Brief is a Chrome extension that watches which tabs hold your attention during the day and, each morning, gives you a written report of yesterday. Building that report means recording your browsing activity and, once a day, sending a summary of it to a language model. This policy explains exactly what data Brief collects, where it goes, how long it's kept, and what you can do about it.
Throughout the day Brief records your focus intervals — the URL and title of the tab you're on and how long it held focus — into local storage on your own device. At the day boundary, that day's intervals are sent to the Brief backend, where a language model writes them up into your daily brief. The brief and the intervals behind it are stored under an anonymous account identifier — Brief asks for no name, no email, and no sign-in. Brief has no public sharing, runs no ads or analytics, and never sells your data.
01Who we are
"Brief," "we," and "us" refer to the developers of the Brief Chrome extension and the
marketing site at brief.productivities.fyi. The extension source is published at
github.com/zachzwy/brief.
For privacy questions, contact support@productivities.fyi.
02What Brief collects, and where it goes
The table below is the complete list of data the extension handles. Each row names the data, where it is stored, why we have it, and (for anything that leaves your device) which parties see it.
| Data | Stored where | Purpose | Shared with |
|---|---|---|---|
| Focus intervals (tab URL, title, start/end time, local day) | chrome.storage.local on your device as you browse; once a day the day's intervals are uploaded to our backend (Supabase, hosted in the United States) |
Measure where your attention went and build the daily brief | Supabase (our backend host). The intervals are summarized and sent to our language-model provider to write the brief — see §4 |
| Generated daily brief | Our backend, keyed to your account; cached in chrome.storage.local for viewing |
Show you the morning report and let you reopen past days | Nobody beyond our backend host. Briefs are owner-scoped — there is no public view |
| Settings and per-day tracking state | chrome.storage.local on your device |
Remember your configuration and the in-progress day between service-worker restarts | Nobody |
| Account identifieranonymous | Our backend (Supabase) and your local extension storage | Attribute your intervals and briefs to your anonymous account. Brief does not ask for a name, email, or sign-in | Supabase (our backend host) |
| Time zone | Our backend | Decide when your local day rolls over so the brief covers the right window | Nobody beyond our backend host |
| Request metadata | Our backend (transient logs, retained up to 30 days) | Apply rate limits, debug failures, and detect abuse | Nobody outside our backend hosting providers (Supabase, Cloudflare) |
03Browser permissions
Chrome shows you the permissions Brief requests at install time. Here's what each one is actually used for:
tabs— read the URL and title of the focused tab so Brief can measure how long each site held your attention. Brief never reads page content; it has no content scripts and does not inject anything into the pages you visit.storage— the local intervals, settings, tracking state, and cached briefs described above. Nothing inchrome.storage.localis synced to your Google account.alarms— schedule the daily roll-over so the previous day's brief can be generated and opened the next morning.history— read only on a day that Brief recorded no focus intervals (for example, the day you installed it), to reconstruct that day's visited sites from your browser history so the brief isn't empty. Durations are estimated from the gaps between visits; any day Brief actually tracked never touches history.
04How the daily brief is generated
At your local day boundary, Brief sends that day's focus intervals to its backend, where they are passed to a third-party language model (currently DeepSeek) that writes the prose summary you read. The model receives the activity summary — the sites and durations of your day — in order to produce the brief. It does not receive your email or any other account-level identifier beyond what is needed to process the request.
The backing model provider may change over time; the current provider is disclosed in the extension and here. We do not use your intervals or briefs to train our own models.
05What we do not collect
- We do not run analytics, ad-tracking, fingerprinting, or session-replay code inside the extension or on the marketing site.
- We do not read the content of the pages you visit — only the URL and title of tabs, and only to measure focus time.
- We do not sell, rent, lease, or trade personal data to anyone, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers.
- Brief has no public or community sharing. Your briefs are visible only to you.
- There is no payment processor and no card data — Brief is free.
06Children
Brief is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect data from them. If you believe a child has created a Brief account, email support@productivities.fyi and we'll delete it.
07Security
Local data lives in chrome.storage.local and is protected by Chrome's own profile
isolation. Account data on the backend is stored in Supabase (encrypted at rest, accessed over
TLS) with row-level security enforcing per-user isolation. No system is perfectly secure; if
you discover a vulnerability, please email
support@productivities.fyi before disclosing it.
08Your rights
Whether or not your jurisdiction grants them by law, you can:
- Stop and erase locally at any time: uninstalling the extension or clearing its storage removes the local intervals, settings, and cached briefs from your device and halts all further tracking.
- Access, export, or delete the copy held on our backend by emailing support@productivities.fyi. Because the account is anonymous, we'll work with you to identify it before acting on the request.
Residents of the EEA, UK, California, and other regions with comprehensive privacy statutes have additional rights under those laws (including the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority). We honor all of them on request.
09International transfers
Our backend infrastructure (Supabase, Cloudflare) and our model provider are hosted in the United States and, for the model provider, potentially elsewhere. If you use Brief from outside the U.S., the personal data described above is transferred to and processed in those locations under standard contractual clauses with each sub-processor.
10Retention
- Local intervals and tracking state: kept on your device until they are uploaded at the day boundary, then cleared; removed entirely if you reset or uninstall the extension.
- Uploaded intervals and generated briefs: retained under your account until you delete the account.
- Account record: until you delete the account.
- Request logs: up to 30 days, then purged or aggregated.
11Changes to this policy
We will update this policy when the data flows change. Material changes — anything that expands what we collect, who sees it, or how long we keep it — are announced in-extension and on the marketing site at least 14 days before they take effect. The "Effective" date at the top of this page always reflects the current version; prior versions are kept in the public Git history of the marketing-site repository.
12Contact
Questions, complaints, requests: support@productivities.fyi. We do our best to respond within five business days.