GetPawsOff

GetPawsOff is a local-first privacy extension. No accounts, no telemetry, no server. Blocks trackers, rejects cookie banners for you, and flags bad Terms of Service. Everything stays on your device. What it does: - ConsentGhost: auto-rejects cookie consent banners. Only ever declines or stands down, never clicks "Accept" for you. - PixelBlock: blocks tracking pixels in webmail (Gmail, Outlook, Proton, Yahoo, Fastmail, and others). - ToS Shield: scans Terms of Service and privacy pages and flags sketchy clauses (data resale, forced arbitration, silent changes). - Network tracker blocking: a bundled EasyPrivacy ruleset blocks known trackers at the network level. - Local tracker learner: an on-device, heuristic style engine that learns which third parties follow you across sites. Observe-only for now, doesn't block anything on its own yet. Privacy: - Runs on your device. State lives in chrome.storage.local, nothing is sent anywhere. - Sites are recorded as a one-way hash, never a plaintext URL or history. - No analytics, no telemetry, no beacons. - One optional exception: it can fetch a signed rules update from config.getpawsoff.app. Read-only, verified against a pinned key, and falls back to the bundled rules if anything about that fetch fails. Permissions, explained: When you install GetPawsOff, Chrome will show its broadest warning: "Read and change all your data on all websites." We'd rather explain that upfront than have you wonder about it later. Cookie banners and tracking pixels can show up on any site, so there's no fixed list we could scope access to without the extension quietly stopping working the moment you visit somewhere new. That's the only reason the permission is broad. Nothing about your browsing is read out, logged in readable form, or sent off your device, the code that would have to do that simply isn't there. It's open source under MPL-2.0, so that's not something you have to take our word for. A short version of the rest: declarativeNetRequest lets Chrome's own built-in engine enforce the tracker blocklist and block webmail pixels, so blocking happens through browser rules, not our code inspecting your traffic. The consent-banner detector runs as a content script on the page you're on, for the same reason the broad permission exists above; scripting and activeTab are used narrowly, to call a site's own "reject" button through its own JavaScript when clicking alone won't do it, injected into that one tab, on demand. tabs and storage are what let the popup show your current site's status and remember your settings, locally. webRequest powers the tracker-count badge in the toolbar. Early days (v0.1.0). It's had real testing but not exhaustive testing across every site and CMP, so it may still miss edge cases. Use "Pause on this site" in the popup if something breaks, and tell us. We'd rather hear about a miss than have you find one silently.