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Description
disclose affiliate relationships on the page you are viewing Product-review sites earn a commission on many of the products they recommend. Which links pay them, and which do not, is not visible while you are reading. Disclosed marks the links that carry affiliate attribution with a small dot beside them, and tells you which network and which merchant. That is all it does. IT MAKES NO NETWORK REQUEST. NOT "BY DEFAULT". The manifest declares no permissions and no host permissions, so the browser will not let this extension reach the network at all. That is not a policy we are asking you to take on trust; it is a fact about what the browser permits, and you can read it in the shipped manifest.json in about ten seconds. Everything it needs is embedded at build time: the network signatures, the rate table, the report cards, and the whole table of resolved redirects. The resolution table is keyed by a hash of the URL and contains no URL, so a link you are actually looking at can be looked up, and the list of links cannot be read out of the file. WHAT IT NEVER SENDS - Never a URL you visited, to us or to anyone. - Never the page's content, title, text or links. - Never an identifier. There is no account, no email, no user id, no install id, no device id and no cookie. - Never analytics, telemetry, error reporting or usage counts. - Never a request to a merchant, an affiliate network, or a redirector. It does not follow, prefetch, resolve or fire an outbound link. Nothing is written to localStorage, chrome.storage, IndexedDB or a cookie. It keeps no record of anything you looked at, including in memory once the tab is closed. IT NEVER TOUCHES A LINK It does not strip, replace, inject, rewrite, redirect or fire an affiliate link. Not as a feature, not as an option, not behind a flag. It inserts a dot BESIDE a link, in the link's parent, after it. A test captures every link's markup, attributes and destination before the scan and asserts they are identical afterwards. This matters beyond good manners. Extensions that overwrite a creator's affiliate tag with their own take a commission somebody else earned. That practice is one of the things this project exists to document, and an extension that did it while claiming to expose it would have nothing left to say. WHAT GETS MARKED, AND WHAT NEVER DOES A filled dot means a verified signature match. A hollow dot means a weaker signal — an unverified signature, a resolved redirect, or the publisher's own sponsored attribute on its own domain. The two are shown differently because they are different claims. A link whose only signal is a bare tracking parameter is NEVER marked, under any circumstance. Those parameters are used constantly for things that pay nobody a commission. One wrong mark costs more than a hundred missed links, so where there is doubt, nothing is marked. WHAT THE POPUP SHOWS For the page: how many links were marked and at which confidence, how many ranked products the page recommends and how many of those carry a marked link, how many links were examined, and where any disclosure text sits relative to the first marked link. For the site: the published report card, in whichever state it is in — including "we have not measured this site", which is shown differently from "we measured it and found nothing". A correlation between commission rate and ranking is shown only where a card carries one, together with its interval and its sample size. Nothing is recomputed, estimated or inferred. No commission rate is displayed anywhere in the extension. A rate has to be shown with the page it was read from and the date it was read; a popup showing a bare percentage would be a rate without provenance. OPEN SOURCE, MIT An unauditable privacy claim is worth nothing. The source is public and the claims above are greppable in the built output: the shipped manifest has no permissions block, and the content script that reads your pages contains no network primitive at all. https://github.com/nchzingo/disclosed-extension LIMITS, STATED HERE RATHER THAN FOUND LATER - A cloaked link the shipped table does not hold stays unmarked. It is shown as cloaked with an unknown destination, never as paying nothing. - The scan stops at 2,000 anchors per page, and says so when it does. - A site with no marked links is a site where no affiliate link was DETECTED, not a site that earns nothing. Display advertising, placement paid outside an affiliate network, subscriptions and licensing are all outside what this sees. - The report cards cover a small number of sites so far. Most sites will show "no report card", which is the accurate answer.