Why this page exists
Browser extensions ask for permissions that sound alarming out of context. Rather than hope you click through, here is each one, in plain language, with the feature it exists to serve.
The permissions
| Permission | What it is for | What breaks without it |
|---|---|---|
| activeTab | Lets Lensable act on the tab you are currently looking at, only after you invoke it. | Nothing would work. This is the core permission. |
| scripting | Injects the selection overlay and the results panel into the page you are on. | No selection rectangle, no results panel. |
| storage | Stores your settings, your chosen AI provider, your Saved Highlights and, once you sign in, your sign-in session: the tokens described under Signing in and your password, never your password itself. All of it is local to your browser profile, and the session is removed when you sign out or uninstall. | Settings reset every time; nothing could be saved. |
| unlimitedStorage | Lets saved scenes and Saved Highlights keep their thumbnails without running into the browser's default storage cap. | Saving would begin to fail once your library grew. |
| identity | Used for one thing only: Sign in with Google, through Chrome's own sign-in window. You sign in on Google's pages and we never see your Google password; what comes back is a session for your Lensable account, issued by Supabase, our sign-in provider. If you sign in with an email address and password instead, that password goes from the popup straight to Supabase over HTTPS and is never seen by Lensable's servers. Both routes are described under Signing in and your password. | Google sign-in would be unavailable. Email and password would still work. |
| Host access | Allows the overlay to appear on the sites where you use it, and to read the address of the page you act on so a saved item can link back to it. | The overlay could not appear on those sites, and saved items would lose their source link. |
What we deliberately do not request
webRequestor proxy permissions — we do not intercept your network traffic.history— we do not read your browsing history.cookies— we do not read cookies from sites you visit.tabs— we do not enumerate your open tabs. Reading the address of the one page you act on comes from host access, above.- Background
desktopCapture— there is no ambient screen recording.
About host access
Host access is the permission people worry about most, and reasonably so. It grants the ability to run on pages, which is what makes an overlay possible at all.
In practice Lensable stays dormant. Nothing from a page is captured, read or transmitted until you open it and complete a selection. Signing in is separate from any page: it sends your sign-in details to Supabase, as described under Signing in and your password, and once you are signed in your session token accompanies your own requests to our servers. Nothing from the page is involved in either. If you would rather restrict it, every supported browser lets you set the extension to run on click or only on specific sites — right-click the icon and choose the site access option. Lensable works fine that way.
If an extension asks for a permission it cannot justify with a feature you can see, that is a red flag. Hold us to that: if anything on this list stops matching what the product does, tell us and we will either fix the code or fix this page.
Video and protected content
Paused video is supported where the browser allows a frame to be read. DRM-protected video cannot be captured — those frames come back blank. That is a deliberate limit, not a bug to be worked around, and we will not add a bypass.