Privacy policy

weirdOS makes this extension. We are a design company based in Winchester, California.

Email us about anything on this page.

It keeps nothing until you say yes on its welcome page. That yes is also when Chrome asks whether SOS may see the sites you visit. From then on it takes a picture of the tab shortly after each click, form or new page. One more comes when a request to that site fails.

Before a picture is saved, the boxes you can type in are painted gray, along with anything the site marks private for its own recordings. A few embedded forms and drawing surfaces sit out of its reach, so look the picture over before it goes out. While a password or card field is on screen, no earlier picture is kept.

It also notes the label of what you clicked, a form being sent, each page’s title and address, the errors the page threw or logged, and any request that failed, with its address and status. Emails, long numbers and login tokens in that text are blanked, and addresses stop before the question mark. SOS never records your keystrokes.

Up to 8 pictures for each tab sit in Chrome’s memory on this computer. Ones older than two minutes are dropped the next time that tab does anything, and they never go into a report. Each tab’s share goes when it closes, and quitting Chrome clears everything.

Bowie comes out on that page. It reads the error being shown and the words on the last button you pressed, and asks what should have happened. Bowie and any marks you draw are ordinary parts of the page while they are there, so a site that records its own sessions can see them. What you type to Bowie stays inside SOS.

If you ask, Bowie presses that button once more for you. It will never press a button that pays, orders or books. For a request that never arrived, Bowie asks the site for its front page to see whether it still answers.

Packing it up takes one picture, with typed fields painted over the same way. That picture, the earlier ones, your words, the notes above, your browser and system version, window size, language and the time go into one PDF. Up to four support or contact links found there go in too, so the report can be addressed to their team.

The microphone stays off until you press its button. A second press, sending, or closing Bowie stops it. Chrome does the listening and hands over the words, and the sound is never stored.

When Chrome has the language installed, the audio never leaves your machine. When it does not, Chrome sends the audio to Google’s speech service to turn into words. Chrome asks for the microphone in the name of whichever site is open, and that permission stays with it afterward.

Only the people you send it to. Send it opens an email in your own mail app, addressed to the support address it found, with the write-up in it. The PDF saves to your downloads so you can attach it. Where the site has a contact form instead, Take it there opens it, and Bowie writes the report in and attaches the PDF. You press their Send button yourself. SOS has no server that receives reports.

After a report is packed, you get one question about adding it to the count at sos.weirdos.design/reports. Pressing Count it sends the site’s name, the page with ids removed, the words on the button, the kind of error, the one fix that was tried and whether it helped, the support address or contact page it found, and a short code that differs for every site and only tells apart two reports from one copy of SOS. None of your words and no picture go with it.

Those rows are kept in a Google Sheet that weirdOS owns. To tell you how many others hit a problem and what worked for them, the extension downloads the whole board up to twice a day and finds the match in that list by itself. The board is never asked about any single page.

• Access to every site. You are asked on the welcome page, and it is granted only by your yes. Earlier pictures and errors come from those pages. SOS still works on the current tab if you say no.
• Active tab. To put Bowie on the page where you press SOS.
• Scripting. To add Bowie to that page, and after a yes, to notice errors on the pages you use.
• Storage. To remember your answer and to hold the saved pictures in memory until they expire.

SOS follows the Chrome Web Store User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements. What it keeps is used only to make your report and, when you choose, the public count. It is never sold.

Vercel serves these pages and keeps standard server logs, meaning an IP address, a browser name and the page requested. The site also runs Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity, with their own cookies, to understand how people use it.

If your browser is on a European time zone, they wait until you agree on the banner, and everywhere else they start when the page loads. Saying no from the Cookies link at the bottom of any page clears what they stored. The extension never runs either one.

Close a tab and what SOS kept for it is gone. Quit Chrome and all of it is. Removing the extension removes the rest. Reports stay with you until you send them, so there is nothing of yours for us to delete. To take a site’s rows off the public board, write to us.

This extension is not aimed at anyone under 16.

Any revision moves the date at the top.