Privacy Policy — Website Blocker

This Privacy Policy describes how the Website Blocker browser extension ("the Extension", "we") handles data. The Extension is available on the Chrome Web Store. It runs on the user's machine; the only server-side processing is done by the Pro billing service described in section 2.7.

Buying Pro? Purchases, Pro accounts and this website are also covered by our Privacy Notice, Terms of Service and Refund Policy.

1. Our principles

• Privacy policies should be human-readable. No legal cosplay, no template boilerplate describing things we don't do.
• The simplest data practice is no data practice. The less we collect, store, or transmit, the less can leak.
• Match the reasonable expectation of the user. You installed an extension that blocks sites, runs a focus timer and, if you turn it on, blocks ads. It does that and nothing else.

2. What data we process

2.1 Stored locally on your device

• Your settings — stored in chrome.storage.local on your device (only the install date is kept in chrome.storage.sync). This includes:
  • Blocked domains, URL patterns and keywords you added
  • Custom and enabled categories
  • Schedule (days and time ranges)
  • Focus Mode settings (focus / break duration, cycle count, focus-mode kill-list)
  • Password hash and recovery code hash (both SHA-256, never the plain password or plain code)
  • Theme (light or dark) and other UI toggles
  • Tasks and to-do categories you created
• Statistics — daily counts of blocked attempts, completed focus sessions, focus minutes and per-site block counts. Stored locally and auto-cleaned after 90 days.
• Ad blocker — whether it is on, the sites and pages where you turned it off, the page elements you chose to hide, and counts of blocked ads. Stored locally only.
• Rating prompt — counters that decide when to ask you to rate the Extension on the Chrome Web Store and, once that moment comes, your country code and pricing region as returned by the billing service (section 2.7), kept for 7 days. Stored locally only.

We do not store your browsing history or the content of pages you visit.

2.2 Data sent to our servers

None. The Extension does not send your blocklist, password or browsing history to any server; your schedule and statistics leave your device only as the anonymous numbers listed in 2.3 (for example how many focus sessions you completed, or the days and hours of a schedule window you add). Apart from the favicon, font and icon files described in 2.4, the only network calls the Extension makes on its own are the anonymous analytics in 2.3 (version 2.5.0 also named a site in some of its ad-blocker events) and the calls to the Pro billing service in 2.7, including a region check before the Extension asks you for a rating.

2.3 Anonymous product analytics

The Extension may send anonymous product-usage events to Amplitude using its EU endpoint (api.eu.amplitude.com) so that data never leaves the EU. Analytics is best-effort and used only to understand which features are useful.

What is sent:

• Event names (for example focus_session_started, site_blocked, popup_opened) and non-identifying properties such as the source surface (popup / settings), an enabled / disabled flag, a category preset id or name (e.g. social), focus timer durations, the days and times of a schedule window you add, extension version, OS name and browser language
• A randomly generated device_id stored locally so events from the same install can be grouped. It contains no account info and is not linked to any personal identifier
• Aggregate user properties: extension version, install date, whether a password is set (boolean only), the counts of blocked sites / focus sites / completed focus sessions / total focus minutes / completed tasks, whether a schedule is enabled, whether the ad blocker is on, and the ad blocker's counts of allowed sites, allowed pages, page elements you chose to hide (number of rules) and blocked ads (numbers only, never the sites themselves)
• In version 2.5.0, when you used the ad blocker's per-site controls in the popup or its lists in Settings, the event also included the site — its domain (such as example.com) when you turned the ad blocker off or on for a website, added or removed an allowed site, opened the Block element picker or removed hidden elements, and the domain plus the page path, without the query string, when you turned it off or on for a single page. These events were sampled like all other product events (see Sampling below). Versions after 2.5.0 do not include the site in any event

What is never sent:

• The domains, URLs, URL patterns or keywords in your blocklist
• Your browsing history, or the address of any page you visit (apart from the version 2.5.0 ad-blocker events above)
• Passwords, recovery codes, task or category names you typed
• Your IP address or any geolocation derived from it — Amplitude is configured at the project level to drop the request IP and not infer country, region or city from it, so no location data is stored against your events

Sampling. For ordinary product events, only a small randomly selected portion (currently 3%) of installations send anything at all. The choice is drawn at random on your device and stored locally; it is not based on anything about you, and it is drawn again only when we change the sampling rate. The exception is events about the Pro plan and your Pro account — the plan dialog being shown, the popup handing a Pro action over to the settings page, a checkout being started or completed, the free tries running out, opening the account menu, the billing portal or the support form, restoring a purchase, signing out, and billing errors — which are sent from every installation where they happen, so we can tell whether payments work at all. They still contain no personal data beyond the random device_id described above.

2.4 Third-party favicon, font and icon requests

When the Extension's settings page lists sites — your blocked sites and URLs, focus sites, top blocked sites, and the ad blocker's allowed sites and sites with hidden elements — your browser loads the favicon for each domain from Google's public favicon service (https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=...). This means Google sees those domain names at the moment the list is rendered. The Extension itself does not send anything to Google; the request is made by your browser as a normal image fetch. If you prefer not to share these domains with Google, you can avoid opening the relevant settings tabs or block google.com/s2/favicons at the network level.

The popup and settings page also load the Montserrat font from Google Fonts (fonts.googleapis.com, fonts.gstatic.com), and the popup, settings page and block page load the Font Awesome icon stylesheet from cdnjs.cloudflare.com. These are ordinary font and style downloads: the providers see your IP address and browser details, but not your blocklist or the pages you visit.

2.5 Welcome and support pages

The Extension may open this welcome page on first install. The static pages on websiteblocker.pro are served from a standard web server, which logs visits (IP address, user-agent, timestamp) for operational diagnostics. These visits happen because you opened the page in your browser, not because the Extension reports your activity. The website also uses Google Analytics, which sets cookies and records page visits, including visits to the welcome and uninstall pages the Extension opens.

2.6 Uninstall feedback form

If the Extension is uninstalled, the browser may open websiteblocker.pro/uninstall/. That page embeds an optional Google Forms survey so you can tell us why you uninstalled. Submitting the form is entirely voluntary — you can close the page without filling anything in.

If you do submit the form, the responses are processed by Google Forms, which is a third-party service. Google may collect the information you enter, your browser metadata, and technical request data according to Google's own privacy policy. We only see the answers themselves — we do not link them to any account or identifier. Please do not include sensitive personal data in your feedback.

2.7 Pro plan: sign-in, payments and subscription status

Installing the Extension and using its toolbar popup — blocking or unblocking the site you are on, the focus timer and the ad blocker — never require an account. The features of the settings page are part of the optional Pro plan: after a few free tries, using one of them without an active plan shows a purchase dialog there. Pro is offered only in selected countries; elsewhere every feature stays free and no purchase dialog is shown. When you open the Extension's settings page, it fetches the current prices and your plan status from the billing service (a random visitor identifier and our paywall identifier are sent; the service sees your IP address like any web server). Your email address is sent only if you choose to sign in or to contact support.

Pro billing is provided by Monetize.software. It runs on the subdomain app.websiteblocker.pro, which is delegated to and operated by them — it is not hosted on our web server, and requests may also be answered by their backup host edge.app.websiteblocker.pro. The payment itself is completed on the checkout page of a PCI-compliant payment processor that opens in a new tab. The Extension contains no remote code: the billing component ships bundled inside the extension package and talks to the billing service directly from your browser.

What is sent to the billing service:

• A randomly generated visitor identifier and the identifier of our paywall, so prices and your plan status can be looked up
• Your email address, only if you sign in (to buy, or to restore an existing purchase on another computer): either typed by you together with a password you choose, or shared by Google or Apple if you use their sign-in. Sign-in tokens are stored locally in the Extension's own storage on your device, never in cookies
• If you use Contact support in Settings → Account (no sign-in needed): the email address, subject and message you type and any files you attach, so we can reply
• Your purchase and subscription status (plan, active / cancelled, renewal date), so the Extension knows which features to unlock
• Anonymous paywall usage events (dialog viewed or closed, plan selected, checkout started, purchase completed) used to understand and improve the purchase flow
• Your IP address is seen by the billing service like by any web server; it uses it to derive your country, which selects the currency, regional prices and offers, and whether the plan dialog is shown in your region at all. We see only aggregated country statistics in the billing dashboard, never your IP address
• A plain request for our paywall's public settings, with no visitor identifier and no cookies, made at most once every 7 days once the Extension is ready to ask you for a Chrome Web Store rating — even if you never use Pro. The answer tells the Extension which pricing region your country belongs to: in the countries where Pro is offered, it does not ask for a rating. The country code and region are kept on your device (section 2.1) and are not sent anywhere else

What is never sent: your blocklist, keywords, URL patterns, schedule, tasks, statistics, browsing history or blocker password. The billing service cannot see what you block.

Card details are entered on the payment processor's checkout page and are handled by the processor under its own privacy policy. We never see, store or transmit card numbers.

You can manage or cancel a subscription from Settings → Account inside the Extension. Purchases come with a 30-day money-back guarantee — write to us at the address below. See the Refund Policy.

3. What we do NOT collect

Apart from the Pro sign-in, purchase and support data in section 2.7, which our Privacy Notice also covers, the Extension does not collect:

• Names, phone numbers, postal addresses. An email address is processed only if you sign in for the Pro plan or send a support request from Settings → Account (section 2.7)
• Your blocker password (it is hashed and stored locally — we never see it). A Pro account password, if you set one, goes only to the billing provider (section 2.7); Pro sign-in tokens live only on your device
• Card numbers or bank details — payments are completed on the payment processor's page, never in the Extension
• The content of pages you visit
• The list of sites you have on your blocklist
• Your browsing history
• Keystrokes, mouse movements, or screen recordings
• Data from children under 13 (knowingly)

4. Permissions we request and why

• storage — to save your blocklist, schedule, settings and statistics on your device
• tabs — to redirect a tab to the "blocked" page when you try to visit a blocked site, and to read the URL of the active tab when you click the popup so the "Block this site" button knows what to add
• activeTab — temporary access to the active tab's URL when you click the popup, used to show whether the current site is on your blocklist and how many ads the ad blocker blocked on it
• webNavigation — to detect navigation events to blocked URLs and stop them before the page loads
• alarms — to drive the Pomodoro timer and the schedule (start / end of blocking windows)
• declarativeNetRequestWithHostAccess — for the optional ad blocker: lets Chrome itself block ad and tracker requests using filter lists that ship inside the Extension, and let requests through on the sites and pages where you turned the ad blocker off. Chrome applies these rules itself; the Extension does not inspect or store the requests it blocks
• scripting — for the optional ad blocker: adds style rules and small scripts to the pages you visit that hide or remove leftover ads; on some sites these scripts run inside the page and remove ad data from the page's own responses. It also runs the Block element picker. They work locally and send nothing anywhere
• webRequest — for the optional ad blocker: used only to notice requests that were blocked, so the Extension can count them. Only the counts are kept, on your device; requests are never changed or redirected
• offscreen — to open a hidden extension page that hosts the Pro billing component and keeps your sign-in and plan status in one place. It is created when you open the settings page, has no visible window, and never reads web pages
• Host permissions (http://*/*, https://*/*) and a content script on all URLs — required for the Extension to read the URL / hostname of every page you visit so it can decide locally whether to redirect it to the block page and, when the ad blocker is on, hide ads on it. The Extension never transmits the URLs you visit to any server; the only exception is the site named in the version 2.5.0 ad-blocker analytics events described in section 2.3. This permission cannot be narrower because the user defines arbitrary blocklists at runtime

All permissions are used only for the purposes above and only when needed.

5. Data retention

• Local settings and blocklist — stay on your device until you uninstall the Extension or clear Chrome's extension storage
• Statistics — kept for 90 days, then automatically deleted
• Web-server logs for the welcome / support pages — rotated automatically (typically a few weeks)
• Anonymous analytics events — retained according to Amplitude's standard retention policy and not linked to your identity
• Pro billing records (email, plan, purchase history) — kept by our billing provider and the payment processor for as long as your plan is active and afterwards as required for accounting and tax purposes. Pro sign-in tokens on your device are removed when you sign out or uninstall

6. Data sharing and selling

We do not sell, rent, or trade any data. We do not share user data with advertisers or anyone else. The only third parties that process data on our behalf are Amplitude (anonymous analytics, section 2.3), Google Analytics on this website (section 2.5) and, if you buy Pro, our billing provider and the payment processor (section 2.7) — each receives only what it needs for its job.

7. Your rights

Apart from the Pro billing data described in section 2.7, we do not collect personal data, so there is nothing tied to "you" that we could look up on our side. You can:

• Delete your local data by uninstalling the Extension or clearing extension storage in Chrome's settings
• Sign out of Pro from Settings → Account, which removes the sign-in tokens from your device
• Ask us to delete your Pro account and billing data — email us; we will forward the request to the billing provider and the payment processor, subject to their legal retention duties
• Contact us at developerext7@gmail.com with any questions or concerns

If you are located in the EEA, UK, or California, you have rights under GDPR / UK GDPR / CCPA including access, rectification, erasure, and objection. Contact us at the email above to exercise these rights.

8. International data transfers

The web server hosting the websiteblocker.pro website is a VPS in the European Union (the billing subdomain in section 2.7 is operated by our billing provider, not by us). The Extension itself does not transfer your blocklist or settings internationally because it does not transmit them at all. If you buy Pro, the billing provider and the payment processor may process your email and payment data in other countries under their own safeguards (standard contractual clauses or equivalent).

9. Security

Web traffic to websiteblocker.pro is protected by HTTPS / TLS. The blocker password is stored only as a SHA-256 hash in chrome.storage on your device — we never see it. The recovery code is stored as a SHA-256 hash too, so a forgotten password can be reset by entering the original recovery code without us ever knowing the value.

10. Children

The Extension is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect data from children. If you believe a child has used the Extension, contact us and we will take appropriate action.

11. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, we will update the "Last updated" date at the top. Material changes will be communicated via the Chrome Web Store listing and / or our website.

12. Contact

Questions, requests, or privacy concerns:
developerext7@gmail.com