What this sends, and where it goes.

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, without its query string or fragment

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.

This includes text inside a text box or an embedded frame, such as an email or a chat message you are reading or writing. That text is sent only when you select it and click Explain or press the shortcut.

The address is cut back to the site and the path before it is sent, soexample.com/thread/42?token=abc#msg-7 leaves as example.com/thread/42. Everything after the ? or the # is removed inside your browser and never transmitted. Those parts routinely carry sign-in tokens, password reset links and search terms, and the only thing this tool needs the address for is recognising what kind of page you are on.

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.

Read this part before you use it. The passage you select and the paragraphs around it are sent to Google’s Gemini API, because that is what writes the explanation. This service runs on the free tier of that API, and Google may use data sent to the free tier to improve its products. That is Google’s stated policy, not a possibility we are guessing at: see the Gemini API terms. If what you are reading should not be used that way, do not use this extension on it.

What is kept

No passage, page title or address is stored. The explanation service keeps no record 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.

To apply the daily allowance it keeps three counters, each of them a number: one for your install, one for your network address, and one for the service as a whole. Your install identifier and your address are hashed before they are used as keys, so neither is stored in a readable form, and the counters are deleted automatically after 48 hours.

On your own device the extension stores two things: a randomly generated install identifier, which is not derived from anything about you and exists only so the allowance can be counted, and a count of today’s usage. Clearing your browser data removes both.

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 5 November 2026.