Privacy & Data Storage
Where TabSlate stores your data locally, what leaves your device, and what analytics does and doesn't see.
TabSlate is local-first: your workspaces, collections, bookmarks, tabs, and saved groups live on your device whether or not you ever sign in. This page explains where, in plain terms. For the complete legal statement of what TabSlate collects, stores, and shares, see the Privacy Policy.
Local storage
TabSlate uses three separate browser storage mechanisms, each for a different kind of data:
- IndexedDB holds your actual product data — workspaces, collections, bookmarks (active, archived, and trashed), tags, saved groups, and Chrome tab-group titles. This is what makes TabSlate work fully offline and as a guest, with no account.
chrome.storage.localholds smaller, selected state: your theme and other preferences, an anonymous device identifier used for analytics (see below), and — for a signed-in account — the rest of your session's account state.chrome.storage.sessionholds only your access token, for as long as the browser stays open. This area is cleared when the browser fully closes, and TabSlate restricts it to trusted extension contexts where the browser supports that. Keeping the token here means it never sits in the same persistent storage as your account state or product data.
TabSlate refreshes a signed-in session in the background as needed, which is why you may briefly see the sync status change right after reopening the browser. See Offline Behavior for what that looks like across a restart.
What leaves your device
Nothing above syncs anywhere on its own. Data only starts syncing to a server once you register and verify an email — at that point TabSlate syncs to whichever server your account is on: the default TabSlate Cloud, or a self-hosted TabSlate Server if you've pointed the extension at one. See Cloud Sync for what has to be true for sync to run.
Guest use never syncs anywhere. See Guest and Verified Accounts for what changes once you connect a verified account.
Anonymous analytics
TabSlate can send anonymous usage events — for example, that a search was run, a bookmark was saved, or a sync attempt failed — tied to a randomly generated identifier stored alongside your preferences, never to your name, email, or the content of what you searched, saved, or synced. If you build the extension yourself from source without configuring an analytics endpoint (see Install TabSlate → Build from source), no analytics events are sent at all.
Browser permissions
Storage location is separate from what TabSlate is allowed to read from your browser in the first place. See Browser Permissions for what each permission is used for, including the optional one that powers the global search overlay.
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