What this sends, and where it goes.
ContextReader explains passages you select. Doing that means sending them somewhere. This page says exactly what leaves your browser, what happens to it, and what is kept.
What is sent
When you ask for an explanation — by clicking Explain or pressing the keyboard shortcut — the extension sends four things:
- the passage you selected
- the paragraph containing it, and the paragraph before it
- the page title
- the page address
The surrounding paragraphs are the point of the tool rather than an extra: a line of verse cannot be read without the lines around it. Nothing is sent unless you ask for an explanation. Selecting text on its own sends nothing.
Where it goes
The passage goes to this site’s explanation service, which passes it to Google’s Gemini API. Google generates the explanation and returns it. Your reading therefore passes through Google, and is subject to Google’s terms for that service.
One thing worth knowing: this service runs on Google’s free tier, and Google may use data sent to its free tier to improve its products. If that matters for what you are reading, do not use the extension on it.
What is kept
Nothing. The explanation service stores no passages, keeps no database of what anyone has looked up, and writes no selected text to its logs. Errors are recorded without the text that caused them. There are no accounts, so there is nothing to attach a history to.
The extension stores one thing on your own device: a count of how many explanations you have used today, so the daily allowance can reset at midnight. It is a number and a date. It never leaves your computer, and clearing your browser data removes it.
What is not done
No analytics, no tracking pixels, no advertising, no third-party scripts on this site. Nothing is sold or shared with anyone beyond the explanation service and Google, which are required to produce the explanation itself.
Permissions
The extension asks to run on all sites because it is a reading aid and people read everywhere; it cannot know in advance which page will need it. It asks for storage only to hold the daily count described above.
Questions
The extension and this service are open source, so the claims here can be checked against the code rather than taken on trust. Raise anything at the issue tracker.
Last updated 9 September 2026.