Privacy

TL;DR

Wholisphere does not collect or sell your browsing data.
The vast majority of capabilities run entirely in your browser with zero network calls.
Cloud-AI capabilities (image description, summarize, translate, voice command, live captions, audio transcript, CAPTCHA describe) send the specific input you asked about to a backend that talks to a language or vision model, and return the answer.
The backend is keyed by an anonymous install ID generated on first run. There is no account, no email, no name.
All preferences and the activity journal stay on your laptop in chrome.storage.local.
You can review every capability’s data flow below.

What’s local-only

These capabilities run entirely in your browser. They make zero network calls beyond the page you’re already on:

Read aloud (uses the browser’s built-in voice)
High contrast
Larger text
Color filter
Reduce motion
Flash protection
Focus mode
Remove distractions
Find low contrast
Status monitor (live-region observer)
Watch for timeouts (countdown observer)
Form helper (heuristic mode — see below)
Save form drafts (drafts stored only in chrome.storage.local)
Keyboard helper (focus highlighter, focus mode)
Sortable assist
Boost speech in audio (real-time Web Audio processing)
Screen reader navigation, dedupe, page-shape scan, modal trap, table grid, mode switching — all local

What’s cloud-assisted

These capabilities send specific data to the backend on demand. They do not run automatically.

Capability	What’s sent	Why
Describe image	Image bytes (PNG, base64) + the page URL + alt text if any	Vision model produces a description
Describe video	Sampled frames every few seconds + page URL	Vision model produces scene descriptions
Read this page	Article text (truncated to 50,000 characters) + outline + page title	LLM produces a section outline
Summarize this page	Page main text	LLM produces a 3–5 sentence TL;DR
Explain in simpler words	The selected text	LLM rewrites at 6th-grade level
Translate selection	Selected text + target language	Translation model
Define word	The selected word	LLM dictionary lookup
Live captions	Audio chunks from the page or microphone	Cloud STT
Transcribe audio	Audio file or chunks	Cloud STT
Voice command	Audio of your spoken command + a DOM summary of interactable elements	LLM converts to action
CAPTCHA describe puzzle	Puzzle image bytes + surrounding label text	Vision model produces description
Screen reader (LLM-augmented mode)	Page text + URL on first activation per page	Used to make announcements smarter; cached per page

The backend is the Wholisphere staging Worker (or your own self-hosted Worker). It logs the request shape (timestamps, install ID, capability name, latency) for service monitoring; it does not retain the page text, image bytes, or audio content beyond the request lifetime.

What’s stored on your laptop

In chrome.storage.local:

whs.preferences — your TTS voice, rate, pitch, per-capability on/off state, screen-reader enabled, preferred language, and similar global prefs.
whs.journal — a rolling activity log (last ~1,000 events) for telemetry-opt-in users. Contains capability invocations, latency, errors. Capped at 5 MB.
whs.formDrafts — saved form drafts (when Save form drafts is on). Capped at 5 MB.
whs.imageDescriptionCache — per-image cache so we don’t re-call the cloud for the same image. Capped.

In chrome.storage.sync (sync follows your Chrome profile across devices, capped at 100 KB total):

Per-site preferences — small flags like “screen reader on for this site by default” or “hide widget on this site”.

What’s not stored at all

The text of pages you visit.
The content of images on pages you visit.
The transcripts produced by Live captions or Transcribe audio (those are surfaced in the side panel and you can copy or download them; we don’t keep them after the panel closes).
Anything you typed into a form (with the explicit exception of Save form drafts, which only writes to your local storage).
Your microphone audio outside of an active Voice command or Live captions session.

Bring your own model — different routing, same posture

If you’ve configured a BYO provider in the popup (see Bring your own model), the eligible cloud capabilities route to your provider instead of the Wholisphere backend:

Describe image
Summarize this page
Explain in simpler words
Translate selection
Define word

In BYO mode, those calls go directly from the extension’s background service worker to api.anthropic.com or generativelanguage.googleapis.com. Wholisphere does not see, proxy, log, or retain those requests. The remaining cloud capabilities (Read this page, Voice command, Live captions, Transcribe audio) still go through the Wholisphere backend.

Your API key stays in chrome.storage.local on this device. It is not synced via Chrome Sync, not sent to Wholisphere, not included in telemetry.

Telemetry

Telemetry is off by default. If you opt in (popup → Settings → “Help us improve”), Wholisphere sends:

Capability invocation events: name, latency, success/error.
Performance metrics: TTS engine load time, page-shape scan time, LLM round-trip time.

These events do not include page URLs, page text, image bytes, microphone audio, your install ID, or anything that could identify you.

You can review the journal yourself at any time by opening the popup and clicking View journal. You can also clear it.

Cookies

Wholisphere does not set any cookies and does not read cookies from pages you visit.

Analytics on the marketing site

Separate from the extension, the Wholisphere marketing site (wholisphere.ai) and dashboard (staging.wholisphere.ai) use privacy-first analytics (Plausible-style, no third-party cookies). That’s covered in the marketing site’s privacy policy, not this document.

Data deletion

Because there’s no account, there’s no per-user database record to delete. To remove all Wholisphere data from your laptop:

Open chrome://extensions/.
Click Details on Wholisphere.
Scroll down to Storage and click Clear data.
(Optional) Remove the extension entirely.

If you’d like the backend to forget the request logs associated with your install ID (kept ~30 days for monitoring), email web.dev.hari@gmail.com with your install ID. The popup → About page shows your install ID.

Compliance posture

Wholisphere is built so that an enterprise compliance review finds nothing scary. Specifically:

No PII is collected by the extension itself.
No third-party trackers are loaded into pages.
No remote-code execution — the extension’s JavaScript is bundled at build time and ships in the zip; no eval, no remote <script> injection.
Manifest V3 with the smallest permission set we can justify (see the browser extension docs).
SOC 2 Type II — in flight; expected to close before the first paid pilot.

For your own VPAT / Section 508 review, see the Wholisphere accessibility statement.