foxscope — context you grant von Pooria

foxscope lets a web page that runs an AI agent ask your browser for a few named facts, such as your top size or a budget, and get only what you allow. It is the browser side of SCENT (Scoped Context Exchange with Notice and Trail).

Who it is for: people who use shopping, travel or writing agents on the web and want to decide what those agents know, and developers who build such agents.

What it does

• A page calls window.scent.request with the fields, the purpose and the time it wants.
• An approval window shows the site, the purpose, each field and its sensitivity, and the time. You pick Approve, Approve smaller answers (a range or a yes/no in place of the exact value) or Deny.
• Private fields are never given. Standing rules can answer one site for a set of fields, for a time you set, up to 1 hour.
• Each read shows a notification. The manager page lists live grants with a countdown, waiting requests, rules, recent reads and the trail, which you can verify.
• Revoke one grant, or everything of one site, at any time.

Where the values come from: the foxprefs and foxpack add-ons, when you install them, and sample values, which are off until you turn them on in the manager page.

What leaves the browser, and when

• foxscope has no server and sends nothing to its authors.
• A value goes to a web page only after you approve that page's request, or after you add a standing rule for it. This holds for every field, the ones marked public too. The page gets the approved fields and nothing else, for at most 1 hour.
• A page that is refused gets only the word "denied", not the reason. A page can tell a field you have from one you do not have: a field you have opens the approval window and the page waits for your answer, while a missing field, a private field or a field of an add-on that is not installed is refused at once. So a page can learn which add-ons you have and which of their fields that are not private you keep, but no value without your approval.

Permissions

• Storage: grants, rules and the list of recent reads stay in your browser. The trail is kept in the add-on's IndexedDB.
• Notifications: a notice on each read.
• Access to https pages: to give pages the window.scent function. It reads nothing from the page.

The source code is MIT licensed.