Privacy Policy
Last updated: 2 June 2026
Zilense is a Chinese-dictionary browser extension. This policy explains what data it handles and what it does not.
What is stored, and where
The following are stored locally on your device using the browser's
chrome.storage API. They never leave your device and are not sent to the
developer or any third party:
- Saved words, the deck of entries you star.
- Settings, your display preferences (accent color, Chinese font, tone colors, traditional/simplified, hover popup, pin key, Reader-mode appearance).
- Recent lookups / history, words you have looked up, kept locally so the panel can show them again.
You can clear this data at any time by removing the saved words in the panel or by removing the extension from your browser.
Network requests
Zilense works offline for its core dictionary. It makes outbound network requests only on demand, and only to the following services, when you explicitly expand the corresponding section:
tatoeba.org, to fetch example sentences when you open the Examples section for a word.cdn.jsdelivr.net, to fetch stroke-order path data when you open the Stroke order section for a character.
These requests contain only the Chinese word or character being looked up. No identifiers, account information, or browsing history is attached to them. Pronunciation uses your browser's built-in speech synthesis and makes no network request to the developer.
When you open a PDF in Zilense's built-in viewer, the viewer fetches that PDF's own bytes from its address in order to display it. Scanned PDFs are recognized by an OCR engine that is bundled with the extension and runs entirely on your device — the page image is never uploaded anywhere. Nothing about the PDF is sent to the developer.
What Zilense does NOT do
- It does not use analytics, telemetry, cookies, or tracking pixels.
- It does not collect personally identifiable information.
- It does not transmit the pages you visit, your selections, or your saved words to any server.
- It does not sell or share any data with third parties.
- It does not serve ads.
Permissions
Zilense requests the minimum permissions needed to function: reading the character or word
you hover/select on a page (to look it up), storage (for the local data above),
sidePanel and contextMenus (its user interface), and
activeTab (to read the current tab's address when you open the panel). It does
not request broad host access to read or modify arbitrary sites in the background. Access to
a PDF's site is requested only on demand — when you choose to open that PDF in Zilense — and
can be declined or revoked.
Changes
If this policy changes, the "Last updated" date above will change and the new version will be published at this URL.
Contact
Questions about privacy: me@verybad.engineer