Privacy

This extension screenshots the pages you browse. That deserves a straight answer about where those screenshots go.

Nothing leaves your machine

Screenshots and URLs are stored only in the extension’s local IndexedDB database (BetterTabUnload) inside your own browser profile. There is no backend, no telemetry, no analytics, and no sync.

This is verifiable rather than a promise: the extension source contains no fetch, no XMLHttpRequest, no WebSocket, no navigator.sendBeacon, and no external URL of any kind. manifest.json declares no remote hosts to connect to — host_permissions is present so the extension can read pixels from and inject an overlay into the pages you visit, not to talk to them.

What is stored

Data	Where	Retention
JPEG screenshot of the visible area of tabs you view	IndexedDB store screenshots, keyed by normalized URL	Deleted after 7 days by the hourly cleanup
The same screenshot keyed by tab ID, plus its URL	IndexedDB store tabScreenshots	Deleted when the tab closes, or after 7 days
Recent screenshots for open tabs	Service worker memory	Dropped after 30 minutes, or when the worker restarts

Screenshots are captured only from tabs that are active and fully loaded. Pages under chrome://, chrome-extension://, about:, edge://, brave://, devtools://, view-source:, and file:// are skipped entirely.

Because a screenshot is a picture of the rendered page, it can contain anything that was on screen: logged-in account names, email subject lines, private messages, document contents. Treat the database as sensitive.

Incognito and private windows

The extension is not enabled in Incognito unless you explicitly allow it on chrome://extensions. Leave that off, and Incognito browsing is never captured.

Deleting the data

• Options page — lists every stored screenshot with its URL and capture time. Delete individual entries, or Clear All to empty both object stores immediately.
• Uninstalling the extension removes its IndexedDB database along with it.

The one real hazard: debug logs

DEBUG_LOGS is shipped as false specifically because of this.

When you turn it on, the service worker console records the full URL of every tab the extension touches, with an ISO timestamp. That is a browsing history log, in plain text, sitting in a DevTools console. If you save it to a file, you have written your browsing history to disk.

If you enable it to diagnose something:

• Turn it back off when you are done.
• Write any saved console output to the repository’s logs/ directory, which is gitignored. Never save it to the repository root.
• Redact URLs before sharing a log in a bug report or pasting it anywhere.

Log files (*.log, console-*.log) and the whole logs/ directory are excluded by .gitignore so that an accidental git add . cannot commit them. That is a safety net, not a reason to be careless — a file you have already pushed cannot be unpublished.