Privacy

Vigie is a reading tool. It needs to know what you read to build a feed worth opening, and that is the entire reason any of the data below exists. Nothing here is sold, and nothing is shared with an advertising network.

Last updated 26 October 2026.

What is stored

Before you make an account

Installing the extension creates an anonymous account identified by a random string generated in your browser. It is not derived from anything about you or your device — it is random, it identifies one installation, and removing the extension makes it worthless. Against it Vigie stores:

• The topics you chose, and how those weights shift as you read.
• The sources you follow.
• Which stories you opened, saved, upvoted or hid. This is what makes the feed adapt; there is no way to personalise reading without recording reading.
• Your interface preferences: theme, density, layout, language.
• The country you read from, if you kept the one suggested or chose one.

Your country

On your first visit Vigie suggests a country, so that its outlets come first and the interface opens in its official language. The suggestion comes from the country our hosting provider reports for the network your request came from — the country alone, never your address, and that answer is not stored — or, failing that, from your device’s time zone. The country you keep is stored with your preferences. Change it, or choose “No country”, in Settings at any time.

If you make an account

An email address and a password. The password is stored only as an Argon2id hash — Vigie cannot read it, and a copy of the database is not a list of working passwords. An account exists so your feed follows you to another browser; the product works fully without one.

If you save a page

The address and title of that page. Saved pages are private to you: they never appear in anyone else’s feed and are never matched against anyone’s watchlists, including your own.

If you add a source

The address you pasted is fetched by Vigie’s server — never by your browser — to find its feed, and the feed is then read with all the others. The source, and that your account added it, are stored. Once three readers follow it, other readers can find and read it too; they are not told who added it.

If you like or report a story

A story shows how many readers opened and liked it — counts, never who. A report keeps the reason you chose and any note you wrote, with your account, so the people running Vigie can review it; the story leaves your feed at once.

If you create a watchlist

The words you asked to be told about, and which stories matched. If you add a webhook, its address and signing secret, so deliveries can be signed.

What is never collected

• Your browsing. The extension reads the address of a page only at the moment you ask it to save that page — through the right-click menu or the keyboard shortcut. It has no standing access to your tabs.
• Page content. Vigie stores a title, an excerpt from the publisher’s own feed, and a link. It does not read the pages you visit.
• Anything for advertising. There are no ad networks, no trackers and no third-party analytics in the extension or the web app.
• Precise location, contacts, files, payment details. Never requested; the only place Vigie keeps is the country you choose. Vigie is free; if you choose to donate, the payment is handled entirely by the provider you donate through and card details never reach Vigie’s servers.

What leaves the server

Almost nothing, and only where you have asked for it. The extension’s fonts are bundled inside it rather than fetched from a font CDN, precisely so that opening a new tab does not tell a third party how often you open tabs.

• Email goes to a mail provider, if digests are enabled or you request a password reset.
• Webhook deliveries go to the address you configured, and nowhere else.
• A web search, only when you pick “Search the web” in the search box, goes to the search engine you chose in settings — the same as typing it there yourself.
• Donations, if you make one, are handled by the provider you donate through.

Comments

Comments are public: anyone who opens the story sees them. Without an account you appear under a pseudonym derived from your random account identifier (“Reader 4F2A”); with one, under the name you chose. Vigie stores the text, the time, and which account wrote it. You can delete your own comments at any time — the text is removed, and a placeholder stays only if others replied to it. A comment reported by several readers is hidden until it is reviewed. Comments on a page you saved by hand are impossible: those pages are private.

AI models

Vigie runs open models from Hugging Face over the stories it reads: to find the same story told in other words or languages, to name the people, organisations and places in it, to read the tone of a watchlist’s coverage, and to translate a title and excerpt. What they read is the publishers’ own public titles and excerpts — nothing about you. They run on GitHub’s servers in a scheduled job Vigie controls, or on Hugging Face’s inference service, and the results are stored with the story, not with you.

Comments are read by a moderation model too, so that abuse can be kept back for a person to review; the model never deletes anything. A summary or translation you ask for is written from the story’s public text and is labelled as machine-made wherever it appears.

What stays in your browser

Some preferences belong to a screen rather than to you, and never leave the browser: whether the sidebar is folded, focus mode, your daily reading goal, your accent colour, your shortcuts to other sites and your preferred search engine. Shortcut tiles are drawn from the site’s name; nothing is fetched from those sites to draw them.

Your reading streak is not stored anywhere. It is counted, when you look at it, from the stories you opened — the same record that already shapes your feed — which is why it follows your account to every browser without anything new being kept.

How long it is kept

Stories leave the database after 30 days at most — sooner when it is full, oldest first. What you opened, saved or hid of a story goes with it. Anything you saved is kept until you delete it; what a watchlist matched is kept for the 30 days, and its daily counts for longer.

Getting rid of it

• Remove the extension. Its local cache goes with it, and an anonymous account with no installation behind it is unreachable.
• Delete a watchlist and its matches go too.
• Delete your account in Settings → Account and data — or, without an account, erase your data there. Everything above is removed at once, not merely hidden. You can also write to the address below.

Children

Vigie is not directed at children and does not knowingly hold data about them.

Changes

If what is collected changes, this page changes with it and the date above moves. It is not rewritten quietly.

Contact

Questions, or a deletion request: javahtml37@gmail.com. The rules for writing in Vigie are in the terms of use.

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