Effective 25 October 2026

Privacy policy

PlainTerms grades the terms and privacy policies of the sites you visit. Doing that without learning which sites those are is the central design constraint of the product, and most of its architecture exists to satisfy it. You do sign in to use PlainTerms — this page explains what your account holds, why it is kept apart from the requests that look sites up, and what we have deliberately made ourselves unable to know.

The short version

• You need an account to use PlainTerms. It holds your email address, your plan, and your balance of checks.
• Your account is never attached to the requests that look a site up, read its grade, or ask for it to be analyzed. We have no record of the sites you visit, and there is no table in our database that could hold one.
• Looking up a site sends a 20-bit hash prefix shared by many domains — not the domain itself.
• Checks are paid for with single-use tokens that carry no account identifier, so we cannot connect what you looked at to who you are.
• We have never sold data, and we do not serve advertising.
• The extension keeps a log of every request it makes, on your device, so you can check all of this yourself rather than take our word for it.

Who we are

PlainTerms is operated by Adwise Partners LLC, a limited liability company registered in New York, United States. For anything in this policy, including a request to exercise the rights described below, write to [email protected]. For everything else, [email protected].

Adwise Partners LLC is the data controller for the information described here.

Your account

You sign in with Google or with a six-digit code we email you. Sign-in is handled by Supabase; there is no password to store. When you first sign in we create an account record that holds:

• Your email address, and the identifier Supabase gave your sign-in.
• Your plan, when a paid plan renews or ends, and your balance of checks, kept as a ledger of every credit and debit so a billing question can be answered.
• How many checks your account has bought in total — a count, never a list of where they were spent.
• If you pay: your Stripe customer and subscription identifiers, and a record of each purchase and refund.
• If you joined with an invite code: whose code it was. The person who invited you is told only how many of their invites joined, never who.

The account exists to meter a plan and to take payment. It is sent only when the extension buys check tokens, reads your plan and balance, opens checkout or the subscription page, uses an invite code, manages a watch, or deletes the account — never with a request about a site.

A new account is refused for an address at a disposable-mailbox service, and new accounts from one network address are limited per day. Both exist because each account carries a free monthly allowance that costs real money to serve.

What stays on your device

Most of what PlainTerms knows about you never leaves your browser. The extension stores the following in Chrome's local extension storage, where it is readable by the extension and by you, and by nothing else:

• Your settings — sensitivity, quiet hours, category weights, muted sites, and the sites you asked never to check.
• A cache of the grades you have already seen, so revisiting a site costs nothing.
• A map from the domains you have visited to the services they belong to, and the date you last visited each one, kept 180 days so a new site can be told from one you know.
• The bell's list of alerts — new sites and changed terms — kept 30 days and never more than 50.
• Your sign-in session, a copy of your plan and balance, and any unspent check tokens.
• The transparency log: every request the extension has made, kept 30 days.

If you choose one of the pop-up alerts, Chrome asks for permission to run on the sites you visit. The extension uses it to draw the pop-up in the corner of the page; drawing it reads nothing from the page and sends nothing anywhere.

None of this is transmitted to us, and none of it is backed up to your Google account. Uninstalling the extension deletes all of it. The list of sites you muted, the sites you visited, and the grades you looked at exist only on your own machine.

What each request sends

The extension talks to our API and to our sign-in provider in a small number of ways, and no others. The options page lists every request it has actually made, with what each one carried, so this section can be verified rather than trusted.

Looking up a site that has already been graded

Your browser computes a SHA-256 hash of the site's domain and sends us the first five hexadecimal characters of it — 20 bits. We answer with every graded domain sharing that prefix, and your browser picks out the one it wanted. Because many domains share any given prefix, the request tells us that you are looking at one of a large set of sites and not which. It carries no account, no session, and no token.

The answer deliberately does not contain a grade. It carries one bit per entry meaning “this site is currently rated D or F”, which is all the warning dot needs. Seeing the grade itself costs a check.

Checking a site nobody has graded yet

Here we need the domain, because something has to go and read that site's policies. So the request does contain it. It carries no account and no session, and we record only that the domain is waiting to be analyzed and how many clients are waiting — a count, never a list of who.

That request can also carry up to 10 links to the site's own policies that your browser found on the page, which is how PlainTerms reads a footer that is built by JavaScript. Those links are always on the site's own domain, always stripped of anything after a ?, and never from an account area. The page is read only with your consent: either you clicked the toolbar icon, which is what Chrome's activeTab permission covers, or you turned on enhanced mode.

Reading a grade

Reading the full report for a service spends a check token. A check token is a single-use number we signed when your account bought it, and it has no field identifying who bought it — our database table for these tokens has no account column, and adding one would defeat the entire design. We can count how many checks an account has purchased. We cannot see which sites they were spent on.

Each token also carries a yes-or-no mark saying whether it may start the analysis of a site nobody has graded, which is how a daily limit on those analyses is applied per account without the token saying whose it is.

The things that do link your account to something

We would rather state these plainly than let the summary above imply more than it should.

Watching a service for changes

If you use a paid plan and ask to be told when a specific service changes its terms, we necessarily store the fact that your account is watching that service. There is no way to send you that alert otherwise. This is the one place where an account and a particular service are stored together, it happens only for services you explicitly chose to watch, and removing the watch deletes the record.

Paying

When you buy a plan or a pack of checks, Stripe processes the payment and knows what you bought. It does not know which sites you check, because we do not know either.

Reporting a mistake

If you tell us a flag is wrong, we store what you wrote, without your account. Please do not include personal information in that note — we do not need any, and we would rather not hold it.

What we never collect

• Browsing history. Not in a table, not in a log, not in aggregate, and not against your account. The database has no visits table and no lookups table.
• Page content. The extension reads a page only to find links to that site's own policies, and sends only those links.
• Full IP addresses, in our own records. Addresses are cut to a /24 (IPv4) or /48 (IPv6) before anything is written down, so an individual address is never stored by us and cannot be recovered later. An address we cannot parse is discarded rather than kept whole. Cloudflare, Supabase, and Stripe, listed below, see the address your request came from as part of carrying it.
• Which site a request was about. Our server logs record the shape of the request, such as /v1/services/:serviceId/verdict, and never the actual service.
• Anything from a child. See below.

We do not use cookies for tracking, we run no analytics on the website, and the fonts are served from our own domain rather than a font CDN, which would otherwise learn who reads these pages.

Who else handles anything

We use a small number of providers. None of them receives a record of your browsing, because we do not have one to give.

• Anthropic — Analyzes the text of published legal documents. The text of a site's own terms and privacy policy. Never anything about a PlainTerms user — the model is never told who asked, or that anyone asked at all.
• Supabase — Signs you in. Your email address, the sign-in method you used, and records of your sign-in sessions, including the network address each sign-in came from. It holds no plan, balance, or browsing information.
• Google — Confirms your identity, only if you choose “Continue with Google”. Google tells Supabase your email address and name. We keep the email address and nothing else from Google.
• Stripe — Processes payments. Your email address, card or other payment details, billing address, and what you bought. Card details go to Stripe directly and never reach us.
• DigitalOcean — Runs the API, the crawler, the database, the job queue, and plain-terms.app. Your account record, balance, purchases, and referrals; the grades and documents every user shares; domains awaiting a scan; short-lived rate-limit counters; and request logs with addresses truncated before they are written.
• Cloudflare — Proxies every request to plain-terms.app and api.plain-terms.app. Each request passes through Cloudflare in full, including your network address and the request itself, while it is in transit. Cloudflare has no access to our database.

We may disclose information if we are legally compelled to. In practice the answer to most such demands is that the data does not exist.

Your rights

If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, you have the right to access, correct, export, and delete your personal data, to object to processing, and to complain to your data protection authority. If you are in California, you have the right to know what we collect, to delete it, to correct it, and to opt out of sale or sharing — we do not sell or share personal information, so there is nothing to opt out of.

Most of this you can do yourself: the options page exports everything the extension holds, and deletes your account. For anything else held on our side, write to [email protected] and we will respond within 30 days.

Our lawful basis is contract for running your account and any plan you buy, and legitimate interest in keeping the service from being abused.

Deleting everything

Settings has a Delete account button. It will not delete an account whose subscription still renews: cancel the subscription first, from the same page, and deletion is allowed straight away, with any paid time left ending at the same moment. We confirm this with Stripe directly rather than with our own copy.

Before deleting, it asks why you are leaving. We keep that answer, but not with your account or your email: the reasons you picked, anything you typed in the box, your plan, how many days the account existed, and whether it had a subscription. It is written in the same step as the deletion, so we hold an answer only for an account that is actually gone.

Then it ends any subscription that is left, deletes your Stripe customer record and the cards saved with it, deletes your sign-in from Supabase, and deletes your account record together with your balance, purchase records, watches, and invites. Check tokens you had already bought are not linked to you and simply expire. Stripe keeps its own record of past payments, as payment processors are required to. Uninstalling the extension then removes everything left on your device.

Children

PlainTerms is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their personal data. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, write to [email protected] and we will delete it.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy in a way that affects what we collect, we will change the effective date above and say so in the extension before the change takes effect. Given what this product does, announcing a quiet policy change would be the least defensible thing we could do.