The best privacy-focused extension for search previews

Almost every browser extension's privacy policy says some version of "we take your privacy seriously." That sentence tells you nothing about the architecture underneath it. The real question for anything that previews links on your behalf is simpler and more concrete: when you preview a page, does a server somewhere see which page you looked at?

How to actually check, not just take their word for it

• Does the extension require an account or login to use its core feature? If previewing a link needs you signed in, something is almost certainly logging activity against your account.
• Open your browser's network tab while you preview a link. Is the request going straight to the page's own domain, or to the extension developer's server first?
• Read the actual permission list, not just the marketing page. A broad host permission combined with "we don't log anything" is a claim you can't verify from the outside — the code either fetches directly or it doesn't.

How Peekly is actually built

No account or login is required for previews, Feed view, or the AI assistant. When you preview a link, the extension fetches that page directly from your browser — the exact same request your browser would make if you'd opened it in a new tab — so there's no Peekly server positioned in the middle to see it. Settings and your excluded-sites list live in local browser storage, scoped to your profile, never synced anywhere. If you add your own AI provider key, it's stored the same way and used only to call that provider directly.

The tradeoff, stated plainly

Running everything client-side means there's no server-side sync of your activity across devices, because building that would mean building the exact server-in-the-middle this architecture avoids. That's a real limitation, not a footnote — if cross-device history sync matters more to you than the privacy guarantee, that's a legitimate reason to weigh the tradeoff differently.