Privacy Policy
For the Inkah browser extension for Chrome and Firefox.
Effective August 25, 2026
What this policy covers
This policy covers the Inkah browser extension distributed through the Chrome Web Store and Firefox Add-ons, and this page describing it.
Inkah was previously a company that also operated a website and mobile apps for iOS and Android. The company wound down in 2023 and the mobile apps have been removed from both app stores. The browser extension has since been rebuilt from scratch and released as open source under the MIT licence.
This policy replaces the earlier one published at inkah.com and effective June 8, 2022. That policy described a product with user accounts, Google sign-in, and server-side data collection. None of that exists any more. If you are looking for the policy that governed the old mobile apps, it is retained for the record but no longer applies to anything that is running.
What the extension stores, and where
Everything the extension stores is kept locally, in your own browser, on your own device. None of it is transmitted anywhere.
| What | Where it lives |
|---|---|
| Words and sentences you save, and any tags on them | IndexedDB, on your device |
| For each word you save, the page you saved it from — so you can go back to the sentence | IndexedDB, on your device, as part of that word |
| A random identifier generated on first run, so the extension can tell its own stored data apart | chrome.storage.local, on your device |
| The Chinese and Korean dictionaries (CC-CEDICT, KEDict, Vicon, lemma tables) | IndexedDB, imported once from files bundled inside the extension |
| Your settings — target language, tone colours, font size, dark mode, hover key, and similar preferences | chrome.storage.local, on your device |
Settings use chrome.storage.local rather than chrome.storage.sync. This is deliberate: local storage is not synchronised to your browser account, so your settings do not travel to your browser vendor’s servers or to your other devices.
What the extension reads
To show a definition when you hover a word, the extension has to read the text of the page you are on. That reading happens entirely inside your browser: the text is matched against the local dictionary and rendered into a pop-up. It is never sent anywhere, and it is never written to disk.
The extension does not read form fields. Hovering over an input, textarea, or any element marked contenteditable="true" returns immediately without a lookup, so passwords, payment details and anything else you type into a form field are not examined. Some rich-text editors nest their editable region differently, and a hover inside one of those can still be looked up — the lookup stays on your device either way, and nothing typed is stored or transmitted.
Your browsing is not tracked. The extension builds no history, no list of sites, no record of where you go. Pages you visit, and words you hover without saving, leave nothing behind at all.
What you save remembers where you met it. That is the one address the extension keeps, and only because it is useful: a word learned from a drama scene means something different from the same word in a news article. For saved sentences the address is shown as a link you can follow, and is included if you export your data. For individual saved words it is stored but not currently displayed. Either way it lives only with the item you saved, and deleting that deletes the address with it.
What leaves your device
Nothing is sent to Inkah. There is no Inkah server, no API, and no account system. The project is maintained as open source and has no backend of any kind.
The dictionaries are not downloaded — they ship inside the extension package and are loaded from within it on first install.
There is one case where the extension makes a network request: on Netflix and YouTube, it fetches the subtitle file for the video you are watching. That request goes to Netflix’s or YouTube’s own subtitle URL — the same server the page is already talking to, for a file the player itself is already loading — so the extension can make those subtitles hoverable. No third party is involved, and nothing about you is attached to the request.
Why the extension asks for what it asks for
| Permission | Why it is needed |
|---|---|
| storage | To keep your settings and your saved words on your device. This is the only permission the extension declares. |
| Access to the pages you visit | The pop-up dictionary works on any page, so its content script runs on all sites. It reads text only to look words up locally, and only while the extension is enabled. |
| netflix.com, youtube.com | A second, narrower script runs only on these two sites, to make burned-in subtitles selectable and hoverable. |
You can disable the extension at any time from its toolbar icon, or with Ctrl / Cmd + i. While disabled it reads nothing at all.
Chrome Web Store data declarations
The Chrome Web Store asks developers to declare which categories of user data an extension collects. Chrome counts data as collected even when it never leaves the device, so one of these is declared yes — and it stays on your machine.
| Category | Collected? | Leaves your device? |
|---|---|---|
| Personally identifiable information | No | — |
| Health information | No | — |
| Financial and payment information | No | — |
| Authentication information | No | — |
| Personal communications | No | — |
| Location | No | — |
| Web history | No | — |
| User activity | No | — |
| Website content | Yes — stored locally | Never |
We further certify that:
- We do not sell or transfer user data to third parties, outside of the approved use cases.
- We do not use or transfer user data for purposes that are unrelated to the item's single purpose.
- We do not use or transfer user data to determine creditworthiness or for lending purposes.
These are trivially true in Inkah’s case: there is no Inkah server, no account, and no analytics, so there is nothing to transfer and nobody to transfer it to.
Website content is yes because a word you save is text taken from a page, and it is kept — in IndexedDB, on your device, so the extension can show you your own vocabulary later. The address of the page you saved it from is kept with it, for the same reason. Neither is transmitted; there is nowhere to transmit them to.
Web history is no. Chrome defines that category as the list of pages a user has visited. Inkah does not build one, locally or otherwise. It has no idea where you have been — only where the words you deliberately saved came from, which is a record you created by saving them and can delete by deleting them.
Deleting what the extension holds
Because everything is stored locally, you control all of it directly and do not need to contact anyone to have data removed.
- Delete individual saved words from the extension's own interface.
- Uninstalling the extension removes all of it — saved words, settings, and the imported dictionaries — through your browser's normal extension cleanup.
- Clearing site data for the extension in your browser has the same effect.
There is nothing held on our side to request, export, or erase, so rights of access, portability and erasure under regimes such as the GDPR and CCPA have no data to operate on.
Use by children
Inkah does not collect personal information from anyone, children included. There is no sign-up, no age gate, and no profile — because there is nothing to sign up to.
Updates to this policy
If the extension’s behaviour changes in a way that affects your privacy, this page will be updated and the effective date above changed with it. Because the extension is open source, changes are also visible in the commit history.
Questions
Open an issue on the repository, or use the contact form on this site. The source is public, so if something here does not match what the code does, that is a bug worth reporting.