Duckout — Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2026-08-19 · Applies to Duckout v1.x (panic-hide)

The short version

Duckout collects nothing, sends nothing, and has no servers. It moves your tabs around inside your own browser. That is all it does.

What Duckout collects

No personal data of any kind. Specifically, Duckout does not collect, transmit, sell, share, or retain:

• browsing history, URLs, or page titles
• the content of any page you visit
• personal or financial information
• authentication details, cookies, or credentials
• location, device identifiers, or usage analytics

There is no account, no sign-in, and no telemetry.

Why Duckout cannot read your pages

Duckout requests exactly two permissions:

Permission	Why it is needed
tabs	To move a tab into a background window and move it back. Hiding a tab is a tab operation, so this permission is the feature.
storage	To remember your two settings, and to remember which tabs are currently hidden so they can be restored.

Duckout requests no host permissions and registers no content scripts. Under Chrome’s extension model that means it has no ability to read or modify the contents of the pages you visit — not as a policy promise, but as a limit of what it is installed with. You can verify this yourself on chrome://extensions: the permission list shows tab and storage access and nothing about site data.

What is stored, and where

Everything stays on your device, in Chrome’s own extension storage:

• Your settings (two on/off preferences: mute-while-hidden, show-decoy) are kept in chrome.storage.sync. Honest caveat: if you have Chrome Sync enabled, Chrome itself syncs this storage area across your signed-in Chrome installations via your Google Account. That transfer is performed by Chrome, not by Duckout, and it carries only those two on/off values — never URLs, titles, or page content. Turn off Chrome Sync, or use chrome.storage.local builds, if you would rather it stayed on one machine.
• Which tabs are currently hidden is kept in chrome.storage.session, which Chrome clears when you quit the browser. It holds tab IDs and positions so a hidden tab can be put back; it is never transmitted anywhere.

Uninstalling Duckout removes both.

Third parties

None. No analytics provider, no crash reporter, no ad network, no CDN, no external fonts, no remote code. Duckout makes no network requests at all.

What Duckout protects you from — and what it does not

Duckout is designed for shoulder-surfing: someone glancing at your screen in an office, a café, a classroom, or a shared room.

It does not protect you from network monitoring, your employer’s IT or device management, your internet service provider, software installed on your computer, or your browser history. Duckout has no ability to affect any of those, and you should not rely on it as though it did.

Children

Duckout is not directed at children and collects no data from anyone, including children under 13.

Changes

Material changes will be published here with a new “Last updated” date before the build they describe is released.

Contact

Questions about this policy: open an issue on the project’s public repository, or use the support link on the Chrome Web Store listing.

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