Molasses privacy policy
Chrome extension · Version 2.1.3 · Last updated: 7 August 2026 · Publisher: AR Digital, Luxembourg
The whole thing, in one sentence. Molasses records nothing about what you read, contains no tracker and has no analytics. Everything it measures stays in your browser local storage, on your machine. The single exception is your licence: to know whether you have paid, the extension asks our payment provider that one question and nothing else.
1. What Molasses records
To measure whether the degradation actually changes your behaviour, the extension keeps a log of your browsing sessions. Each session records:
- the start and end timestamps, and the genuinely active duration;
- the number of pixels scrolled;
- how the time was split across the watched feeds, by site name (for example
instagram), never by page address; - how many times you switched from one feed to another;
- when the degradation kicked in and how long you stayed after that;
- which set of levers was active;
- how many emergencies were used.
On top of that: your configuration, the time estimate you type into the Stats tab, the daily emergency counter, and the cached answer to "has this licence been paid for".
2. What Molasses never records
- No page address. The extension knows you were on Instagram, not which post you were looking at.
- No content. No text, no image, no video, no message, no form field.
- No identifier of any kind. No name, no email address, no account ID, no advertising ID, no browser fingerprint. Not even for customers: the billing email held by our payment processor is never stored by the extension.
- No keystrokes other than the confirmation code, which is compared in memory and never stored.
- No health, location, financial or authentication data.
3. Where the data goes
Your usage data goes nowhere. It is written to chrome.storage.local, a storage
area private to the extension, on your device. There is no analytics service, no tracker, and no
server of ours anywhere.
The extension makes exactly one kind of outbound request, and only that one: a licence check to
extensionpay.com, at most once an hour. It sends an anonymous key generated at install
and receives back two things only: whether that key has paid, and when a trial started. It sends no browsing data,
no site names, no durations and no session log. All executed code, including the ExtensionPay
library, ships inside the installed package; nothing is loaded remotely.
If you have Chrome sync switched on, your browser may replicate local storage between your own devices under Google rules. That is your browser, not the extension.
4. Permissions, and why
| Permission | What it is for |
|---|---|
| storage | Save your configuration and your session log locally. It is the only place anything is written. |
| alarms | A one minute wake up that closes a session after a long absence and resets the daily emergency quota. Without it, a session would stay open forever. |
| scripting | Register the degradation scripts on the feeds you have ticked, and only those, and unregister them the moment you untick one. |
| Site access | No access is requested at install time. The manifest declares no required host permission. Each feed is granted one at a time, by you, at the moment you switch it on. Unticking a feed hands its permission back to the browser. |
On the feeds you have authorised, the extension delays resource loading, blurs images and video, adds weight to scrolling and, depending on your setting, makes a small share of clicks fail. It neither reads nor transmits page content.
5. Payment
Payment is handled by ExtensionPay and Stripe, on their own pages, outside the extension. If you buy a licence, they process your email address and your payment details under their own privacy policies: extensionpay.com/privacy and stripe.com/privacy. AR Digital receives the payout and sees your email address and the amount, as any seller would. We never see your card details, which go straight to Stripe.
The extension itself never receives or stores your email address. It asks one question, "has this licence been paid for", and keeps only the yes or no. Nothing about your browsing is ever attached to your purchase, on our side or theirs.
6. Your data is yours
- Read it: the Stats tab of the extension.
- Export it: the Export button in that tab, as readable JSON.
- Erase it: the Erase everything button, at the bottom of the same tab. Uninstalling the extension also removes its storage entirely.
None of it is ever transmitted to AR Digital, so we hold no copy and cannot read it, restore it, or pass it to anyone. That applies to customers exactly as it does to everyone else: buying a licence tells us your email address, and nothing whatsoever about your browsing.
7. Legal basis and GDPR
Your usage data never leaves your device, so AR Digital carries out no processing of it whatsoever and has no access to it. You remain the sole controller of what your browser stores.
For customers only, AR Digital processes an email address and a purchase record, on the legal basis of performing the sales contract and meeting its accounting obligations. That data lives with Stripe and ExtensionPay, both of which may process it outside the European Union under the European Commission standard contractual clauses. To have it erased, or to obtain a copy, write to the address below.
8. Children
Molasses is not directed at minors and knowingly collects no data concerning them, which follows from the fact that it collects no data at all.
9. Changes
Any change to this policy will be published on this page with a new update date. If a future version of the extension were ever to transmit any data, that would be the subject of an explicit update to the Chrome Web Store listing and of a consent request inside the extension.
10. Contact
AR Digital · radu@ardigital.eu