Privacy and Data Policy
Preface
We want you to be confident that Control Space respects your privacy and browsing activity.
This page will go into detail about what data is accessed and stored, locally and by third parties, and how and why it is used.
If you're short of time, know that:
- Control Space does not log, transmit or store any browsing activity or data outside of the browser extension itself, unless you turn on fetching site icons, which is off by default
- Your account details are held by a third party, Outseta, for the purpose of user management and billing
- Control Space collects no analytics
If you have any questions after reading this page, please email us at support@controlspace.app.
Browser data
Chrome permissions
Control Space leverages the Web Extensions API to provide new functionality, and upon install will request certain "permissions".
When you install it, Chrome will warn you that Control Space can:
- Read and change your browsing history on all your signed-in devices
- Read and change your bookmarks
- View and manage your tab groups
- Read the icons of the websites you visit
It is important that you understand what each permission is, and how it is used to provide the advertised functionality:
| Permission | Usage |
|---|---|
| Tabs | Control Space is a tab manager. It shows every open window and tab, with titles, addresses and icons, on one board, and lets you search, switch to, move, sort, pin, mute, sleep, close and reopen them. It follows tab events so the board stays current as you browse. |
| Tab groups | Shows your tab groups, with their names, colours and collapsed state, alongside your windows and tabs. Lets you create, rename, recolour, move, collapse and ungroup groups, and save them as bookmarks. |
| Bookmarks | Shows your bookmarks beside your open tabs, and lets you search and open them, save tabs, groups and windows as bookmarks, and move, rename, sort and delete bookmarks and folders. |
| History | Shows your browsing history in the History pane, grouped by site and by date, and includes it in search. Also removes Control Space's own pages from your history as they are visited. |
| Sessions | Shows recently closed tabs and windows in the Recent pane, so you can find and reopen them, and restores tabs you have just closed when you choose Undo. |
| Favicon | Shows each tab's, bookmark's and history entry's site icon, read from Chrome's own local icon cache. Makes no network requests. |
| Active tab | When you press the Control Space shortcut, or choose Switcher or Saver from the toolbar button's menu, shows that panel over the tab you are on. Gives temporary access to that one tab, at that moment. |
| Scripting | Loads Control Space's own bundled Switcher or Saver into that tab, together with Active tab. Used on no other tab, and loads no other code. |
| Context menus | Adds items to the right-click menu on the toolbar button: Overview, Switcher, Saver, Preferences and Keyboard shortcuts, and "Close other copies of this page" when the page is open in more than one tab. Never adds anything to web pages. |
| Storage | Saves your preferences, your layout, your settings for each site, and the names and settings of your windows and groups, so they come back after a browser restart. Stored on your device. |
| Alarms | If you sign in, a single alarm every 12 hours checks your sign-in and renews it before it runs out. No other alarms are set. |
| System display | Reads the size and position of your screens, so Control Space's window opens the right size, fully on screen, on the display you are working on. Reads nothing else about your system. |
| All sites | Optional, and not requested at install: Chrome asks you for it, with the warning "Read and change all your data on all websites", only if you turn on fetching site icons in Preferences. Used only to download those icons; see below. |
Browsing activity
As you can see from the table above, the permissions are extensive, though functionality is constrained mainly to display, organisation, and search. Critically, this information stays local; no browsing data (i.e. URLs, domains or web page content) is sent outside of the extension.
Site icons
The exception to the above is fetching site icons, which is off unless you turn it on in Preferences.
Control Space shows each page's icon from the browser's own cache. Where the browser has none, and you have turned this on, Control Space downloads the icon from the site itself or from an icon service — DuckDuckGo and then Google — depending on which you choose. Either way, the site's domain is sent to the site or to the service to ask for its icon. Domains that only work inside a private network, such as .local addresses, are never sent to a service.
Turning it off again removes the permission it asked for.
Bookmarks
If you sync your Chrome profile with another machine, anything you save with Control Space as a bookmark will be available on other machines where you sign in to Chrome with the same Google identity (note that this is a feature, and not a bug!)
Local storage data
Control Space stores your preferences, layout and a record of your windows, tab groups and tabs within its local storage area. These are used to persist data across sessions and to put things back after a browser restart or crash. This data is deleted when you uninstall the extension.
Third parties
User management
To use the Overview, you will need to create an account using your email address as your identifier. The Switcher and the Saver work without one.
Control Space uses a third party Outseta to manage user accounts. Outseta securely stores your email address, password, name and optionally billing information. Some additional metadata is stored by Control Space to manage your account and the extension.
When you sign in, the extension keeps a sign-in token and your email address in its local storage. It checks the token twice a day, and before it runs out sends both to our account site, account.controlspace.app, which renews it with Outseta. Your password and billing information never pass through the extension.
For more information on how Outseta stores your data, see Outseta's privacy policy.
Removing your data
Uninstalling the extension will remove its local data, which includes your preferences and a record of your recent windows and tabs.
If you saved any tabs using Control Space, they will be retained as browser bookmarks, and may be backed up by Google.
Control Space account and billing data will remain with Outseta, and will be stored as part of the billing record. To have your account removed, please contact us using the email at the top of the page.