Privacy Policy — Browser Extension

Last updated: 7 September 2026

The Caliptic Translate browser extension translates text on a web page — and the text inside images — and reads it aloud. Recognition, translation, and speech all happen on your own computer. Nothing you read, select, or capture is sent to us or to any cloud service.

1. Data we collect

None. We do not collect, store, transmit, or sell any personal data. There is no account, no identifier, no analytics, no advertising, and no crash reporting operated by us. We have no servers that receive anything from the extension.

2. What the extension reads, and when

The extension deliberately has no always-on content script. It does not run on any page until you activate it, either by clicking the toolbar icon or by choosing a Caliptic entry from the right-click menu. Until you do, it is inert.

Once you activate it on a tab:

• Text mode reads the text of the paragraph or selection you pick, directly from the page. No screenshot is taken.
• Image mode and Live mode capture a picture of the visible part of that tab so the text inside images can be recognized. The capture is cropped in memory, used once, and discarded. It is never written to disk by the extension and never uploaded.

The extension is not a crawler: it reads only what you point it at, in the tab you are looking at.

3. Where the processing happens

• Text recognition (OCR) is performed by the Caliptic Translate desktop app on the same computer, using Apple Vision. The extension talks to it through Chrome's native messaging, which is a local channel between two programs on your machine — not a network connection. If the app is not installed, image and live modes simply do not work; text mode is unaffected.
• Translation uses the browser's own built-in, on-device translation model. If your browser does not support the language pair, we show the original text and say so — we do not quietly fall back to a cloud translator.
• Speech uses your system voices through the browser. The extension explicitly prefers a local voice; if your platform offers only network-based voices for a language, the browser's speech service would process that text, and you can avoid it by turning sound off in the panel.

4. What is stored on your computer

Three preferences, in the browser's own extension storage: your chosen target language, whether sound is on or off, and which mode you used last. Nothing else. They stay on your computer and are removed when you uninstall the extension.

5. Permissions and why each one exists

• activeTab and scripting — to inject the panel into the tab you are on, only after you activate the extension. This pair is what lets us avoid requesting access to all your websites.
• nativeMessaging — to send a captured image to the Caliptic Translate app on your computer for text recognition, and receive the recognized text back. It communicates with that one app only.
• tts — to read translations aloud.
• storage — to remember the three preferences above.
• contextMenus — to add the Caliptic entries to the right-click menu.

6. Third parties

The extension contains no third-party SDKs, no trackers, and no remote code. It makes no network requests of its own. Your browser may download its translation model from its own vendor the first time you use a language pair; that is the browser's behaviour, governed by the browser vendor's privacy policy, and it happens whether or not our extension is installed.

7. Children

The extension is not directed at children and collects no data from anyone, including children.

8. Your rights

Because we hold no data about you, there is nothing for us to access, correct, export, or delete. Uninstalling the extension removes the stored preferences from your computer.

9. Changes

If this policy changes, the date below changes with it and the new version is published on this page.