Privacy Policy

1. How a page gets saved

What happens depends on which part of Mothball you use.

• The browser extension. Extraction happens entirely in your browser. The extension reads the page you are already looking at, strips the ads and clutter there, and nothing about that page is sent to Mothball.
• The web app. When you paste a link, your browser cannot fetch another website's page directly — browsers block this, a restriction called CORS. So the URL is sent to Mothball's server, which fetches the page, removes the ads and clutter using Mozilla's Readability library, and sends the clean article back to your browser.

That server step happens entirely in memory. The page content is not written to a database, a disk, or a log, and nothing about it is kept once your browser has the result. URLs are sent in the body of the request rather than in the web address, so they do not appear in standard server access logs either.

Saving is separate from extraction. When you click Save, the file goes from your browser directly to Google Drive using Google's own API. Your Google access token and the finished files never pass through Mothball's servers.

2. The Google permissions Mothball asks for

Mothball requests a single Google Drive scope, drive.file, which is the narrowest one that does the job. It grants access to exactly two things:

• Files and folders Mothball itself creates, such as your My Drive › Mothball folder and everything saved into it.
• A specific folder you choose yourself through Google's own folder picker, if you'd rather save somewhere else.

Mothball cannot list, search, read, edit or delete anything else in your Google Drive. Documents, spreadsheets, photos and folders you have not pointed it at are invisible to it — not by policy, but because Google never discloses them to an app holding this scope.

Mothball also uses Google sign-in to identify your account, remember your preferences, and determine whether you have purchased Pro.

Mothball does not sell your personal data, and does not use your personal data or your archived content to train machine learning or artificial intelligence models.

3. What Mothball stores

Mothball keeps one small record per user, in Google Cloud Firestore. It contains:

• Your Google user ID and the email address on that account
• Your preferences, such as your default save format and destination folder name
• Whether you have purchased Mothball Pro

That is the whole record. Mothball does not store the pages you save, their contents, their titles, or any history of what you have saved or when. Your archive exists only in your Google Drive.

4. Payments

Payment for Mothball Pro is handled by Stripe. Your card details go directly to Stripe and never pass through or get stored on Mothball's servers. Mothball receives only the fact that a purchase was completed, which is what sets the Pro status on your record.

5. Removing your data

You can withdraw Mothball's access to your Google Drive at any time at myaccount.google.com/permissions. Mothball immediately loses the ability to create or read anything in your Drive.

To have your stored record deleted, email support@mothballed.app from the address on your account and it will be removed.

Neither of these touches the files Mothball has already saved for you. They are ordinary files in your Drive, they stay exactly where they are, and you can read, move, export or delete them yourself — with or without Mothball.

6. Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a way that affects how your data is handled, the date at the top of this page will change and the new version will be posted here before the change takes effect.

7. Contact

Questions about this policy, or about anything else, go to support@mothballed.app.