TempoLife › Features › Browser extension › privacy

Privacy

What a TempoLife extension would read, what would leave your browser and what would not — plus exactly what the bookmarklet sends, which is the only part that exists.

What it would and would not readBookmarklet: works todayChecked 2026-09-02

There is no TempoLife browser extension. It is not in the Chrome Web Store, not on addons.mozilla.org, and there is no unpacked build to sideload. Anything you find under that name is not ours. What is on this page is a description of what it would do, and a bookmarklet that does a useful slice of it today.

The part that exists: the bookmarklet

Everything about extension privacy below is conditional, because there is no extension. This part is not: the bookmarklet is real, and here is precisely what it does with your data.

TempoLife food lookup

Drag that button to your bookmarks bar. Do not click it here. This page sends a strict Content-Security-Policy that forbids inline script, so a click on this site is blocked by design — which is also a small demonstration that the page is not running it for you. Once the link lives in your bookmarks bar it runs against whatever page you are on instead.

What it does, in order

1. Reads the text you have selected on the current page. Nothing else on the page is read.
2. If you selected nothing, it asks you what to look up, pre-filled with an example.
3. Collapses whitespace, trims, and cuts anything over 160 characters — the limit /api/answer enforces, so a long selection returns an answer instead of an error.
4. Opens https://tempolife.app/api/answer?q=… in a new tab with noopener, so the new tab cannot reach back into the page you came from.

The source, in full

Read it before you install it. That is the point of a bookmarklet: it is small enough that you can.

javascript:(function () {
  var q = '';
  try {
    q = String(window.getSelection ? window.getSelection() : '');
  } catch (e) {
    q = '';
  }
  q = q.replace(/\s+/g, ' ').trim();
  if (!q) {
    q = String(window.prompt('Ask TempoLife about a food', 'calories in banana') || '');
    q = q.replace(/\s+/g, ' ').trim();
  }
  if (!q) { return; }
  if (q.length > 160) { q = q.slice(0, 160); }
  window.open('https://tempolife.app/api/answer?q=' + encodeURIComponent(q), '_blank', 'noopener');
})();

There is no fetch, no XMLHttpRequest, no injected <script>, no cookie access, no localStorage, and no code loaded from anywhere. It reads a selection and opens a URL. The minified form in the link above is this and nothing more, percent-encoded so no quote or angle bracket ends up in an HTML attribute.

What it sends, and where

The text you selected is sent to tempolife.app in the URL of the new tab, because that is how a query parameter works. Select a food name, not a private sentence. The endpoint logs are ordinary web-server logs; nothing is attached to an account, because the bookmarklet sends no cookie and needs no sign-in.

Where it will not work

Sites with a strict Content-Security-Policy of their own can block bookmarklets — behaviour varies by browser and has changed more than once. Browser-internal pages such as chrome:// or about: never run one. And on mobile, bookmarks bars mostly do not exist; use the form below instead. When a bookmarklet fails it usually fails silently, so if nothing happens, that is why.

What an extension would and would not do

Extension privacy is decided almost entirely by the permission list, so the design constraints are worth writing down before the code exists rather than after.

One consequence is worth stating explicitly, because it is the part people usually want and cannot have both ways: an overlay that resolves ingredients has to send those ingredient names somewhere. That is the irreducible disclosure. It can be minimised — send the ingredient, not the recipe; send no cookie, so it is not linked to you — but it cannot be zero unless the whole food table ships inside the extension, which would be a multi-megabyte download that goes stale.

How to check any of this yourself

For the bookmarklet: read the source above, or edit the bookmark after you have saved it and read it there. For any extension, including a future one of ours, open your browser's network panel and watch what it sends while you use it. Claims on a privacy page are worth exactly as much as your ability to check them, which is the argument for keeping the useful thing small enough to audit in a minute.

The wider TempoLife privacy policy covers the account, the app and the website. This page covers only this surface. Where they disagree, the policy is authoritative — but they should not disagree, and if you find that they do, that is a bug worth reporting.

Full privacy policy

Frequently asked questions

Source: TempoLife /api/answer endpoint — live, documented in the developer portal · checked 2026-09-02

Other pages

Extension overview · The API it would use · Embeddable widgets