What Sniff reads
Only your own saved posts, and only from the Instagram page your browser has already loaded while you are signed in. For each saved post it may store:
- the post's ID and link, the account that posted it, and the collection you filed it under;
- the caption and its hashtags;
- the description Instagram itself attaches to the image for screen readers;
- a copy of the post's thumbnail image;
- any text Sniff reads off that thumbnail, which happens on your computer;
- if you turn on picture search, a list of numbers describing what the thumbnail shows — not a second copy of the picture;
- the order in which the posts came back, which is the order you saved them in.
Sniff does not read any other tab, any other site, or anybody's posts but the ones in your own saved collection.
Where it is stored
In your browser's own storage, on the computer you installed Sniff on. It is not synced between your devices, not backed up anywhere, and not readable by any website you visit. I have no copy of it and no way to obtain one.
What leaves your computer
Two kinds of request, and neither one carries anything about you.
1. Your thumbnails, from Instagram
To store and read a post's thumbnail, Sniff fetches that image from Instagram's own image servers (cdninstagram.com and fbcdn.net) — the same picture your browser was already loading to show you the page. Those requests are made without cookies or credentials, so they carry no session and identify nobody.
2. The picture-recognition model, once
Searching for what a picture shows needs an open-source model that is too large to ship inside the extension. The first time you use that feature, Sniff downloads it from huggingface.co: four files, being the model's configuration, its tokenizer, its vocabulary and its weights. That is a download only. No image, caption, search term or any other piece of your data is ever uploaded, to Hugging Face or anywhere else. Once it has downloaded, the feature works with no network at all.
There is nothing else. Sniff contains no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no advertising, and no third-party tracking scripts of any kind.
What Sniff never does
- It never asks for your Instagram password, and could not use one. It works inside the session you are already signed into.
- It never posts, likes, follows, comments or messages as you.
- It never sends your captions, pictures, searches or index to me or to a third party.
- It never sells or shares data, because it never receives any.
- It is not used to determine anyone's creditworthiness or for lending purposes.
The permissions it asks for, and why
| Permission | Why it is needed |
|---|---|
| storage | To keep your search index and settings on your own device. |
| unlimitedStorage | A large saved collection exceeds the browser's default allowance, and the extension would stop partway through without this. |
| tabs | To find your open Instagram tab and notice when it navigates away. The contents of other tabs are never read. |
| sidePanel | The whole interface is the browser's side panel. |
| offscreen | Reading text off a picture is heavy work; this runs it in a hidden document that has no access to any website. |
| instagram.com | To read your saved posts from your own saved page. |
| cdninstagram.com, fbcdn.net | To fetch your saved posts' thumbnails, as described above. |
| huggingface.co | The one-time model download, as described above. |
Deleting everything
Removing the extension from your browser deletes the entire index immediately — the posts, the cached thumbnails and everything read from them. There is no copy held anywhere else, so there is nothing further to request and nobody to ask.
If you want to clear the index but keep Sniff installed, open the panel, press the ? button and use the control that wipes the index there.
Children
Sniff is not directed at children under 13 and is not designed for them. It collects no information from anyone, of any age.
If this policy changes
The date at the top of this page changes with it. If Sniff ever starts transmitting anything off your device — which is not planned, and would be a change to what the product fundamentally is — that will be stated here plainly and in the extension's store listing before any version that does it is released.
Questions
Get in touch through the support contact on Sniff's listing in the Chrome Web Store or Microsoft Edge Add-ons.
One note on Instagram
Sniff is an independent tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Instagram or Meta in any way.