What Copy Element can see, what it does with it, and — the short version — why the answer to almost everything below is "nothing leaves your browser."
Collects — nothing. No analytics, no crash reporting, no telemetry, no account.
Sends to a server — nothing. There is no Copy Element server. The extension has no backend.
Stores — nothing, anywhere. Not in chrome.storage, not in a database, not in a log.
Reads — only the one element you click on, only while you're picking it, and only to build the snippet on your clipboard.
Copy Element lets you click an element on any page and copies it to your clipboard as a self-contained block of HTML and CSS — one that renders the same when pasted somewhere else. That's the entire product. Everything below follows from that one job.
The picking, the style extraction, and the clipboard write all happen inside your browser, in the tab you're looking at. No page content, no URL, no screenshot, and no copied snippet is ever transmitted anywhere — not to us, not to a third party, not to an analytics service. We don't operate a server that the extension talks to, so there is nowhere for that data to go even if we wanted it to.
Chrome requires an extension to declare, up front, every capability it might use. Here is what each declared permission is for, in this extension specifically.
| Permission | Used for |
|---|---|
| activeTab | Lets the picker run in the tab you're currently viewing when you click the toolbar icon or press the shortcut — the ordinary way a browser extension is allowed to act on the page you're looking at. |
| scripting | Injects the picker overlay and the style-extraction code into the page so you can hover, highlight, and select an element to copy. |
| clipboardWrite | Puts the finished HTML + CSS snippet on your system clipboard after you click an element — this is the extension's entire output. |
| host_permissions <all_urls> |
Two things: lets the picker work on whichever site you're on without asking per-domain, and lets the background service worker fetch images and font files referenced by the element you copied — so they can be embedded directly into the snippet as data URIs, rather than the snippet depending on a live connection back to the original site. This fetch goes straight from your browser to the asset's own origin; it never passes through us. |
chrome.storage, or to any database. Close the tab and there is no residue.If what the extension collects, sends, or requests ever changes, this page will be updated and the "Effective" date above will move. Continuing to use the extension after an update means you've seen the current version of this policy.