Browser permissions explained
Latr asks for eight permissions at install and two more only if you use the features that need them. None of them is access to your browsing history, and none is standing access to the content of pages you visit.
Asked for at install
| Permission | What it is for |
|---|---|
| storage | Keeping your reminders and settings on this machine. |
| unlimitedStorage | Lifting the default storage cap, which page thumbnails would otherwise reach for anyone with a lot of reminders. |
| alarms | Asking the browser to wake Latr at a specific time. This is the mechanism that makes a reminder fire. |
| notifications | Showing the notification when it does. |
| activeTab | Reading the title and address of the tab you are on, at the moment you save. See below. |
| scripting | Reading the line of text at the top of your screen when Where you were is on. Only on the tab you are saving, only at that moment. |
| contextMenus | Putting "Remind me about this" in the right-click menu. |
| offscreen | Playing a notification sound. A background worker cannot play audio on its own, so it borrows a hidden document for a moment and closes it again. |
Asked for only if you use it
- bookmarks — requested by the import control at the moment you use it. As a required permission it would put read and change your bookmarks on the install dialog for a feature most people never open. See importing bookmarks.
- access to latr.page — requested when you activate a Pro licence, and used for nothing else. See activating your licence.
Both can be revoked afterwards from your browser's extension settings, and everything else keeps working.
What Latr does not ask for
- Your browsing history. Latr cannot see where you have been. It knows about the pages you explicitly saved and nothing else.
- Access to all websites. The permission that reads "read and change your data on all websites" is not in Latr's manifest, and adding it has been declined more than once for features that would have been easier with it.
- Your identity, your tabs in general, your downloads, your cookies. None of it, at any point.
What an update will not add
Permissions are not only an install-time question. When an extension adds a permission in an update, and that permission is one your browser warns about, the browser switches the extension off on your machine until you re-approve it — with the same alarming dialog it would have used at install. It is a genuinely unpleasant thing to have happen to software you already trusted, and plenty of people answer it by uninstalling instead.
Latr's required list has not changed since launch, and the commitment is that anything which would trigger that dialog goes in the optional list instead — asked for by the control that needs it, at the moment you use it, and revocable afterwards. That is already why bookmarks is optional rather than required.
What activeTab actually means
activeTab is a deliberately narrow permission: it grants access to one tab,
only when you have just performed a gesture on it, and only until that tab navigates
away. It is not standing access.
All four ways of saving a reminder are such gestures — clicking the toolbar icon, pressing the shortcut, using the right-click menu, running the address-bar keyword. That is why Latr can read the page title and address at that moment and cannot read anything at any other moment.
Checking and revoking
chrome://extensions → Latr → Details lists what is granted, and the optional
ones can be turned off there. Firefox has the same under its Add-ons manager.
You can also see what Latr has actually done from inside it: Settings → About Latr shows live counts of data sent and servers contacted. On a free install both read zero — see where your data lives.
Something unclear, or something Latr does that this page does not cover? Tell us — the page is easier to fix than the confusion it causes.