Pensa Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2026-09-29

The short version

By default this extension sends nothing anywhere. It has no analytics and no account, and with the default settings it makes no network requests of any kind. Everything it notices about a page is processed on your device and stays on your device.

The one exception is a setting you have to switch on yourself: sharing which shops use which techniques, and whether you added the item to your cart after seeing them, described in full below. It is off unless you turn it on. Pensa asks you about it once, on the card that opens when you install it, and again on your first in-page card only if you never answered there.

With sharing off, nothing reaches any server. That is what the "zero outbound requests" test asserts against the compiled extension. With sharing on, reports go to exactly one address, a counting service run by this project whose source is in the public repository's server/ directory, so what it accepts and stores can be read rather than trusted.

You can verify this rather than take our word for it: open DevTools, go to the Network tab, and browse with the extension enabled and sharing off. There will be no requests from it.

What the extension does

On the https sites where it runs, it reads the page to notice persuasion techniques: countdown timers, limited-stock messages, crossed-out reference prices, preselected checkboxes, and similar. When you add something to a cart or begin checkout, it may show a small card with a question about what it noticed.

On any page with nothing to notice, it notices nothing and shows nothing. Shopping pages are not a list it holds; they are simply the pages where these techniques appear.

What it stores, and where

Everything below is stored only on your device, in your browser's extension storage, and only for pages Pensa has decided are shops. A page that is not a shop is never recorded.

Detections (kept 30 days by default, adjustable in Settings):

• The pattern type, a confidence number, how long the element was on screen and how much of the screen it filled, and the stage of checkout you were at.
• The site's origin (for example https://www.example.com) and a redacted path shape (for example /products/:slug).
• A one-way hash of the matched text, plus a short excerpt of that text (up to 240 characters) so you can see what was matched. On a checkout page, text near a matched element can include whatever that page displays, so an excerpt could in principle contain details shown there.

These are recorded as you browse shops. When Pensa notices something it writes down what the page displayed, and it does so again when you add something to your cart or head to checkout, which is when it may also show you a card. Each distinct piece of copy is recorded once per page, not once per second, and a page it finds nothing on produces nothing.

Product history (kept up to 90 days, at most 5,000 products):

• For products you view on shops: an identifier for the product (its SKU or barcode where the page provides one, otherwise a one-way hash of its address and title), the prices and "was" prices shown, stock counts, countdown end times and viewer counts, each with the time seen.
• This is what lets Pensa notice a countdown that resets, a stock count that goes back up, or a "was" price that is never actually charged. It is a record of which products you looked at on which shops, and it never leaves your device.

This browsing session (cleared when you close the browser):

• For each shop: which checkout stages you reached, and the prices on each (item price, subtotal, shipping, tax, total, and fee or add-on lines with their labels).
• The label of any add-to-cart button you clicked, and which kinds of add-on you chose or declined yourself (for example "gift wrap: chosen"). This is what stops Pensa reporting an add-on you picked as one you did not.

Open page views (only while sharing is on, at most 30 minutes each):

• For a product or listing page you are looking at: the shop, whether it is a product or listing page, and which techniques have been on screen so far. This is how Pensa knows, when you click Add to Cart, what you had seen before deciding. It is turned into the reports described below when you click Add to Cart or after 30 minutes without activity, then deleted. Nothing is held while sharing is off, and switching it off deletes anything held.

Settings you choose, until you change them.

You can export or delete everything from the Settings page ("Export my data", "Delete all my data").

What it never stores or transmits

• Full URLs or query strings.
• Anything you type into a page: searches, addresses, messages, payment details.
• Your name, email, phone number, or any account identifier, other than where one appears in on-page text near a matched element, as described above.
• Anything at all about pages that are not shops.
• Any of the above leaving your device, unless you switch on sharing, and even then only the fields listed in that section.

Site permissions

Pensa asks for access to all https websites at install time, and your browser (Chrome, Edge or Firefox) will tell you so in those words. You should read that warning as accurate: the permission is broad, and it is granted the moment you install rather than site by site.

This is a deliberate change from how Pensa previously worked, and it is worth being plain about the trade. The earlier design asked for one site at a time, which made the permission narrow and the tool nearly useless: a shopper had to already suspect a page before they could ask Pensa to look at it, which is precisely backwards for a tool whose whole purpose is to notice what you did not. Persuasion techniques are not confined to a list of large retailers; they turn up on small independent shops, regional sites, and storefronts that did not exist when any list was written. A fixed list is always wrong, and it is wrong in the direction that leaves people unprotected.

So the permission is broad. What constrains it is not the permission; it is what the code does with it, and that is public and testable:

• Pensa never runs on banking, health, government, or webmail sites. This is enforced in two independent layers: those hosts are excluded from the content script's match patterns, so the browser does not inject Pensa there at all; and the script additionally refuses to run on any denied host before it reads anything. The list is in src/shared/urlScore.ts and the build fails if it is empty.
• Only https sites. Plain http pages are outside the requested permission entirely.
• It sends nothing anywhere unless you switch sharing on. Broad read access and network access are separate questions. With the default settings there are zero outbound requests, asserted against the compiled bundles by an automated test, not merely stated here.
• It records nothing about a page that is not a shop. Access to read a page is not a record of having read it. On shops, what it keeps is listed under "What it stores".

Pensa itself has no per-site off switch. You can turn detection off entirely, or switch off any individual technique, from its Settings page. To keep Pensa off particular sites, use your browser's own control. In Chrome, open chrome://extensions, choose Pensa's Details, and set Site access to "On specific sites"; in Edge, the same under edge://extensions. In Firefox, open about:addons, choose Pensa, and use its Permissions tab. The browser then enforces that regardless of anything Pensa does. Uninstalling removes the permission entirely.

Optional: helping measure these techniques

There is a setting to share which shops use which techniques. It is off by default and there is no pre-checked box.

How you are asked. On the card that opens when you install Pensa, and, if you never answered there, once more at the bottom of the first in-page card it shows you. Either way the question says who builds Pensa, what the data is for, what is shared and what is never shared, in the question itself, or one click away under "More details", rather than behind a link to somewhere else. The two answers are the same size and style, and neither is selected for you. Closing the install card answers nothing; closing the card without answering is recorded as no. Once answered, you are not asked again, and you can change your answer at any time in Settings.

In Firefox, Firefox asks as well. Saying yes brings up Firefox's own data collection prompt, which lists what would be collected (browsing activity, website content and website activity), and sharing is on only if you allow it there too. Firefox only lets that prompt open from Pensa's own pages, so in Firefox the question is asked on the install card and in Settings, never on a card inside a shop's page. If you later remove the permission in about:addons, sharing switches off and anything waiting to be sent is deleted, the same as switching it off in Settings.

While it is off, nothing is transmitted and nothing is even recorded for transmission. The queue is not filled and then withheld, because a queue that accumulates while you have said no is one that would empty the moment you said yes.

If you switch it on, it names the shop. That is its purpose: to build a picture, shop by shop, of how often these techniques are used. A report says "someone saw a countdown on shein.com today." It is sent to a server run by this project and stored there.

There are two kinds of report.

1. What a shop showed. Each carries exactly eight fields and no others:
2. pattern type: e.g. scarcity.stock
3. detector id: which rule matched
4. confidence quartile: 1–4, never the score
5. funnel stage: browse / product / cart / checkout / payment
6. shop: the main domain only, e.g. shein.com, never us.shein.com/products/123
7. shop category: e.g. fast_fashion, or other
8. rule pack version:
9. day: the date, never a time
10. Whether an item was added to the cart. On product and listing pages only. When you leave such a page, or click Add to Cart on it, Pensa sends one report saying whether you clicked Add to Cart, plus one more for each technique that was on screen before you decided. Each carries exactly seven fields and no others:
11. pattern type: e.g. urgency.countdown, or _page for the page itself
12. funnel stage: listing or product page only
13. shop: the main domain only, e.g. shein.com
14. shop category: e.g. fast_fashion, or other
15. rule pack version:
16. day: the date, never a time
17. added to cart: yes or no

"Added to cart" means you clicked an Add to Cart button, not that the item was actually added: Pensa does not check. On travel and ticket pages, which have no cart, the equivalent click counts instead: "Reserve", "Book now", or picking a specific ticket listing. A page's reports are sent as separate counts, never as a list of what one page showed together, because that combination could identify the page. Nothing about the item is included: not its name, price, or address.

This measures association, not effect. It can say that product pages showing a countdown on a given shop were followed by an add some share of the time, compared with that shop's pages overall. It cannot say the countdown caused the difference, and nothing published from it will claim that.

Never included in either kind: the page, the product, the search, the path or the full web address; any page text or prices; your account, name, email, or any identifier for you or your browser; and any time more precise than the day. The record type is declared .strict() in the extension and the server independently rejects any report with a field outside that list, so an accidentally added field is refused at both ends rather than stored.

The limits, each enforced in code rather than promised here:

• Only shops can be reported. Pensa reads each page and decides whether it is selling something before it does anything else. A detection, and therefore a report, can only exist on a page that passed that check. A site you visit that is not a shop is never reported, whatever it is.
• The day, not the time. A shop plus an exact time is far easier to tie to one person's browsing than a shop plus a date, and measuring how common a technique is needs no more than the date.
• Sent on a timer, never at the moment something is found. Pensa checks every six hours and sends once at least 25 reports are waiting, or once the oldest has waited a day. So the timing of a request does not reveal when you were shopping.
• One request carries one person's batch. A batch can hold reports from several shops over up to a day, sent together from your browser, so while it is in transit and being counted it is a short list of shops one browser reported. The service adds each report into its running totals immediately and keeps nothing that links the reports in a batch to each other or to you.
• The server stores counts, not reports. Incoming reports are added into running totals keyed by shop, technique and day. No individual report is kept, and there is no column that could hold who sent it.
• The service does not record who sent anything. It reads nothing from a request except the report itself, never stores your IP address, and has per-request logging switched off in its deployed configuration. Like any website, the request still passes through the hosting provider's network on its way in; nothing about you is kept once the report has been counted.
• Switching the setting off deletes the queue immediately. Not at the next send: data gathered under a permission you have withdrawn is not held pending a change of mind.

You can see the exact reports that would be sent, verbatim, in Settings → Help measure these techniques → Show me exactly what would be sent. Asking you to consent to a sentence about your data is not the same as showing you the data.

What the collected data is used for. Research into persuasion techniques in online shopping: how common they are, which shops use them, where in the checkout they appear, how often page views that show each one are followed by an add to cart, and how all of that changes over time. Findings may be published. Anything published is aggregated so that no single browsing session can be picked out: a shop and technique are only included once enough independent batches have reported them. The data is not sold, licensed, or used for advertising.

Third parties

No analytics providers, no error reporting services, no advertising networks, no data brokers. Nothing is sold, shared, or licensed.

If you switch sharing on, reports are received and stored on Cloudflare (Workers and D1), which hosts the counting service. Cloudflare processes that traffic as a hosting provider; it is not given the data for any purpose of its own.

Children

The extension is not directed at children and collects no personal information from anyone.

Changes

Material changes will be reflected here with an updated date, and in the extension's listing.

Where this is published

The authoritative copy is served at https://viditchhajed.github.io/pensa-docs/privacy.html.

Pensa was previously published as Vero. The policy formerly served at viditchhajed.github.io/vero-docs/ redirects here.

Contact

Open an issue on the project repository.