Privacy

Only while you are signed in, and only on ordinary web pages (http and https):

• When a page opens: its address and title, so motl can check whether the page is private before reading anything else.
• As soon as a public page is readable: while the tab is visible, its readable text goes to motl to find related saves. Pages you open briefly also get this lookup; a substantial content update may trigger one more. YouTube uses the title, description and opening of its transcript when available. Library-topic underlines start at the same time: only short mention sentences leave the browser for confirmation. Deep read uses the same gated readable text to select exact quotes and compare specific claims with up to five related saves. These quotes appear in the panel and as page highlights. Selected quotes are stored with an item only when you keep it.
• As you keep reading: on the same public page, while the tab is visible, each new screenful you scroll to (up to 2,000 characters of what is on screen, including posts a feed loads as you go) is checked for saves not shown yet, at most one lookup every 1.5 seconds and 12 to 30 per page. On YouTube, while the video plays, each new minute or so of its transcript is checked the same way; nothing is sent while it is paused. Turning motl’s lens off for a site stops this there. motl does not store the screenful.
• Never read: private messages and inboxes (for example X and Reddit messages, LinkedIn messaging, Facebook Messenger, Instagram direct messages, WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, Teams, Gmail, Outlook, Proton Mail, Yahoo Mail and Fastmail), by any motl feature. On public pages, pop-up dialogs, chat and message drawers, text boxes and anything you are typing are left out too. A site’s own search results (on X, Reddit, YouTube and others) get the same private-search check as Google, and motl does not keep reading them as you scroll.
• When you search on Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo, motl reads the words you searched and the top results to find related saves. Searches about health, money, legal matters, religion, sexuality or relationships are treated as private and are not sent on for reminders.
• Once you have been reading for about 8 seconds, or have scrolled 40% of the way down: the article’s readable text (menus and ads are left out), up to 60,000 characters, along with the site name, the page language and the addresses of its main images. motl uses this to decide whether the page is worth keeping and to record that you read it.
• When you save a quote or a note: only after you tap “save quote” or “+ note” next to a selection, use the right-click menu or the panel’s quick actions, and only on a public page. motl keeps the page first (the same checks as Keep), then sends the words you selected (up to about 2,000 characters, with a few words either side so it can find them again), your note, and the project you picked, if any. “Save image to motl” sends that image’s address; our server fetches the image itself. The small “saved to” notice on the page is drawn so the page cannot read it. The page cannot see what you type in motl’s note box: it belongs to the extension, not to the page. A button shown on a web page can never be fully protected from a page that draws over it, so motl ignores clicks that come too soon or on a covered button; the side panel’s “Add a note” is the fully private way to write a note.
• When you use the side panel: which reminders were shown or dismissed, and what you keep or undo.
• On a Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo results page: only after the search passed the privacy check above (a search about a sensitive personal matter gets nothing), the search address and title and the titles and short descriptions of the top 8 results (not their addresses), once per search, so motl can tag results that fit one of your projects. Marking results and links you kept or read this week happens entirely in your browser: the links on a page are never sent.
• When you ask motl to sort your open tabs: only when you tap “sort them” (or pick it from the quick actions), the address (with anything after a “?” removed) and title of up to 16 open tabs. Never pinned or incognito tabs, search pages, pages motl already judged private, or the banks, inboxes, sign-in pages and other pages listed below. Keeping a tab from the list goes through the same checks as Keep; closing never touches the tab you are on, and can be undone.
• When you keep a video or podcast page: its transcript, when it has one. On YouTube, your browser reads the video’s captions from YouTube itself, without your YouTube cookies. On other sites, motl uses a transcript already on the page. If motl cannot read the page at all, it keeps just its address and title.
• When you import links or share one from your phone: the file you upload is read once and not stored; the list of links (address, title, folder or tag, the date you saved it, and Readwise or Raindrop highlights and notes) is. Links to private places (banking, mail, sign-in pages, messages) are dropped before anything is opened. For each remaining link, motl’s server opens the page itself, the way any visitor would: no cookies, never signed in, respecting the site’s robots.txt, and checking every redirect against the same private list and that site’s robots.txt before following it. A page’s own “canonical” address is used only when it is on the same site and not private. It checks the address and title are not private (the same check as everywhere else), then keeps the page like one you kept yourself. A page that will not open is kept as just its title and address. A link motl refuses as private keeps only its site name and the reason; its address and title are erased. To suggest projects, Jev sees your project names and descriptions, folder names and link titles. Any web address in a title or folder name is cut to its site name, and a link without a real title is sent as its site name, so Jev never sees an address.

All of this goes to motl’s own server and nowhere else. Apart from reading captions from the video site you are on, the extension does not talk to any other company directly.

• Anything at all while you are signed out.
• Pages on the connected motl origin or the extension’s configured motl origins.
• Pages that are not ordinary web pages, such as browser pages, files on your computer local development sites, and devices on your home network such as your router.
• Anything from banks, payment sites, email inboxes and private messages, sign-in pages, account, settings and billing pages (but not documentation about them), and patient portals. The extension recognizes these by their address, in your browser, and sends nothing about them, not even their address or title. Our server checks the same list again.
• The text of other private pages. For every other page, an automated check on its address and title (with anything after a “?” removed) decides whether it looks private before any text is sent. If it looks private, if the check fails, or if your browser cannot reach our server to ask, the text stays in your browser. This holds for reading, reminders, highlights, topics, summaries and keeping alike.
• Your browser history, cookies, other tabs (unless you ask motl to sort them, as above), or what you type into forms. motl does not ask Chrome for access to history or cookies.

A few companies do part of the work for us. They receive only what they need for their step. We do not sell your data or use it for advertising.

TypeSafe (Jev)

Makes motl’s judgments: whether a page looks private (its address, with anything after a “?” removed, and its title), whether a Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo search concerns a sensitive personal matter (the words searched), what kind of page it is and whether to keep it (page text and your project names and descriptions), which of your saves relate to a public page you are reading (its text, and the titles and summaries of up to 30 of your saves), which paragraph or quote connects, which of your projects a quote or note you save belongs to (the quote, your note, the page title and your project names and descriptions), which of your projects imported or shared links belong to (folder names and link titles, or only the site name of a link without a title, never the address), which topic a mention means, what goes in your morning note (titles and summaries of your saves and this week’s reading titles), which of your projects a search result fits (the words searched and the top results’ titles and descriptions, after the sensitive-search check), whether an open tab is worth keeping or closing (its address without anything after a “?”, its title, and your project names and descriptions, only when you ask to sort your tabs), and search ranking. For the search privacy check, motl stores the answer, not the words searched. TypeSafe receives nothing about the banks, inboxes, sign-in pages and other pages the extension recognizes by address.

OpenAI

Turns text into numbers (embeddings) for finding related pages: the full text of pages you keep; the title and first 2,000 characters of each public page you open, even briefly, once you have kept at least one page; the text of each new screenful you scroll to on such a page (up to 2,000 characters); and your library search queries. When Anthropic cannot answer, OpenAI also writes the two-sentence summary of a page you keep, or that you ask to summarize, from its text. Pages brought in by an import are always summarized by OpenAI (gpt-5.4-mini), from their first 12,000 characters. To avoid repeating requests, our server can reuse the numeric embedding of the same text for your account for ten minutes. This cache adds no page text.

Anthropic

Writes a two-sentence summary of each page you keep, from its text, and of a page you tap “summarize” on (that summary is not stored).

Wikimedia

Receives topic titles from our server for public topic summaries and free images, never the text of the page you are reading.

Vercel

Hosts the motl app and stores images from pages you keep, privately.

Our database host

Stores the data listed below.

Resend

Sends the morning email, if it is on: your address and the titles, links and small images of the saves it mentions. The email has no tracking pixels.

The original websites

When you keep a page, our server downloads that page’s own images and icon from its site. When you import links or share one from your phone, our server also downloads the page itself (and the site’s robots.txt). The site sees our server, not you.

• Your account: your name, email and a hashed password, until you delete your account. For each sign-in, its IP address and browser type, until that sign-in expires; expired sign-ins are deleted every hour.
• Pages you keep: the address, title, text, a summary, quotes, the passages and notes you saved on it, topics, images, and the project you put it in, until you unkeep the page or delete your account. An unkept page stays under Recently removed in your library for 7 days, unchanged and hidden everywhere else, where you can restore it or delete it at once; then it is deleted for good with its text, summary, quotes, embeddings, related judgments and images.
• Titles of pages you read: the title of each public page you read long enough for motl to look at, so the morning note can take this week’s reading into account, and a scrambled fingerprint of its address (made with a secret value unique to your account, never the address itself) so the extension can mark links to pages you read this week. Deleted after 7 days. We do not store the text of pages you do not keep. Results tagged for a project and tabs you ask motl to sort are not stored at all.
• A record of motl’s judgments: for each page it checks, the address with anything after a “?” removed, and the answers. No page text. For searches we keep only a scrambled fingerprint of the query, never the words. Most judgments are stored by address only: the privacy check, whether to keep the page, reminders, deep read and highlights. Those are deleted after 30 days, whether or not you later keep the page. Judgments recorded against a page you keep (how its topics, picture and connections were chosen) stay with that page, including during its 7 days under Recently removed, and are deleted with it.
• Reminder activity: which reminders you saw, opened or dismissed. Deleted after 90 days.
• Topics: how often each topic underline was shown to you or hovered, and the ones you marked as known, until you delete your account.
• Imports: the list of links and what happened to each (for a link refused as private, only its site name), until 30 days after the import ends (a preview you never started: one day). The pages it kept stay like any page you keep. A count of your uploads and of the links you started importing (no addresses or titles), for the daily limits, is deleted after 48 hours.
• Morning notes: which saves each note picked, and a copy of each morning email sent. Deleted after 30 days.

These limits are applied by a job that runs every hour, so a record can outlive its limit by about an hour (longer only if a large backlog takes several runs). Copies in our database host’s own backups follow that host’s backup schedule.

In your browser, the extension keeps its sign-in token and, for each open tab, the page it last read. The tab copy is cleared when you navigate away, close the tab or quit Chrome. To mark links and search results you kept or read this week, it also keeps the list of scrambled fingerprints of those addresses, with their titles and your account’s secret value, refreshed at most every 10 minutes and erased when you sign out. Web pages cannot read this list, or see the marks motl draws.

Only if you connect an AI app (such as Claude, ChatGPT or Claude Code) to motl and press Allow on motl’s own screen. Nothing is shared with any app otherwise.

• Read your library lets the app search your saves, open one (its title, address, summary, key quotes, your highlights and notes, topics and connections), list your projects and recent saves, and ask questions answered only from your saves, with citations. It never sees your browsing, reading log or reminders.
• Add to your library lets the app name a web address for motl to keep. motl’s server fetches that page itself, as the public internet sees it (no cookies, public addresses only), refuses private sites (banking, email, health, sign-in pages) before fetching, and runs the same privacy check as every keep before storing anything.
• What a tool returns goes to that app and its provider, under their privacy terms. Connect only apps you trust with your library.
• motl keeps the app’s registration (its name and return address), what you allowed and when, and its access keys only in scrambled (hashed) form. An access key expires after an hour; a renewal key after 30 days. Each tool call is logged with the tool’s name only, never what was asked or returned, and deleted after 90 days.
• Disconnect any app in Settings → Connected apps: its access stops at once. Deleting your account removes every connection. Your export lists your connected apps (never their keys).

The “What you’re learning this week” card is counted by motl’s code from your own saves, topics, connections and opens. To add one short sentence per section, the titles of this week’s saves and their topic names go to Anthropic (or OpenAI if Anthropic is unavailable), and Jev checks each sentence against those facts; a sentence that does not pass is not shown. motl stores only the sentences that passed, until the facts change, and deletes them with your account.

• Sign out or remove the extension and motl reads nothing more.
• Undo a keep in the side panel, or Unkeep a page from its page in your library. It disappears at once from your library, reminders, notes and search, and its images stop loading. It stays under Recently removed at the bottom of your library for 7 days, where you can restore it exactly as it was or delete it at once; after that it is deleted for good, with its text, summary, quotes, embeddings, related judgments and images.
• Turn off the morning email in the note settings, or with the unsubscribe link in any email.
• Download your data from Settings: one JSON file with your account, projects, saved pages (text, summaries, quotes, topics), connections, reminder activity, reading titles, morning notes and judgments.
• Delete your account from Settings. It happens at once and cannot be undone: your account, every saved page with its text, summary, embeddings and images, your projects, reading titles, judgments, reminder activity and morning notes are deleted from our database and image store, and the extension is signed out. For your safety it asks you to have signed in within the last day.

Questions or requests: privacy@motl.ai (placeholder: owner to confirm)