Hesperia Origin Filter: privacy policy
Hesperia Origin Filter is a Chrome extension that hides Amazon products made in, or owned from, countries you choose, and shows the sources behind each decision. It does this inside your browser. We do not run accounts, analytics or advertising in the extension, and we never sell data.
Your agreement comes first
When you install the extension, or update from a version that did not ask, it opens a data notice that says in plain words what it reads, requests, sends and keeps. Until you click "I agree" it stays paused: it reads no Amazon page, downloads nothing and contacts neither Amazon nor us. You can withdraw your agreement at any time in the settings, which pauses it again (open Amazon tabs reload) and switches sharing off and deletes what sharing created. The caches described below stay on your device until they expire or you remove the extension. The agreement (the notice version and the time you agreed) is stored only in your browser, not synced. If what the extension reads, sends or keeps ever changes, the notice changes and you are asked again.
Versions before 1.1.0 neither ask first nor offer sharing or withdrawal; everything else on this page applies to them too.
Limited Use of your data
The use of the data Hesperia Origin Filter handles complies with the Chrome Web Store User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. In plain words:
- Only what the single purpose needs. The extension has one purpose: to hide Amazon products made in, or owned from, countries you choose, and to show the sources behind each decision. Everything described on this page is used only for that. The optional sharing of origin readings is used only to add checked origin facts to the research the extension's decisions rely on, which improves that same purpose; it is off unless you switch it on. We use none of it for any other purpose.
- Browsing activity. The extension handles the Amazon pages you open on the supported stores, and the product pages it requests in the background, only to show origin labels, hide products and answer "Why?". Which products you looked at is sent to us only if you switch on the optional sharing described below, and then only as each product's ASIN with its reading.
- No other use or transfer. We do not sell this data, use it for advertising (personalised or not) or profiling, or use it to decide creditworthiness or lending, and we do not hand it to data brokers, advertising platforms or other third parties. It is handled only by the hosting providers that run our servers on our behalf, and we would disclose it only where the law requires it or to protect against abuse, spam or fraud.
- People do not read it. Readings, and the hashes stored with them, are processed automatically. Nobody at Hesperia reads individual readings except to investigate abuse, to comply with the law, or, aggregated and anonymised, to run the service. What reaches our public research is only the checked product fact (ASIN, store, brand and country), which carries nothing about who reported it.
- Secure transmission. Everything the extension sends to us goes over HTTPS.
What the extension reads
- Amazon pages you open on the supported stores (amazon.de, .fr, .it, .es, .nl, .se, .pl, .com.be and .co.uk). It reads product cards and product pages to find the brand, the product's ASIN and Amazon's country-of-origin field. This happens on your device only.
- Product pages in the background, if you leave that setting on. To fill in a missing country of origin, the extension requests a product page from the Amazon store you are already browsing. These requests are sent without your Amazon cookies, so they are not tied to your Amazon account and do not appear in your browsing history there. It sends at most 12 such requests per page you view and 60 per hour, up to 10 at a time per tab, and stops for 30 minutes if Amazon pushes back. These requests go to Amazon, not to us.
What the extension sends to Hesperia Market
| Request | When | Contains |
|---|---|---|
| Download of the brand research list | After you agree to the data notice, then about four times a day | Nothing about you or what you browse. The same file is served to everyone. |
| Sources for one brand | Only when you open a brand's details ("Why?" or the banned-brands list) | The name of that brand. |
| Amazon origin readings (optional) | Only if you switch on "Share Amazon origin readings" in settings, separately in each browser. It is off by default. | For each product page whose Amazon "Country of origin" row the extension read: the product's ASIN, the Amazon store, the brand and the country as Amazon prints them, plus a random id created when you switch sharing on. At most one upload of up to 20 readings per minute, and each product at most once per 30 days. |
Like any website, our servers see the network address and browser type of these requests. We use them only to keep the service running and to stop abuse (for example rate limiting), under the Hesperia Market privacy policy. What you browse and buy stays on your device, with one exception: the optional sharing above, which, only while you have it switched on, sends the ASIN of each product whose origin row the extension read, so it tells us which products you looked at. Apart from that we never receive your Amazon searches, the products you look at, your Amazon account or your purchases.
What happens to shared origin readings
A shared reading is a claim until we have checked it: our server re-reads that Amazon listing itself and keeps the reading only if the listing shows the same brand and country, or, when Amazon blocks our re-read, waits until at least 3 people on 3 different networks report the same brand and country and nobody reports anything else. Checked readings are added to the brand's research as "Brand-Stated", the lowest level of evidence, with a link to the Amazon listing. They never raise a brand's grade above what its other sources support.
To count independent reports we store a keyed one-way hash of the random id and a keyed one-way hash of your network's address range (the first three parts of an IPv4 address, or the first 48 bits of an IPv6 address), never the address itself. These hashes are deleted 180 days after the reading was sent. Switching sharing off deletes the random id and any readings still waiting on your device; readings already added to the research stay there, as facts about the product, not about you. Unlike your other settings, this choice is not synced: it is stored only in the browser where you made it, so each browser needs its own opt-in and gets its own random id.
What the extension stores
- Your agreement to the data notice (its version and the time), on the device only.
- Your settings (chosen countries, rules, brands you always want shown) in Chrome's sync storage. If you use Chrome sync, Google syncs them between your browsers.
- Caches on your device: the brand research list, and the brand and country of origin read from Amazon product pages (kept for 30 days, at most 10,000 products), plus brand sources you opened (deleted after 7 days). Expired entries are deleted daily and whenever the browser starts.
- Sharing, only if you switch it on: the opt-in itself, the random id, readings waiting to be sent (at most 200), and which products were shared in the last 30 days. Switching sharing off deletes them.
- Request counters: the times of background product-page reads in the last hour, when a pause after an Amazon push-back ends, and a random token per page view, so the limits described above hold across tabs and browser restarts. They contain no addresses, searches or product names.
Removing the extension deletes all of this from your browser.
Permissions
- Access to the supported Amazon stores: to read and filter their pages.
- Access to hesperiamarket.eu: to download the brand research list and brand sources, and to send origin readings if you switch sharing on.
- Storage: to keep your settings and the caches above.
- Alarms: to refresh the brand research list a few times a day, and to send waiting origin readings if you share them.
About the research
The extension's decisions use Amazon's own country-of-origin field and Hesperia Market's published research. Every research fact the extension can act on links to at least one public source. Research can be wrong or out of date. You can report errors on each brand's page on hesperiamarket.eu. Read how we research origin.
Contact
Questions or requests about this policy: info@hesperiamarket.eu. Publisher details are in our legal notice.