smartdiary for your browser

An extension for Chrome and Firefox that remembers which sites you spend time on and hands that to smartdiary on the same computer. Each day in your journal can then tell you what your day online was about. The account is written by the local model, from the page titles.

It needs the smartdiary desktop app, and it talks to nothing else.

Setting it up

1. Install smartdiary.
2. In smartdiary, open Settings → Remember what you saw online and press Get it for Chrome (or Firefox). Edge and Brave use the Chrome one.
3. Install the extension. Its settings page opens and asks smartdiary to pair.
4. smartdiary comes to the front and asks Allow Chrome to send what you browse? Press Allow.

If smartdiary was not open, open it and press Pair on the extension’s settings page (toolbar button → Settings). Nothing is noted until it is paired.

What it notes

One stretch at a time: the page in the focused window’s active tab, from the moment it came to the front until something changed. Something changing means another tab, another page, the browser losing focus, or two minutes with no input. Idle time still counts while the tab is playing sound, so a video counts and a walk away from the desk does not.

For each stretch it keeps the address, the page title, when it started and how many seconds it lasted. Once a minute it hands what it has to smartdiary.

What it does not

• It never reads what is on a page, only its address and title.
• It never runs in private or incognito windows.
• It never notes a site on its exclusion list. A site covers everything under it: bank.example also covers online.bank.example.
• It never notes anything that is not an ordinary http or https page.
• It never contacts anything but the smartdiary app on this computer, at 127.0.0.1.

Privacy policy

This policy covers the smartdiary browser extension for Chrome and Firefox.

What is collected. The address and title of the web pages you have in front of you, when you viewed them, and for how long. This is collected only after you have paired the extension with smartdiary, and only while it is not paused.

Where it goes. Only to the smartdiary app on your own computer, over the loopback address 127.0.0.1. It is never sent to kumulativ, to any server, or to any third party. kumulativ never receives, sees or stores it.

What smartdiary keeps. smartdiary drops everything after the ? in an address before storing it. The one exception is the words typed into a search engine, which are kept as a list of the day’s searches. It keeps the day’s pages for 60 days, inside the diary it encrypts with your password, on your computer. A day’s written account stays until you delete it. Cloud sync and the diary export do not include any of it.

While it waits. If smartdiary is closed or locked, the extension keeps what it noted in the browser’s local extension storage, on your computer, until smartdiary can take it. At most 20,000 visits are kept; the oldest go first.

What is never collected. The contents of pages, form input, passwords, cookies, anything from private or incognito windows, and anything from sites on your exclusion list.

Sale and use. The data is not sold, not shared, and not used for advertising, credit, or anything other than showing you your own day online in your own diary.

Deleting it. In the extension, Throw away what is waiting deletes everything not yet handed over. In smartdiary, Forget this day online on a journal day, or Forget everything it reported in Settings, deletes what was kept. Removing the extension deletes its local storage.

Changes. Changes to this policy are published on this page.