Privacy

The data Privoo collects

None.

That is the whole section, but it is worth saying what it means in practice, because "we don't sell your data" usually means something narrower than it sounds.

• There is no Privoo account, so there is no profile to attach anything to.
• There is no sync server, so your history and bookmarks have nowhere to be uploaded to.
• There is no analytics or crash-reporting endpoint. Privoo does not phone home on launch, on navigation, or on error.
• The only outbound requests Privoo makes that you did not ask for are the update check and the filter-list refresh, and both can be turned off in Settings.

Your history, bookmarks, passwords, settings and AI conversations are files in one folder on your own disk. You can read them, back them up, or delete them.

What is on by default

Protections that are off until you find them are not protections. These are all active before you open the first tab:

• Ad and tracker blocking. EasyList, EasyPrivacy and the uBlock Origin lists, applied at the network layer so blocked requests never leave the machine.
• Third party cookies blocked. This is the mechanism most cross site tracking still depends on.
• HTTPS only mode. Insecure connections are upgraded automatically.
• DNS over HTTPS. Your lookups are encrypted, so the list of sites you resolve is not readable on the wire.
• Fingerprint protection. Canvas readback is noised deterministically per origin, the user agent is normalised, and WebRTC cannot leak your local address.
• Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control. Both signals are sent.
• Tracking parameter stripping. utm_*, fbclid, gclid and friends are removed from URLs, and the Referer header is minimised.
• Paste protection and pop‑up blocking, both described below.

What Privoo cannot do

• It does not hide which sites you visit from your internet provider. Encrypted DNS hides the lookup; the connection itself still goes to an address your provider can see. Turn on the VPN or route through Tor if that matters.
• It does not make you anonymous to sites you sign in to. If you log in, you have identified yourself, and no amount of fingerprint protection changes that.
• It does not protect a compromised machine. Malware, a keylogger, or someone with access to your unlocked computer are all outside what a browser can do anything about.
• It does not judge whether a site is honest. Paste protection checks the shape of a link. It cannot tell you whether the people behind a legitimate-looking site are trustworthy.
• Incognito does not make you invisible. It stops Privoo writing anything to this device. Your employer, your school, your provider and the sites themselves see exactly what they always saw.

Paste protection

When you paste a link into the address bar, Privoo looks at it before you follow it. The check is deliberately a short list of things that are almost never innocent, because a warning people learn to click through is worse than no warning at all.

• A username hidden before an @, which browsers do not display. https://apple.com@evil.example reads as Apple and goes somewhere else.
• Punycode hostnames, whose decoded form uses characters that look like ordinary letters but are not.
• A well-known brand name appearing on a domain that is not that brand's.
• A bare public IP address where a hostname belongs. Addresses on your own network are exempt, because a router admin page is a normal thing to open.
• javascript: and data: links, which have no legitimate reason to arrive via the clipboard.

There is no "this domain is new" check and no "http is insecure" check. Both fire constantly during ordinary browsing, and a warning that fires constantly is one people route around entirely. You can turn the whole thing off in Settings → Privacy.

Pop-up blocking

Privoo answers one question: did you just do something? A page that opens a window a moment after your click is acting on that click. One that opens a window with no interaction at all is acting on its own.

Every legitimate case follows an interaction, whether that is a link, a "sign in with" button or a download, follows an interaction, so the test costs them nothing. Pop-unders and timer-driven ad redirects do not wait for one, so it catches them.

Where your data lives

Passwords and API keys in that folder are encrypted. Everything else is plain JSON, and that is deliberate. You should be able to read what a browser has written about you.

Verifying any of this

None of the above should be taken on trust. Privoo is MIT licensed and public; the network layer is in main.js and the blocking is Ghostery's engine. Point a proxy at it and watch what it sends.