Elenchus — Privacy Policy

Elenchus analyses the reasoning quality of a text. It comes in two forms: a Chrome extension, which reads the page you are on, and a web version at elenchus.untilt.app, where you paste the text yourself. This policy describes exactly what leaves your browser, where it goes, and what is kept. It is deliberately specific: each statement below describes what Elenchus actually does, not what it intends to do.

The two forms are not identical, and where they differ this policy says so rather than describing the gentler one. The one difference that matters is that the web version runs an anti-abuse challenge involving Cloudflare, and the extension does not.

Elenchus only reads a page when you ask it to

Elenchus holds the activeTab permission, not access to all websites. It has no standing ability to read your browsing. Clicking the Elenchus toolbar icon grants it access to that one tab, and that grant ends when you navigate away or close the tab. It never runs in the background, and it never sees pages you have not explicitly pointed it at.

What happens to the text you analyse

When you click Analyze, Elenchus extracts the readable article text from the page and sends it to a language model. Where it goes depends on which provider you use.

Free tier (the default). The extracted text is sent to the Elenchus proxy, a Cloudflare Worker, which forwards it to OpenRouter and on to the free model providers OpenRouter routes to. Those providers may log the text and use it to train their models. This is a condition of the free model tier being free, and it is why the extension shows this warning before every analysis rather than burying it here. Elenchus itself does not store the text — the proxy holds it only in memory for the duration of the request — but once it reaches those providers, their own policies apply, not this one. Do not analyse confidential pages on the free tier.

Your own API key (BYOK). The extracted text goes directly from your browser to the provider you configured. It never touches the Elenchus proxy, and no part of it is visible to Elenchus or to its author. Only that provider's privacy policy applies.

Elenchus sends the page text and nothing else: no URL, no page title, no browsing history, no identifier for you.

What the proxy stores

The free tier has a daily allowance per person: 21 analyses through the extension, and 2 through the web version, which is a taster rather than a working tool. Enforcing either requires recognising repeat callers, so the proxy keeps a counter keyed to your network address. IPv4 addresses are used as-is; IPv6 addresses are shortened to their /64 prefix, deliberately coarser than the full address. The two surfaces are counted in separate rows, so using one does not spend the other's allowance.

Against that key the proxy stores only a date and two integers: how many analyses you have run today and how many attempts you have made. No page text, no URLs and no account information are stored against it.

These records are discarded daily. The counters reset at 00:00 UTC, and the stored address key is deleted with them: the first request after midnight removes every counter left from any previous day. Nothing about you is carried from one day to the next, and if nobody uses the free tier for a day the table is empty.

The proxy also enforces service-wide daily ceilings so that the free tier cannot run up an unbounded bill. Those are aggregate counters and are not linked to anyone. Cloudflare, which runs the proxy, processes requests as our infrastructure provider and is subject to its own privacy terms. Those service-wide ceilings are also split: 750 requests a day for the extension and 150 for the web version.

The web version's anti-abuse challenge (Cloudflare Turnstile)

This section describes the web version only. The extension does none of it.

The extension is something you chose to install. The web version is a link, and a link is what an automated script points at, so it needs something between it and the free tier. That something is Cloudflare Turnstile, a challenge that tries to tell a browser from a script.

When you open the web version, your browser loads the Turnstile script from challenges.cloudflare.com. The challenge runs and issues a token. When you then click Analyse, that token is sent to the Elenchus proxy along with your text, and the proxy checks the token with Cloudflare before doing anything else with it. That check sends Cloudflare exactly three things: the token, the site's secret key, and your IP address — the full address, not the shortened key described above. Cloudflare answers yes or no. The text you are analysing is never sent to Cloudflare's verification service, and nothing from Cloudflare's answer is stored.

Cloudflare acts as a processor for this check, on the web version only, and applies its own privacy terms to it. If the challenge cannot be loaded or solved, the web version refuses the analysis rather than proceeding without it.

The extension never takes part in any of this. It loads nothing from challenges.cloudflare.com, holds no token, and no token of its is ever checked with Cloudflare. This is not merely intended: a test in the proxy holds the number of verification calls made on the extension's path at zero, so the two paths cannot quietly converge.

What is stored in your browser

Your settings — chosen provider, API endpoint, model name, and language — are kept in chrome.storage.sync. If you are signed in to Chrome, Google replicates this between your devices, in the same way as your bookmarks.

Your API key, if you set one, is kept in chrome.storage.local instead. This is deliberate: sync would copy a credential with money attached to Google's servers and to every Chrome you are signed in to. Your key never leaves your machine except in requests to the provider you chose.

Uninstalling the extension removes both.

The web version has no settings and stores nothing of its own in your browser — no account, no history, nothing carried between visits. The Turnstile challenge described above is Cloudflare's own component, and what it places in your browser is governed by Cloudflare's terms rather than by this policy.

What Elenchus does not do

• No analytics, no telemetry, no tracking pixels, no crash reporting. The web version loads exactly one third-party script — the Cloudflare Turnstile challenge described above — and no other.
• No accounts, no sign-in, no email address.
• Your data is never sold, rented, or shared for advertising.
• Your data is never used to assess creditworthiness or for lending.
• No analysed text is transferred to anyone except the model provider that analyses it, which is Elenchus's single purpose. In particular it is not sent to Cloudflare's verification service.

Third parties

Depending on how you use Elenchus, the following may process your data: Cloudflare (proxy hosting, free tier only; and, on the web version only, Turnstile challenge and verification, which receives your IP address), OpenRouter and the model providers it routes to (free tier only), or the API provider you configured yourself (BYOK only).

Children

Elenchus is not directed at children under 13 and collects no information intended to identify anyone.

Changes

Material changes to this policy will be published here with an updated date, and the extension's in-panel notice will be changed in the same release. The two are meant to say the same thing; if they ever disagree, treat the stricter one as correct and please report it.

Contact

Questions about this policy: elenchus@revah.paris