What Annotate knows about your browsing

Updated Nov 10, 2026

It depends on one setting, Keep my reading history, which is off unless you turn it on.

With it off (the default), Annotate keeps no history of the pages you visit. When you open a page, the extension checks whether you have saved annotations for that exact address, so it can redraw your highlights. If auto-detect subscriptions is on (it is by default), it also notes whether you could read a paywalled page, or hit its paywall, and stores only the site name. You can turn that off in Settings. Nothing else about the page is stored unless you act on it.

With it on, Annotate keeps a list of the articles you spend 10 seconds or more on, so you can find them again in Overview. Only you can see it, and it stays until you clear it. Only articles count. Adult and 18+ sites, banking, money and investing, health and medical, email, chat and docs, dating, government services and job search sites, plus account pages (logins, checkout, carts, settings), search results and pages with a password field are never recorded. Nothing from before you turned it on is kept, apart from the pages you had already annotated.

Your followers see none of it unless you also turn on Show my followers when we read the same site. See What your followers can see and the Privacy Policy.