TabStash — Privacy Policy
Last updated: 27 August 2026
TabStash does not collect, transmit, sell, or share any of your data. There is no account, no server, and no analytics. This policy is short because there is very little to describe.
What TabStash stores
Everything TabStash knows is stored on your own computer, inside your Chrome profile, using the browser's own local storage:
- The URLs and page titles of tabs you chose to save, along with anything you added to them yourself — notes, tags, stars, reminders, and which column you filed them under.
- Sites you pinned to the Home page, and any name or colour you gave a site.
- Daily snapshots of your saved lists ("versions") — up to 14 of them, and none older than 30 days — so you can go back.
- Deleted items, kept in a trash for 7 days before being removed.
- A history of changes you made, so that actions can be undone. Capped at the most recent 20,000 entries.
- Which board column a page was last filed in, remembered by address for 90 days so that re-saving a page you had already sorted does not lose the sort.
- Your settings.
- Your Pro licence key, if you have one.
- A count of how many tabs have been closed or unloaded, used to show the memory figure.
What TabStash does not do
- It does not read the contents of your pages. It requests no host permissions and injects no scripts into any website, so it has no technical ability to do so.
- It does not observe your browsing. It reads the URL and title of open tabs at the moment you ask it to save them, and to count them for the buttons. It keeps no record of pages you did not save.
- It does not send anything anywhere. The extension contains no networking code — no
fetch, no request of any kind. Nothing is uploaded, synced, or backed up to any service, including ours. Your settings use Chrome's local storage and are never synced to your Google account. - It does not phone home to check your licence. A Pro key is verified on your own machine: it carries a signature that the extension checks with a public key built into it. Activating one sends nothing anywhere, and there is no activation server, no licence check on start-up, and no way for us to see that you are using it. This is why the "no networking code" promise above survives TabStash having a paid tier at all.
- It does not use third-party services. Site icons come from Chrome's own built-in favicon service, specifically so that your URLs are not sent to an external favicon server.
The diagnostics log
Settings contains a local diagnostics log recording recent actions — counts, identifiers, and hostnames — so that you can copy it and send it to us by hand if you want to report a problem. It holds no page content, it is capped at the most recent 200 entries, and it never leaves your machine on its own.
Your data is yours — and a word about backup files
Settings → Backup and restore → Export JSON gives you the complete contents as a file, at any time: every saved link and title, your notes, tags, stars and reminders, your pinned sites and site names, and your settings.
That file is plain text and is not encrypted. It is a complete record of everything you have saved, and some links are more than a record — a password-reset link, a "sign in with this link" email, or an "anyone with the link" document share is itself a key to something. Treat an exported backup with the same care as the pages it points to: keep it somewhere private, and think twice before putting it in a shared or cloud-synced folder.
Removing the extension deletes everything it stored, permanently and locally. There is no copy anywhere else, because there never was one.
Permissions
| Permission | Why |
|---|---|
tabs | To read the URL and title of tabs you save, and to close, move and unload them. |
tabGroups | To keep your tab groups intact when merging windows, and to group restored tabs by site. |
storage | To store your settings. |
unlimitedStorage | So a large stash is not silently truncated by the default quota. |
alarms | To run the idle-tab sweep and the daily version snapshot. |
favicon | To show site icons using Chrome's own service instead of a third party's. |
contextMenus | To add "Stash this tab" to the right-click menu. |
downloads | To save the weekly backup file into Downloads / TabStash — a copy of your stash that survives even the browser losing its own storage. It writes backup files; it never reads, touches or sees your other downloads. Turn the weekly file off in Settings and the permission sits unused. |
notifications (optional) | To show a desktop notification for a reminder you set. Requested only when you first create one, and declined it still works — the reminder appears in the manager instead. |
system.memory (optional) | To show how much RAM this computer has free, in the meter on the Home page. Requested only when you press "Show memory", never at install. It reads the machine's total and free memory and displays them; nothing is stored and nothing is sent. It cannot see what any program is using, including Chrome. |
topSites (optional) | To show your most-visited sites on the Home page. Requested only when you press "Show most visited", never at install. The list is read from Chrome and displayed; it is not stored and not sent anywhere. Decline it and the rest of the Home page works unchanged. |
All three optional permissions can be withdrawn at any time from chrome://extensions without uninstalling anything.
Children
TabStash is a general-purpose utility and is not directed at children. It collects nothing from anyone, of any age.
Changes
If this policy ever changes, the updated version will be published at this address, with a new date at the top.
Contact
Questions about this policy can be sent to the address listed on the extension's Chrome Web Store page.