MariaGuides — Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

MariaGuides ("MariaGuides", "we", "us") provides a browser extension and a web application that record what you do in a browser tab and turn it into step-by-step guides.

Because the product's core function is capturing what is on your screen, privacy is not a footnote here. This policy explains, specifically and without euphemism: what the Service captures, where it goes, who can see it, how long it lives, what we do not do with it, and what is your responsibility rather than ours.

This policy covers the website at mariaguides.com, the web app at app.mariaguides.com, the MariaGuides browser extension, share links served from share.mariaguides.com, and the emails we send. You can reach us about anything in it at support@mariaguides.com.

Read §4 and §6 even if you read nothing else.

2. Our Role: Controller or Processor

Which law applies to us, and what rights you have against us, depends on our role.

If you use MariaGuides through an employer's workspace, your employer is the controller of the Guides in it. Direct requests about that content to your employer; we will support them as their processor, and we are generally not permitted to give you that data directly.

3. Personal Data We Collect

3.1 You give us

Payments. When you buy a plan, you enter your payment and billing details (such as your name, billing address, tax ID and card) at the checkout of Dodo Payments, our merchant of record. They go to Dodo Payments, not to us. We never receive or store your card number. We keep only your subscription's plan, number of Seats, status and renewal date, and Dodo Payments' identifiers for you and for the subscription.

3.2 From sign-in providers

If you choose to sign in with Google or GitHub, that provider tells us your email address, your name and the address of your profile photo.

Our sign-in page shows Google's own "Sign in with Google" button, so it loads Google's sign-in script as it opens, before you choose any way to sign in. Your browser then contacts Google, and Google receives what a browser sends it, such as your IP address and any cookies Google has set in your browser. Google's script also stores one cookie on our domain, g_state (§12).

3.3 Generated by your use

The extension sends no error reports, and no usage data apart from Guide me's progress for Guide Insights (§4.10).

3.4 Guide Insights: how views of a guide are counted

When someone reads a guide, we record a viewing session so the guide's workspace can see how it is used. A session holds:

• which guide, and how it was read (scroll, slides, video, or Guide me);
• where the read came from: a link, an embed (with the name of the website it is embedded in), an email, or other;
• when the session started and when it was last active;
• the furthest step reached, whether and when the guide was finished, and how long it was actively read;
• the answer to "Was this helpful?", and any 👍 🎉 😕 reactions on steps.

A view counts once the guide has been visible for 3 seconds, and visits by the same reader within 30 minutes count once. Nothing is counted when the browser is being driven by automation software.

Who is named. A member of the guide's workspace who reads it while signed in, in the app or with Guide me, is recorded by their account. The workspace's owners and admins, and the guide's creator if they are an editor, can see who they are. Everyone else is recorded anonymously: people outside the workspace, and everyone reading a public share link or an embed. The guide's author is not recorded when reading signed in.

The public share page cannot identify anyone, including the guide's author. For those readers we store no IP address, no account and no cookie. The page keeps a random ID for each guide in the reader's browser storage, replaced after 30 minutes without activity, so that a reload is not counted twice.

We also record when a workspace member downloads an export from the Share dialog, and its format, without recording who.

How long these are kept is in §10.

4. How Capture Works — Full Disclosure

4.1 When capture runs. Nothing is captured until you press Start in the extension's side panel. A recording records only the tabs, in the window you are recording, on which you have clicked the MariaGuides toolbar icon; another tab records nothing until you click the icon on it. Recording stops when you press Stop.

4.2 The picture of each step. In extension version 2.2.0 and later, while a recording runs the extension holds a video-only stream of each tab you are recording. It captures no sound, and Chrome shows its own capture icon on the tab while it is streamed. The stream's frames stay in your browser's memory, and the extension keeps only the last few. When you press the mouse button, activate a control with the keyboard, start typing in a field, change a selection, or arrive on a new page, the frame from just before that moment becomes the step's picture. Only those step pictures are uploaded. The stream itself is never saved or uploaded, and it ends when you press Stop or close the tab. Earlier versions of the extension took a screenshot of the visible part of the tab at each step instead.

4.3 What else each step records.

• the position of the control you used, so it can be highlighted;
• the control's visible label or accessible name, and its role or type;
• the page's title and address. In extension version 2.1.1 and later, parts of the address that look like secrets are removed before upload;
• for text you type into a field, what you typed, up to 120 characters. It becomes part of the step's title (for example, Type "Jane" in Name). In a field the extension treats as sensitive (§4.9), it is replaced with •••.

When you press Start, the extension also saves the icon of the site you are recording with the guide. It reads the icon from Chrome's own cache, once, and requests nothing from the site.

4.4 The picture contains whatever was on that tab. A step's picture shows the visible area of the tab. If your customer's name, a patient record, an account balance, an API key or a private message was visible in that tab at that moment, it is in the picture. We do not, and technically cannot, distinguish sensitive content from ordinary content.

4.5 When capture is NOT running. Outside a recording session, the extension takes no pictures, does not read page content, and does not monitor your browsing. It never captures other windows or anything outside the browser. While a recording runs, a page you open in another window may briefly receive the extension's recorder, which removes itself at once without reading anything. The one other time the extension works on a page is a walkthrough you ask for (§4.10).

4.6 Browser permissions. The extension has no access to any site when you install it. To record, it needs access to the sites you record and permission to capture a tab. Chrome offers nothing narrower, and its prompt reads "Read and change all your data on all websites". We ask for both at runtime, in one prompt, from the extension's side panel after you sign in or when you press Start. You can decline; recording will not start, and the rest of the extension keeps working. You can revoke the access at any time in your browser's extension settings. We use it only for recordings you start and walkthroughs you ask for. The microphone is used only if you turn on voice notes (§4.11).

4.7 Where captures go. Step pictures and step data are uploaded as you record to our cloud infrastructure (see §8.1), so your Guide is ready in the editor when you stop. Before upload, each picture is compressed in your browser, with sensitive fields blacked out (§4.9). The extension's local database is a transient upload queue only — it holds items until upload succeeds, then discards them. MariaGuides is not a local-only or offline product, and no plan keeps your captures solely on your device.

4.8 Storage and access controls. Screenshots are stored in private storage. They are not publicly addressable. The web app fetches them through links that expire after one hour, issued only to people who can open the guide. Anonymous readers of a share link never receive a storage link; images are streamed to them through a proxy that checks the share link on every request. Access to a workspace's data is enforced in the database by row-level security policies, not only in the application. When a workspace on a paid plan renders a guide as a video, the video is also kept in private storage so it can play from share links and embeds. Guides recorded with an earlier replay feature, which was removed in October 2026, may also hold stored copies of the recorded pages; they are kept with the guide and deleted with it.

4.9 Automatic masking is best-effort, not a guarantee. The extension tries to recognise password, one-time-code and payment-card fields, and fields whose names look like secrets. In extension version 2.1.1 and later, it blacks them out in each step's picture before the picture leaves your browser, and replaces what you typed in them with •••. This depends entirely on the site you are documenting marking its fields correctly. It will not catch sensitive information rendered as ordinary text, in an image, on a canvas, in a PDF viewer, or in a custom widget. Treat it as a convenience, never as a safeguard. See §6.

4.10 Guide me walkthroughs. If you have the extension and press Guide me on a guide, the extension opens the guide's first page (or waits for you to open one of the guide's sites) and highlights the control each step names. It looks for that control on the page inside your browser; nothing about the page is sent to us. It works only on the guide's own sites, in the window where you pressed Guide me. Before walking you through a guide from a workspace you are not a member of, the app names the sites it will open. How far you got, whether you finished, and your answer to "Was this helpful?" are counted in Guide Insights (§3.4).

4.11 Optional AI step titles and voice notes. The extension can write each step's title with AI, and can turn what you say while recording into step notes. Both are off until you turn them on and enter an API key for a provider you choose. They are available on every plan, and you pay your provider directly.

• Your key is stored only in your browser, on that device (chrome.storage.local). It is sent only to the provider it belongs to, and never to us.
• AI step titles. For each step, text goes directly from your browser to the provider you chose — OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, OpenRouter, or a server whose address you enter. That text is: the page's title and its path (without the query, the fragment, or parts that look like secrets); the nearest heading and form; and the names of the control you used and of up to ten nearby controls, with the current value of each of those that is a field and is not masked (up to 50 characters each). It never includes the step's picture, and never the value of a masked field. The title the provider returns is stored with the guide.
• Voice notes. After you allow the microphone, the extension records it while a recording runs and is not paused. The audio stays in your browser's memory and is sent only to the transcription provider you chose — OpenAI or Groq. The words that belong to a step become that step's note, stored with the guide. The full transcript stays in your browser on that device until you remove it with Delete transcripts in the extension's settings.
• We never receive your key, the text sent for a title, your audio or your full transcript. What you send a provider is governed by that provider's own terms and privacy policy, including whether it keeps the data or uses it to train its models. Read them before you turn these features on.

5. What We Do NOT Do

• We do not sell your personal data, and we never have. We do not sell, rent or license your Guides, screenshots or step content to anyone.
• We do not use your Customer Content to train, fine-tune or evaluate AI models. If you turn on AI step titles or voice notes, the provider you chose receives what §4.11 describes, under its own terms.
• We do not share your Guides or screenshots with advertisers, data brokers, or any third party for advertising or profiling.
• We do not read your Guides. We do not browse Customer Content. Access is limited to the narrow cases in §8.5.
• We do not capture outside a recording session you started, and never on tabs you are not recording.
• We do not track your general browsing.
• We use no advertising trackers and no analytics cookies, anywhere.
• We run no third-party analytics inside the extension. No third-party analytics, error-reporting or advertising software runs in the extension, its service worker, or any script it adds to a page.

6. Your Responsibility for Sensitive Data

This is the most important section of this policy.

You choose what to record. MariaGuides captures what you point it at, and we have no visibility into whether a given screenshot contains a password, a medical record, a customer list or a bank statement.

You are solely responsible for:

1. Pausing or stopping capture before you navigate to any screen showing credentials, payment card details, health data, government identifiers, or any other sensitive personal or confidential information.
2. Using the blur and redaction tools in the editor to obscure anything sensitive that was captured anyway — before you share, export or publish the Guide, or invite anyone to it.
3. Reviewing every Guide before you distribute it. Once a share link is live or an export has left your device, you cannot take back what a recipient has already seen or saved.
4. Having a lawful basis for capturing personal data belonging to other people — your customers, your colleagues, your patients — and for providing them any notice or obtaining any consent that the law of their jurisdiction requires. Where you are the controller, that duty is yours, not ours.
5. Revoking share links when the intended audience changes.

MariaGuides is not responsible or liable for sensitive, confidential or regulated data that a user chose to record. Blur permanently replaces the stored image and deletes the original, so it is effective going forward — but it cannot reach a copy already exported, downloaded, cached or screenshotted by someone else. This allocation of responsibility is set out in §9 and §20–§21 of the Terms and Conditions.

If you must not capture something, do not capture it. That control is yours alone.

7. Legal Bases for Processing (GDPR / UK GDPR)

Where the EU or UK GDPR applies, we rely on:

Where we rely on legitimate interests, you have the right to object under §11. Where we rely on consent, you may withdraw it at any time without affecting processing done before withdrawal.

Special-category data. We do not intentionally collect health, biometric, racial, religious, political, trade-union or sexual-orientation data. Such data may nonetheless appear in a screenshot you chose to capture. Where it does, you are responsible for identifying an Art. 9 condition, and we process it only as your processor on your instructions.

8. Who We Share Data With

We disclose personal data only as set out below. We do not sell it.

8.1 Service providers

These providers process data for us, to run the Service:

This section is our current list of service providers. Customers who have signed our Data Processing Addendum are told about changes as that addendum provides.

8.2 Companies that act under their own terms

• Dodo Payments is our merchant of record. It sells you the subscription, takes the payment, charges any sales tax or VAT, issues receipts and invoices, and processes refunds. It receives what you enter at its checkout and handles it as an independent controller, under its own terms and its own privacy policy, which also says where it processes data. We receive from it only what §3.1 lists.
• Google and GitHub, if you choose them to sign in (§3.2), under their own privacy policies. Google also receives your browser's data whenever our sign-in page opens (§3.2).
• The AI or transcription provider you choose for AI step titles or voice notes (§4.11), under its own terms and privacy policy.

8.3 Others

• People you share with. Anyone you invite to a workspace or to a Guide, or give a share link to, and anyone who views a page where you embedded a Guide. That is the product working as intended.
• Professional advisers — lawyers, accountants, auditors — under confidentiality duties.
• A successor in a merger, acquisition or asset sale, subject to this policy and with notice to you.
• Authorities, where compelled by valid legal process. We will assess each request, challenge overbroad ones where we have grounds, and notify you unless legally prohibited.
• To protect rights — to enforce our Terms or protect the safety of any person, where necessary and proportionate.

8.4 Error reports, session replay and your screenshots

Our website and web app send error reports to Sentry. For 1 in 10 visits, and for any visit in which an error happens, they also send a session replay: a reconstruction of how the page looked and what was clicked. Replays are recorded with all text masked and all images and media blocked, so a replay shows us how the interface behaved, not what was inside your Guides or screenshots. Replays never run on share, invitation or join pages, whose addresses carry a secret, and the secret parts of those addresses are removed from every error report. Error reports and replays do not include your name or email address. The extension sends neither.

8.5 Access to Customer Content

We do not browse Customer Content. We look at it only: (a) when you ask us for help with a specific Guide; (b) where strictly necessary to investigate a security incident or a suspected violation of our Terms; or (c) where compelled by law.

9. International Transfers

Our providers process data in several countries, so using the Service involves international transfers of personal data.

• To Japan (Supabase, where your Guides, screenshots and account data are stored; Resend's sending region): the European Commission has issued an adequacy decision for Japan, so this transfer requires no additional safeguard for EU data. The UK has a corresponding adequacy regulation.
• To Germany (Sentry): within the European Union.
• To the United States and elsewhere (Vercel, Cloudflare, Resend): we rely on the data processing terms these providers offer their customers, which include the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK International Data Transfer Addendum.
• Dodo Payments, Google, GitHub and any AI provider you choose handle data under their own policies, in the countries those policies name.

You may request a copy of the relevant safeguards at support@mariaguides.com.

10. Retention

11. Your Rights

Subject to verification of your identity, and to the limits each law allows, you may:

• Access — obtain a copy of the personal data we hold about you;
• Rectify — correct data that is inaccurate or incomplete;
• Erase — have your data deleted ("right to be forgotten");
• Restrict — limit how we process your data while a dispute is resolved;
• Object — object to processing based on legitimate interests, and object at any time to direct marketing, which we will always honour;
• Port — receive your data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format, and have it transmitted to another controller where technically feasible;
• Withdraw consent — at any time, without affecting prior processing;
• Not be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing with legal or similarly significant effects — we do not make such decisions;
• Complain to a supervisory authority (§11.2).

How to exercise them. Email support@mariaguides.com from the address on your account. You can also do some things yourself: edit your profile in Settings, download any Guide from its Share dialog, delete Guides, and delete your account in Settings → Your account → Profile (or ask us at support@mariaguides.com). If you own a workspace other people are in, you first make one of them its owner. Deleting your account takes effect immediately and can't be undone: your account, profile and photo, and the workspaces only you are in with all their files and records, are removed; your Guides and anything else you created in workspaces you share move to each workspace's owner; your comments stay, shown as "Deleted user"; and your email address is erased from our invitation records and logs of the email we sent you. If email to your address ever bounced, or you marked our email as spam, our do-not-email list keeps only a one-way fingerprint of the address, never the address itself. A copy of your account data is not available in the app yet; ask us by email. There is no charge unless a request is manifestly unfounded or excessive.

If you use a work account, direct requests concerning Guides to your employer, who is the controller of that content. We will refer you to them.

11.1 United Arab Emirates (Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021, "PDPL")

If you are in the UAE, you additionally have the rights to request information about processing, to object to processing that causes you harm or is not necessary, to request the transfer of your data, and to complain to the UAE Data Office.

11.2 European Economic Area and United Kingdom

The rights above are your GDPR / UK GDPR rights. You may lodge a complaint with your national supervisory authority, or with the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk).

11.3 California (CCPA / CPRA)

In the past 12 months we have collected these categories of personal information: identifiers; customer records; commercial information; internet or network activity; geolocation inferred from IP at country level; and visual information only in the form of screenshots you chose to capture. We do not receive audio. Sources, purposes, and recipients are described in §3, §4 and §8.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We have not done so in the preceding 12 months, and we do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16.

You also have the right to know, delete, correct, opt out, limit the use of sensitive personal information, and not to be discriminated against for exercising these rights. You may use an authorized agent with written proof of authorization. Submit requests to support@mariaguides.com.

11.4 Other jurisdictions

Residents of other jurisdictions with comprehensive privacy laws (including Canada, Brazil, Japan, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland and various US states) have rights comparable to those above. Contact us and we will honour any right applicable to you.

12. Cookies and Browser Storage

We set no cookies on our website, web app or share pages, and we use no analytics or advertising cookies or trackers. The one cookie on our domain is Google's, below. What we keep in your browser:

Cloudflare Web Analytics, on share pages, uses no cookies or other browser storage.

Google's sign-in script, on our sign-in page, stores a cookie named g_state on our domain with the state of its own sign-in prompts (§3.2).

13. Security

Our measures include: encryption in transit (TLS, with every MariaGuides address served over HTTPS) and at rest (Supabase encrypts stored data with AES-256); row-level security in the database, so a workspace's data is unreachable by another workspace even if application code is wrong; private storage for screenshots and videos, read in the app through links that expire after one hour; a proxy that checks the share link on every anonymous request; server-side keys held only in server environments and never shipped in the app or the extension; daily database backups; and no third-party analytics inside the extension.

No system is perfectly secure. We do not warrant that the Service cannot be breached. In the event of a personal data breach we will notify the relevant supervisory authority and affected individuals as applicable law requires.

Report a vulnerability to support@mariaguides.com. See Terms §7 for our safe-harbour for good-faith research.

14. Children

The Service is not directed to children and we do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16 (or the applicable age of digital consent). If you believe a child has provided us personal data, contact support@mariaguides.com and we will delete it.

15. Chrome Web Store Limited Use Disclosure

Our use of information received from Google APIs and from browser extension permissions adheres to the Chrome Web Store User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Specifically, data obtained through the extension is used only to provide and improve the user-facing features described in §4; it is not sold, not transferred to third parties except as necessary to provide those features or as required by law, not used or transferred for advertising or creditworthiness, and not read by humans except with your consent, for security purposes, or to comply with law.

16. Changes to this Policy

We may update this policy. For material changes we will tell you by email or in the Service before they take effect, and, where the law requires consent, we will ask for it. The "Last updated" date always reflects the current version. Earlier versions are available on request at support@mariaguides.com.

17. Contact

MariaGuides — support@mariaguides.com, for privacy questions, data requests, security reports and everything else.

You always have the right to complain to your local data protection authority.