Privacy Policy

Annotate is a personal web-annotation tool: a Chrome extension plus a companion web app (useannotate.com) that let you highlight, note, bookmark, and summarize pages, organize them, and share your notes with friends you choose. This policy explains what we collect, how we use it, and everyone we share it with. It applies to both the extension and the website.

Data we collect

• Account info (from Google Sign-In): your name, email, and profile photo.
• Profile you set: username and bio.
• Your annotations: the highlights, notes, bookmarks, and article summaries you create, plus the page’s URL and title so we can attach and re-draw them.
• Page addresses you visit while Annotate is active: when you open a page, the extension asks our server “does this account have saved annotations for this URL?” so it can re-draw your highlights. On a page you’re paywalled out of, the extension sends the site’s domain to check whether a friend can help. We do not store a history of the pages you visit.
• Social data: who you follow, invites you create/redeem, and note requests between you and friends.
• Subscription/access signals: when you act on a page (highlight, bookmark, or summarize), we record whether that site is paywalled and that you could read it — only on your explicit action, never from passive browsing.

How we use your data

Strictly to run the product: syncing your annotations to your dashboard, re-drawing highlights when you revisit a page, generating summaries, organizing your saves, and enabling the social features you opt into (following, invites, and requesting or sending a friend’s notes). Your notes are private to you unless you explicitly share them or fulfill a request. We do not use your data for advertising, and we do not sell it.

AI features

Annotate uses AI (Anthropic’s Claude models via their API) for two features you trigger: article summaries (the article’s text is sent to Anthropic to produce key points) and smart folders (short snippets of your annotations are sent to group them by topic). This only happens when you click Summarize or Sort. Anthropic processes this to return a result and does not train its models on it.

Who we share data with (sub-processors)

We share data only with the services needed to run Annotate:

• Google — sign-in (your name, email, photo).
• Anthropic — AI summaries & smart folders (article text / annotation snippets, on your action).
• Vercel — website & API hosting.
• Neon — the database that stores your account and annotations.

Google user data — Limited Use

Annotate’s use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. We use Google account data only to provide and improve Annotate’s user-facing features, and never for advertising or to sell to third parties.

What we don’t do

• We do not log or sell your general browsing history.
• We do not access your publisher accounts, subscriptions, or passwords.
• We do not run ads or use your data for advertising.

Retention & deletion

You can delete individual annotations any time. You can delete your entire account from Settings → Delete account, which permanently removes your account and all associated data (annotations, folders, follows, invites, and requests). You can also email us to request deletion.

Cookies & security

We use a session cookie to keep you signed in, and a short-lived cookie to remember an invite while you sign up. Data is transmitted over HTTPS and access tokens are stored securely. We don’t use tracking or advertising cookies.

Changes & contact

We’ll update this page if our practices change. Questions or deletion requests: matt.james.schmidt@gmail.com.