No server.Nothing collected.

The short version

Stay Unseen has no server. It does not collect, transmit, sell, or share any information about you with anyone, including its developer. Everything it records stays inside your own copy of your browser, and uninstalling the extension deletes all of it.

What it stores on your device

All of the following is kept in the browser's local extension storage (storage.local). None of it is ever sent anywhere.

The stored endpoints are ones Stay Unseen saw or blocked on instagram.com, facebook.com and messenger.com. They are capped, overwritten continuously, and readable only by this extension on this device.

Resetting the counters in the popup, or uninstalling the extension, erases all of the above.

Reading request contents

To decide whether a request is a read receipt or a typing notification, Stay Unseen has to look at more than the address: on Instagram and Messenger these signals are sent as GraphQL calls and websocket frames whose addresses are identical to ordinary ones. So the extension inspects the outgoing request body in memory, matches it against a fixed list of patterns, and then either drops it or lets it through.

Two consequences worth stating plainly:

• On a chat site, outgoing bodies include messages you send. Stay Unseen looks at them only to make that block-or-allow decision, and never keeps or sends them.
• Before anything is written to the local log described above, the fields holding text you typed are replaced with <user_text>. This is also what stops a message containing the word “typing” from being mistaken for a typing signal and dropped.

What it does not do

• It does not have a server, so there is nothing to send data to.
• It does not use analytics, telemetry, crash reporting, or advertising.
• It does not transmit your messages, photos, contacts, posts, or account details, and does not store the text of your messages.
• It does not ask for an account, an email address, or a sign-in.
• It does not track your browsing. It cannot: it has permission to run on instagram.com, facebook.com and messenger.com only, and no access whatsoever to any other website.
• It does not sell or share information with third parties, because it does not collect any.

What it does on the sites it runs on

On Instagram, Facebook and Messenger only, Stay Unseen stops the specific network requests that report a story view, a message read, or that you are typing. It does this in two ways: by cancelling those requests through the browser's own blocking API, and by intercepting the equivalent calls made by the page's own code. It does not change the pages you are looking at, except for the optional unread-marker preference, which affects only your own view.

Your control

Every blocking feature has its own switch in the popup and can be turned off at any time; turning one off restores the site's normal behaviour immediately. Removing the extension from your browser's extensions page — chrome://extensions, edge://extensions, or about:addons — stops all of its activity and deletes its stored data.

Children

Stay Unseen is not directed at children under 13 and collects no information from anyone, including children.

Changes to this policy

If the extension's data handling changes, this page will be updated and the date at the top revised before the change ships.

Contact

Questions about this policy: hrrpooh@gmail.com

Affiliation

Stay Unseen is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Meta Platforms, Instagram, Facebook, or Microsoft.