Privacy policy

Geo Hound is a Chrome extension that detects GIS services on the pages you visit and lets you map and analyse them. This policy describes exactly what it inspects, what it keeps, what it sends anywhere, and who else is involved.

It is written against what the code actually does. Where something is a limitation rather than a promise, it says so.

The short version

• Almost everything stays on your computer. Detected services, your folders, your workbench session, and your imported files never leave your machine.
• There is no account and no login. You are identified only by a random identifier your browser generates locally.
• There is no analytics, telemetry, or tracking of any kind in the extension.
• Your browsing history is not uploaded. The extension looks at request URLs as they happen, keeps the ones that are GIS services, and discards the rest.
• The AI assistant is the one feature that sends your data off your machine, it asks for your consent before it does, and it sends schemas and small samples rather than your datasets.

What the extension inspects while you browse

Geo Hound spots GIS services two ways: by watching your browser's network requests, and by reading the page itself. Both happen on every site, and both are described here.

Network requests. Geo Hound uses Chrome's webRequest API to watch requests your browser has already completed. It sees the request URL only. It does not read request or response bodies, and it does not read headers. Technically it listens on onCompleted without requesting any additional information, which is the narrowest form of the API; bodies are not available to that listener at all. For each request it also reads the URL of the tab that made it, so it can record where a service was found.

Page content. A content script also reads the page you are on, to catch services the network watcher would miss. Specifically it reads the link addresses (href values) and the visible text of the page, to find links to geospatial files, and it inspects any live Leaflet or MapLibre map on the page to see which layers it has loaded. It does not read form inputs, passwords, or personal content, and none of the page text is stored or sent anywhere: it is scanned in memory for service and file references and then discarded. What is kept is the same as for network requests, the identified services and file links.

The overwhelming majority of what it sees is thrown away immediately. URLs are discarded, unexamined and unstored, if they are not successful requests, if they belong to a known basemap provider, if they are obvious noise, if they point at localhost or a private network, if you have disabled them, or if they are simply not a GIS service. Discarded URLs live in memory for at most about two seconds and are never written anywhere.

Only URLs positively identified as a GIS service are kept, along with the page URL where the service was found. Those are stored on your machine.

Why the extension asks to read data on all websites

GIS services are hosted on arbitrary domains: a council, a ministry, a utility, a university, a consultancy. There is no list of them to permit in advance, so the extension has to be able to watch requests, read the page, and fetch metadata on any site. That is what the "read your data on all websites" warning describes.

Detection is passive. Nothing is sold, nothing is profiled, and there is no advertising of any kind.

If a site is noisy or sensitive, you can silence it: open the popup, click Settings, and add it under Disabled URLs as an exact pattern, a domain, or a wildcard. Those sites are then skipped before anything is recorded.

What is stored on your machine

All of this lives in your browser's local extension storage and never syncs anywhere. The extension does not use Chrome's sync storage, so nothing is copied to your Google account.

• The GIS services detected, with their metadata and the page URL where each was found.
• Your folders, custom names, and notes.
• Your disabled-URL settings.
• A random identifier (a UUID) generated on your machine. It is not derived from you or your device, and it identifies a browser profile, not a person.
• The workbench session: your layers and their loaded features, styling, annotations, basemap, and map position.
• Whether you have consented to using the AI assistant.
• A cache of the MapScaping podcast feed.

Newly detected services are held in session storage and disappear when you restart your browser, unless you keep them. Saved services are capped at 500, after which the oldest auto-detected ones are trimmed. Services you have filed into your own folders are never trimmed automatically.

To delete any of it: use Clear All in the popup, remove individual services or folders, click New session in the workbench, or uninstall the extension, which removes everything.

What leaves your machine

To the GIS services you are looking at

When the extension finds a service, it asks that service to describe itself: a capabilities document, an Esri service description, an OGC API landing page. When you add a layer in the workbench, it fetches the features and tiles for your map view.

These requests go directly to the service, the same way your browser would. Geo Hound adds no credentials.

To our server, for the shared service directory

Geo Hound maintains a public directory of GIS services so that services other people have found can be recognised and described.

When a service passes validation, its public metadata is submitted: the URL, the service type, titles, abstracts, keywords, layer names, bounding box, formats, CRS, and whether it supports CORS. No identifier of yours and no page URL are included in that submission. Services whose URL contains an API key or token, services on non-production hosts, dead endpoints, and services behind authentication are excluded and never submitted.

One thing worth stating plainly: when you open the popup, the extension asks our server whether it knows about services on the site you currently have open. That request contains the hostname of that site. It is a single hostname, not a URL, not a path, and it is not stored against you, but it is information about where you are browsing leaving your machine, and you should know about it.

To our server, for the AI assistant

Only if you use the assistant, and only after you have consented in the workbench.

Each question sends: your random identifier, your conversation so far, and a summary of your workbench. The summary contains layer names, geometry types, feature counts, field names and their types, and selection counts.

As the assistant works, the results of its tool steps are sent back into the conversation. Those results are capped and trimmed, and they do include sampled attribute values from your layers, up to strict limits: at most 20 rows, values truncated at 200 characters, and about 8 KB of data per result. Raw geometry and whole datasets are never sent.

Our server forwards this to OpenRouter, an AI gateway that routes the request on to a third-party model provider. Your identifier is not forwarded to OpenRouter.

Your conversations are not stored on our servers. We record only the number of messages and tokens you have used in the current month, for billing and quota. The message content is not written to any database. Zero data retention is enabled on our OpenRouter account.

To Stripe, when you buy credits

Buying a credit pack opens a Stripe-hosted payment page in a new tab, carrying only your random identifier so we know which balance to credit.

Geo Hound never sees your card details. They are entered on Stripe's own page. There is no card handling code anywhere in the extension.

Stripe tells our server the payment succeeded, and passes on your email address, the amount, and the pack you bought.

Third parties

| Who | What they get | Why | | --- | --- | --- | | Supabase | The service directory; your random identifier; usage counts; your email and credit balance if you buy | Our database and server functions | | OpenRouter | Assistant conversations, layer schemas, sampled values. Not your identifier | Routes the request to the model provider | | Stripe | Your card details, email, and random identifier | Processes payments | | Resend | Your email address | Sends purchase confirmations and restore codes |

Basemap and GIS service requests go to their own hosts (OpenStreetMap, Esri, and whatever service you are using), which will see your IP address like any website does.

If you buy credits

Your email address is stored in plain text alongside your credit balance and your purchase records, so we can restore your balance when you change machines.

Restore codes are hashed and expire after ten minutes. Your IP address is never stored raw: it is hashed into a short bucket value used to stop one person minting unlimited free questions.

There is no self-service way to delete your purchase data today, and no automatic expiry on it. If you want it removed, email us and we will do it by hand. We would rather say that than imply a delete button exists.

Retention

• On your machine: until you delete it or uninstall.
• The service directory: indefinitely. It contains no personal data.
• Usage counts, email, and credit balance: until you ask us to remove them.
• Conversations: not retained.

Security

Everything between the extension, our server, Stripe, Resend, and OpenRouter travels over HTTPS. Services you browse are fetched over whatever scheme the site uses, so an http:// GIS endpoint is fetched over http://.

Our data is held in Supabase's managed Postgres, which encrypts data at rest at the platform level. Access is locked down so that the key shipped inside the extension can only read the public service directory and nothing else. Secrets for OpenRouter, Stripe, and Resend exist only on the server.

No remote code

Every library the extension uses is bundled inside it. Nothing is downloaded and executed at runtime, and the extension's content security policy blocks it regardless. Network responses are treated as data, never as code.

Changes to this policy

If we change what we do with your data, we will say so prominently in the product before the change takes effect, not quietly in this document.

Limited use

Geo Hound's use of information received from Chrome APIs adheres to the Chrome Web Store User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Contact

Questions, or a request to delete your data: see the support page.