Privacy Policy for Disqus Everything Chrome Extension

Disqus Everything is a Chrome browser extension ("the extension") which allows users to circumvent censorship on third party websites, such as those of news media. As such, the extension collects mimimal data to improve the user's experience of the extension. It does not use ads, cookies or analytics scripts.

The extension's author is Philip Lishman ("the author").

Persistent Storage
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The extension makes records in the Chrome browser's persistent storage to enable it to remember to add, or not to add Disqus comments to each tab as it is opened by the user. The URLs of the tabs the user visits are not stored in Chrome's persistent storage in plain text, but a one-way hash function is used which converts the URLs into a string of letters and/or numbers which correspond relatively uniquely to each URL. Because the hash function is one-way, A URL cannot be recovered mathematically from its hash value.

When the user next visits a URL whose hash has been recorded in Chrome's persistent storage, the URL is hashed, and the hash of the URL is compared with those which the extension has previously placed in Chrome's persistent storage. Each hash is paired with a flag which indicates whether or not the user left Disqus comments open or closed the last time that URL was visited.

Google manages persistent storage on its own servers, to allow synchronisation of persistent storage stored values between the user's different devices. Thus Google terms of service and privacy policies should apply to this aspect of the extension.

A similar scheme is used for remembering whether the last tab a user opened at a URL had comments enabled or not, so that, if the user opens another tab at the same URL in the same session, that tab will inherit the open or closed state of the Disqus comments as the user most recently left them in the other tabs. This function uses Chrome's non-persistent storage feature, which is cleared when the browser is shut down.

This hashing scheme is used to prevent opportunistic recovery of the user's history from Chrome's persistent storage, but it should not be regarded as strong security in the face of a determined or knowledgable attacker.

User Credentials
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The only user credentials used by the extension are those which the user uses to log in to a Disqus account. These credentials do not need to be entered into any form provided by the extension, but are handled entirely by Disqus's software and systems. Accordingly, Disqus terms of service and privacy policies should apply to the handling of both users' Disqus credentials and any comments they post using them.

Payments
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The extension is free software. However, the toolbar button popup does occasionally display a small nag when clicked suggesting the user make a payment to the author. This is entirely optional, and no functionality of the extension is conditional on payment. The payment link is handled by Paypal, under their terms of service and privacy policies.

28-April-2016