hostname can by itself reveal that an internal service exists (say, kb.mycompany.internal). We deliberately dropped engine names and full URL templates from the payload; the domain is the one thing that remains. The caveat does not extend to catalog_engine: that name comes from our own published catalog, so it cannot contain anything of yours.

On by default, and there’s no toggle yet.In v3.0 this counting is enabled by default and the settings page does not yet have an opt-out switch — that’s the honest state of it, and an opt-out is planned for a later release. If you upgraded from v2, your previous “anonymous usage data” preference carries over. Uninstalling the extension stops all events immediately. Google processes these events as our analytics provider under Google’s privacy policy; we keep event data in Google Analytics for at most 14 months.

Two other network calls, both boring.Browsing the engine catalog fetches a public JSON list from simpleselectsearch.com (a plain GET — no identifiers attached by us). And when Pro licensing ships (v3.1), activating a license will send your license key and a per-install device ID to simpleselectsearch.com to validate it — nothing else. That’s the whole network surface; the itemized list is on /transparency.

§03This website

Visit counting. The site uses Google Analytics 4 to count page visits. It sets the standard first-party _ga cookies to tell visits apart; we use it only for aggregate traffic counts — no advertising features, no remarketing, and no cross-site tracking by us. There are no ad networks or other third-party trackers here.

The contact form.If you write to us, we store what you submit (your message and the email address you give us) in our database and it is emailed to the developer. It’s used for one thing: reading it and replying. No marketing lists, no sharing with anyone. If you want a past message deleted, ask through the same form and it will be.

§04Who we share data with

One party: Google, as the processor behind Google Analytics 4, for the extension usage events and the site visit counting described above. We do not sell data, trade data, or share it with advertisers, data brokers, or anyone else. There is nothing else to share — we never had your searches, your browsing, or your identity in the first place.

§05Your choices

Usage counting: v3.0 has no in-extension opt-out yet (see §02 — planned). Uninstalling stops everything; nothing persists server-side that can identify you afterwards. Contact data: ask via the contact formand we’ll delete your messages. Questions:because analytics events carry only a random install ID, we cannot look up “your” events even if you ask us to — that’s by design.

§06Changes to this policy

When the data surface changes, this page changes with it — the effective date at the top moves, and notable changes are called out in the changelog. No silent edits.