ShopInspect Privacy

In short

ShopInspect is a browser extension that analyses the product listing you are looking at and reports on its price, reviews, seller, details and value.

ShopInspect has no servers. There is no account, no login, no analytics and no telemetry. Nobody at Elevven11 Studio can see what you browse, what you inspect, what you are thinking of buying, or what ShopInspect finds.

That last point deserves its own line. A shopping extension is in a position to learn what you want and what you can afford, which is among the most commercially valuable things anybody could know about you. The rest of this policy is about how ShopInspect is built so that it cannot.

When ShopInspect runs

By default, only when you ask it to: when you click the toolbar button, use the keyboard shortcut, or choose ShopInspect from the right-click menu.

There is deliberately no content script in the extension manifest. Nothing of ShopInspect is loaded into a page until you ask for a report on that page, and it is not present on any other page at all.

Automatic inspection is an option you can turn on. It reads each product page as it finishes loading so that a score can appear on the toolbar, and it needs permission to access the pages you visit, which Chrome will ask you about separately. It is off until you turn it on, and the permission can be withdrawn from the settings page at any time.

Reading a product from a listing page is the other time it runs. On a search or category page, ShopInspect names the products in the page's own grid, and asking for one of them opens that product in a background tab and reads it there. It is a page you chose, read once, at the moment you chose it, and it needs the same optional host access as automatic inspection, because the tab is one ShopInspect opened rather than one you clicked into. Nothing about the other products in the grid is read.

While the popup is open, ShopInspect re-reads the one element the price came from, about once a second and a half, for at most a minute. That is how it can tell you the shop has changed the price under a report you are in the middle of reading. It compares the text with what it read before and keeps neither: the comparison happens in the page, and the only thing that ever leaves it is the fact that the two differ.

A site cannot tell that you have ShopInspect installed. The two files the in-page highlight needs, the font and the icon, are served under an address that changes every session rather than a fixed one, so a page cannot quietly ask for them and learn which extensions you use. A shop that could see this extension in its visitors could treat them differently, which is the opposite of the point.

Pages it does not read

ShopInspect reads one product at a time. Before anything else is collected, it checks whether the page is a single product's page, from the store's own structured data, its sharing tags, whether there is a visible add-to-basket control, whether the page shows a grid of product cards, and the shape of the address.

If it is not a product page, nothing further is read. A category listing, a search results page, a basket and a checkout are never collected from, not even a count. That check runs before the collectors, so such a page is never read and then discarded.

What ShopInspect reads

To analyse a product listing, it reads:

• the page's address, from the browser rather than from the page, and its title;
• the store's own structured product data (Schema.org JSON-LD, microdata and RDFa) and its meta tags, including Open Graph;
• candidate values from the page: the price, the was-price, any discount badge, the rating, the review count, the availability, the seller name and the brand, together with where on the page each was found;
• the specification table: the label and value of each row;
• the product images: source, alt attribute, intrinsic and displayed size;
• sentences on the page that state a delivery, returns or warranty term;
• the reviews visible on the page: the star rating, the body text, the date as written, whether the store marks the review as a verified purchase, and the helpful-vote count. No reviewer identity is read: not the name, not the avatar, not the profile link;
• the fingerprints a store platform leaves in the markup (a body class, a stylesheet path, a checkout token in a meta tag), so that a Shopify or WooCommerce store can be recognised. These are names and paths only.

What ShopInspect never reads

• The values of any form field. No password, no card number, no address, no search term, no message. Nothing in the codebase will accept one. Editable regions of a page, the kind that behave like a text box, are skipped the same way.
• Anything on a checkout or basket page. Those are not product pages, so they are not read at all.
• Cookies, tokens or credentials of any kind. ShopInspect reads no cookies, not even their names.
• The page's own JavaScript variables. Unlike a technology detector, ShopInspect has no reason to look at them, and there is no second injection into the page's world. A store's globals would reveal the cart contents, the customer's session and the analytics payload, and none of it would improve a product report.
• Any page you have not asked about.

Review text

Review text is analysed, never kept, unless you save page evidence, which writes the reviews read from the page into a file on your device.

The collector caps each review's text hard and the analysis extracts themes and sentiment from it in the browser. What reaches the report is the theme counts, the sentiment split, and a handful of short quotes as evidence. The report is what the cache stores, so the cache never holds a review section.

Review analysis can also be switched off entirely in settings. With it off, the review list is never read, rather than read and then ignored. The inspection gathers exactly what the sections you have turned on actually need.

What ShopInspect stores

On your device, in chrome.storage.local, and nowhere else:

• your settings, including which sections run and your thresholds;
• the products you saved to compare, at most eight, each holding normalised figures (name, price, rating, specifications, score) and never a copy of the page. Clearable from settings or from the Compare screen;
• a cache of the last few reports, keyed by page address, which expires after five minutes and holds at most twelve entries.

That cache is what makes reopening the popup on the same product instant. It holds figures, findings and the short evidence fragments already shown in the report. It is not a shopping history: it holds the last few products you inspected, expires in minutes, and can be cleared from the settings page.

ShopInspect keeps no history of the products you have inspected. There is no such list, and no setting to create one. The saved comparison is the one exception and it is different in kind: you put each entry there by pressing a button, and you can empty it.

The network

Nothing in ShopInspect makes a network request. There is no endpoint to send anything to, and no feature that reaches one. Everything, from the extraction to the review analysis and the scoring, happens in your browser.

The fonts and icons the extension displays are bundled with it, so even the popup opens without touching the network.

What leaves your device

Nothing, unless you ask for it:

• Export and copy build a file or a clipboard entry in your browser. Where it goes next is up to you.
• Save page evidence writes a cleaned copy of the page to a file on your device, described below.
• Clicking a link in the popup opens that address in a new tab, which is your browser going there rather than ShopInspect sending anything. The advert and the links that carry tags are described under the advert below.

Report exports contain the verdict, the figures, the findings, the evidence behind them, and the confidence of each reading. They do not contain a copy of the listing or of anybody's reviews.

Copy what was read puts the figures ShopInspect weighed on your clipboard: each candidate's text, its score and why, and the page's address without its query string, which on many shops carries a session.

Saving page evidence

Save page evidence exists so that a misreading can be fixed from the page itself rather than from a description of it. It runs only when you press it, and it saves a file to your device. Nothing is sent anywhere.

The file holds:

• what ShopInspect read from the page, the same snapshot a report is built from, including review text if review analysis is on;
• a copy of the page, cleaned before it leaves the tab: scripts, styles and frames removed; every form value, placeholder and editable region emptied; query strings taken off every address; and the text of the header, the navigation, the footer, account and login areas and review authors replaced with dots;
• what ShopInspect concluded, and an empty space for what the store showed.

The page text that remains can still say things about you, such as a delivery location a shop prints beside the price. Open the file and check it before you send it to anyone.

Permissions, and why

The advert, and the affiliate links in it

The foot of the popup carries one advert, on one line, labelled Ad. It is the only advertisement in the extension and you can turn it off for good from the cross beside it.

Everything about it is decided before the extension ships:

• the list of adverts is bundled with the extension. Opening the popup reaches no ad network, loads no third-party script and tells nobody that the popup was opened;
• the adverts rotate on a counter, so each one gets an equal share. That counter is the only thing written down, and it says nothing about you: not what you were looking at, not what you clicked;
• nothing about you is used to choose one. There is no targeting, because there is nothing to target with.

Nine of the adverts are affiliate links. They point at Blender add-ons on superhivemarket.com and they carry the founder's own ?ref= tag, so if you follow one and buy something there, the founder earns a commission. That is stated here because an extension that advises on purchases while quietly earning from them is not a second opinion, and that is the whole product.

Superhive is also a store ShopInspect can read, so that relationship is stated twice rather than once. The screen shown on a page with no product to inspect lists the marketplaces it knows as links, and two of those links earn the founder something. Both are marked Ad.

The Superhive chip opens a page inside the extension rather than the shop: Superhive's plain address first, carrying nothing, then the founder's affiliate links under a line saying a commission is paid on them. Somebody who wants the shop gets the shop.

The Anvil Store chip carries the founder's referral code, ?ref=, in the address it opens. Following it and buying something credits the founder. That is the only thing added to it, and the rest of the store list is each shop's own address with nothing on it at all.

Both shops can also be inspected, which is the other half of the arrangement and the half that matters more. A report on a paid listing at either one says so where the verdict is, marked Ad, and the same sentence travels with the summary and the JSON export, because those are read by people who never saw the popup. It is not shown on a listing that costs nothing, since no commission is paid on a free download. Nothing in the reading or the scoring knows the relationship exists: both are read by the same adapter code, against the same thresholds, as every other store.

What the arrangement does not touch:

• the report. Superhive is read by the same adapter code as every other store, scored by the same engine, against the same thresholds. Nothing in the extraction, the scoring or the wording knows the relationship exists, and no listing is treated more kindly for being on a shop that pays a commission;
• anything you buy elsewhere. No store ShopInspect reads is an affiliate partner beyond those two, so there is no commission on a purchase from any listing it reports on except a Superhive or Anvil Store one you reached through a link in the popup;
• the links on a page you visit. ShopInspect does not touch the store's own links, and adds nothing to an address you follow from a page it inspected;
• the advert's place. It sits outside the report, on its own line, under the word Ad, and an affiliate link anywhere else in the interface carries that word too.

Tags on the links in the popup

Links to Elevven11 Studio's own pages, the support page and the donation link included, carry utm_source=shopinspect and which line you clicked. Every Elevven11 extension points at one support page, and without those tags the studio cannot tell them apart.

That is ordinary navigation and not data collection: you click, your browser goes there, and the destination reads its own address. Nothing is sent from the extension, nothing about you is in the tag, and nothing is recorded on this device.

A link to somebody else's site is opened exactly as it was written. The nine affiliate adverts carry the founder's ?ref= tag, which is already in the address that ships in the extension, and ShopInspect adds nothing to it. No other outbound link carries anything at all, the store list included.

Children

ShopInspect is a shopping tool with no accounts, no content and no communication features. It collects nothing from anyone, of any age.

Deleting your data

Everything ShopInspect holds is in one store on your device. "Reset ShopInspect" in the settings page empties it: settings, saved products, cached reports. There is nothing held anywhere else, so there is nothing else to request, export or delete.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and the change will be described in the extension's release notes.

Contact

Questions about this policy go to elevven11studio@gmail.com, or message us on WhatsApp. Bug reports and feature requests are welcome through extension support.

This policy covers the ShopInspect extension only. The studio privacy policy covers this website and the enquiries you send through it.