HopTrace Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy describes how the HopTrace — Redirect & SEO Analyzer browser extension (“HopTrace”, the “Extension”) handles data. HopTrace is developed and published by Aucuparia Holdings LTD (“we”, “us”, “our”) under the RPIEM name.

It applies to the Extension only. The website at https://rpiem.com is covered by the separate Privacy Policy linked from that site's footer.

1. The short version

• HopTrace has no account, no tracking, no advertising and no analytics.
• Everything it records is stored locally on your computer and never uploaded to us or anyone else.
• It can make two kinds of outbound request, both optional and both described below. Neither carries your browsing history, your own IP address, your cookies or your request headers.
• You can delete everything it has stored with one button on the Options page.

2. What the Extension does

HopTrace has one purpose: to show how a URL resolves. When you open the popup it displays the redirect chain for the page in the active tab and reports what each hop did, including status codes, latency, response headers, cookie attributes, security headers, robots.txt rules and the canonical URL the final page declares. It observes navigation using the webRequest and webNavigation events Chrome exposes to extensions. It registers no blocking listener and never cancels, redirects, modifies or injects into a request or a page.

3. Data stored on your device

To let you review past traces, HopTrace writes the following to a local IndexedDB database in your browser profile:

• Web history: the URLs in a traced redirect chain and the page title of the destination.
• Website content: response headers, cookie attributes and document metadata for the traced page: canonical link, title, meta description, heading structure, Open Graph tags and navigation timing.

This data never leaves your device. It is pruned automatically: the 500 most recent traces are kept, and anything older than 30 days is deleted. The Clear stored data button on the Options page erases all of it on demand. Uninstalling the Extension removes it as well.

Cookie values are not stored. HopTrace records only cookie names and their Secure, HttpOnly, SameSite and expiry attributes, which is what the security review needs.

Separately, your preferences from the Options page (theme, default export format, and the toggles for robots.txt checking, IP geolocation and security-header analysis) are kept in Chrome's extension storage so they persist across restarts. Traces are never written to Chrome sync storage.

4. Data sent off your device

HopTrace makes exactly two kinds of outbound request. Both are optional and can be switched off under Options → Analysis; the Extension remains fully functional without them.

The IP lookup geolocates the server, not you. Your own IP address, the URL being traced, your cookies and your request headers are never sent to ipwho.is. ipwho.is is operated by a third party and receives the server IP under its own privacy terms.

5. What is never collected

• Personally identifiable information: no name, address, email address, age or identification number.
• Health, financial or payment information.
• Authentication information: no passwords, credentials, security questions, PINs or cookie values.
• Personal communications.
• Your location. It is never requested or derived.
• User activity: no clicks, mouse position, keystrokes or interaction telemetry. The Extension contains no analytics of any kind.

6. Permissions

Chrome asks you to grant the following permissions when you install HopTrace. Each is used only as described.

• webRequest reads the status code, Location header, response headers, cookie headers and timing of each request in a navigation so the redirect chain can be reconstructed. It only observes.
• webNavigation tells the Extension when a navigation starts, commits and finishes so hops can be grouped into one trace, and distinguishes a server redirect from a client-side history change.
• tabs lets the popup read the URL of the active tab, attribute hops to the tab that produced them, discard a trace when its tab closes, and power the “Reload without cache” button. HopTrace does not create, move, close or inject into tabs.
• storage keeps your Options preferences across restarts. Only preferences are written there.
• Access to all sites is required because a redirect can start on any site and end on any other. It is used to receive navigation events for the active tab, fetch robots.txt from the origin being traced, and run the content script that reads the destination page's own metadata. HopTrace does not read or alter page content beyond that metadata, and sends none of it off the device.

7. No remote code

Every script in the Extension is bundled at build time and shipped unminified. HopTrace loads no script from any remote origin, uses no eval() or new Function(), and declares a content security policy of script-src 'self'. The only outbound requests are the two described in section 4, and neither response is ever evaluated as code.

8. Your controls

• Turn off robots.txt fetching and IP geolocation under Options → Analysis.
• Delete all stored traces with Clear stored data on the Options page.
• Uninstall the Extension from chrome://extensions to remove it and its local database entirely.

9. Data protection

Because trace data stays on your device and is never transmitted to us, we do not act as a controller or processor of it, and we hold no personal data about users of the Extension. We do not sell or transfer user data to third parties, do not use it for any purpose unrelated to the Extension's single purpose, and do not use it to determine creditworthiness or for lending.

If you email us for support, we process your email address and message only to reply to you, as described in the website Privacy Policy.

10. Changes to this policy

If a future version of HopTrace changes what it stores or sends, this page will be updated first and the effective date above revised. Material changes will also be noted in the Chrome Web Store listing.

11. Contact

Company: Aucuparia Holdings LTD
Registered address: Agios Tychonas, Limassol, Cyprus
Privacy: privacy@rpiem.com
Support: support@rpiem.com