Local-first means local.
Threshold runs entirely on your device. Your sessions and settings never leave it: there are no servers, no accounts, no analytics, and no tracking of any kind. This page explains exactly what is stored, what is never done, and why each permission is asked for.
Everything is kept in your browser's local extension storage on this device, using chrome.storage.local. Nothing is uploaded. The data is:
- Your settings: the sites you gate, your daily standard, your pause length, and your allowlist.
- Your sessions: for each visit to a gated site, the intent you typed, the timestamps, and your later answer to whether you did what you set out to do.
- Your Honesty Score and streak: both computed on this device from the sessions above.
These are guarantees, not preferences. The extension ships with a content security policy that only permits connections to itself, so it cannot phone home even by accident.
- No servers. Threshold has no backend and makes no network requests.
- No accounts, no sign-in, no email collection.
- No analytics, telemetry, advertising, or third-party scripts.
- No selling, sharing, or transmitting of your data. There is nowhere for it to go.
- No remote code. Everything that runs is bundled in the extension and reviewable.
Threshold asks for the minimum it needs, and the two most sensitive permissions are optional: requested only when you choose to use the feature behind them, and revocable any time.
- Host access (optional): granted at runtime when you turn on gating. It lets the gate run on the sites you choose. The gate still limits itself to your own list; this only governs whether it may run at all.
- Browsing history (optional): only if you ask Threshold to suggest sites from your most-visited. The list is computed on your device and never leaves it. Decline it and nothing is lost. You can still pick sites yourself.
- Scripting & active tab: to place the gate on a page and to act on the site in your current tab when you invoke Threshold.
- Tabs: to tell which site is in front so the right standard and budget apply.
- Storage: to keep your settings and sessions on this device.
- Alarms: to roll over your daily standard at local midnight and run light housekeeping.
- Context menus & notifications: for the right-click "gate this site" action and the brief confirmation that follows.
Because the data is yours and lives with you, you hold every lever:
- Export everything to a single JSON file from Settings: sessions, settings, the lot.
- Delete your sessions, or reset Threshold to a clean install, from Settings. There is no copy elsewhere to worry about.
- Revoke host access or history access at any time, in Settings or in Chrome's extension controls. Gating simply stops.
- Uninstall removes the extension and its local storage with it.