Design Residue
Privacy Policy

Scope and product purpose

Design Residue has one purpose: when you explicitly invoke it on the page you are viewing, it samples local DOM geometry and computed visual styles so recurring design patterns can be summarized and overlaid in place. The product is intended to reveal typography roles, spacing rhythm, colors, corner-radius language, repeated structures, alignment traces, and visible outliers.

It is not a general-purpose web scraper, code exporter, screenshot collector, analytics service, accessibility certification tool, or background monitoring product. This policy describes Design Residue version 1.0.0 and the data handling necessary for that on-demand visual inspection.

When inspection starts

Inspection begins only when you click the extension action or use the configured Alt+Shift+D shortcut on an ordinary web page. Chrome grants temporary activeTab access for that page, after which the extension uses the scripting permission to inject its packaged analysis and overlay code.

Design Residue does not automatically run on every site, does not register a persistent content script for all domains, and does not continuously watch navigation. Invoking the action again removes the interface; reloading or navigating the page also discards the injected analysis.

• No automatic page-load scanning.
• No persistent all-sites host permission.
• No inspection of unrelated inactive tabs.

DOM and layout information examined

The extension enumerates a bounded set of page elements and reads browser-computed layout information such as bounding rectangles, element visibility, tag name, child-element count, display mode, and repeated left or right edge positions. These values are used to infer visual alignment and repeated component structure.

For structural grouping, Design Residue also creates a compact in-memory signature from properties such as tag, display value, child count, corner radius, and coarsely rounded dimensions. The signature is an analysis heuristic, not a copy of the element’s full HTML or CSS selector.

Computed style information examined

Design Residue reads selected computed style values needed for the visible analysis. These include font family, font size, line height, font weight, text color, background color, border color, padding, non-negative margins, gaps, and corner radius. Colors are normalized locally into display-friendly values when possible.

The extension does not attempt to copy every CSS declaration, stylesheet, animation rule, pseudo-element, source map, or developer-tool protocol record from the site. Its purpose is pattern analysis rather than full CSS extraction.

Limited text sampling for typography

For leaf elements that contain no child elements, Design Residue may read up to 160 characters of text content in memory. The text is used only as a weighting signal so typography roles that occur across meaningful text samples can be ranked sensibly. The actual sampled phrases are not shown in the specimen report, saved, or transmitted.

This means the extension can technically access short portions of visible or layout-participating leaf text on the page after you invoke it. That access is narrower than a full document export, but it is still page content and is disclosed here explicitly.

Information deliberately not collected

Design Residue does not read passwords, form-control values, cookies, browser history, bookmarks, authentication tokens, payment credentials, clipboard contents, geolocation, microphone or camera data. It does not request webRequest or cookies permissions and does not inspect traffic between the page and its servers.

The extension does not capture screenshots of the inspected website. Its X-ray, alignment, repeat, and outlier views are DOM overlays created from geometry that the browser already computed locally.

Pattern analysis performed locally

After sampling, the extension aggregates values into local frequency maps. Typography tuples are grouped by font, size, line height, and weight. Colors are ranked by observed use. Spacing and radius values are counted. Repeated structures are grouped by compact structural signature, and vertical alignment candidates are created from repeated left and right edge positions.

Outliers are identified relative to dominant values observed in the current sample. They are labeled as outliers rather than errors because an unusual spacing or radius can be intentional. Design Residue does not claim that a highlighted element violates a design system.

Processing limits and performance

Version 1.0.0 caps the number of candidate DOM elements examined and the number of records included in the detailed sample. The implementation considers at most the first 5,000 body descendants and stops after at most 1,400 usable records. Overlay rendering is separately capped so X-ray and outlier modes do not draw an unbounded number of boxes.

These limits reduce the chance that a very large page will cause excessive CPU or memory use. They also mean the report is an inspection sample rather than a guaranteed exhaustive audit of every node in an arbitrarily large document.

Storage and persistence

Design Residue requests no storage permission. Version 1.0.0 does not save sampled text, geometry, computed styles, signatures, analysis results, selected modes, or highlighted pattern groups in Chrome storage, IndexedDB, cookies, local databases, or a developer cloud service.

The analysis objects live in the injected script while the overlay is active. Closing the overlay or leaving the page removes that active interface. A small scoped style element may remain in the document until navigation, but it has no effect without the uniquely identified Design Residue root and contains no page data.

Network behavior

Design Residue contains no analytics client, telemetry endpoint, remote API integration, tracking pixel, advertising SDK, or remote-code loader. It does not transmit DOM samples, text snippets, style values, geometry, page URLs, titles, or inspection results to the developer or a third party during normal operation.

The inspected website continues to make whatever network requests its own code normally makes. Design Residue does not proxy, rewrite, or observe those requests and does not need access to them for its analysis.

Permissions explained

The activeTab permission grants temporary access to the specific tab where you invoke Design Residue. This avoids persistent access to all websites. The scripting permission allows the extension to inject its packaged analysis and overlay code into that temporarily authorized page.

Version 1.0.0 does not request storage, tabs, history, cookies, webRequest, downloads, clipboard, geolocation, notifications, identity, or persistent host permissions. All executable code used for the inspection ships inside the extension package.

• activeTab: temporary page access after explicit invocation.
• scripting: inject packaged local analysis code into that active page.

Inspection modes and user controls

The Specimen mode presents aggregated typography, color, spacing, radius, repetition, and alignment findings. X-ray mode overlays representative element boxes. Alignment mode draws strong repeated vertical edge positions. Outliers mode marks visible elements with spacing or radius values that fall outside the sample’s dominant sets.

Repeated-structure rows can be selected to highlight matching in-page instances. These controls change only the local overlay. They do not publish, upload, synchronize, or export the underlying page information.

Restricted pages and unsupported contexts

Chrome prevents ordinary extensions from injecting into certain browser-internal pages, store pages, and other protected contexts. Design Residue respects those boundaries. If injection is not permitted, the extension may briefly display a badge indicating that inspection is unavailable instead of attempting to bypass browser security.

Pages with extremely unusual rendering models may also produce sparse results. Canvas pixels, video frames, cross-origin iframe internals, and closed shadow-tree internals are not converted into a hidden remote analysis pipeline.

Security design

Design Residue uses Manifest V3 and executes only packaged extension code. It does not fetch executable JavaScript from a CDN. Page-derived strings used by the report are inserted as text, and the product avoids rendering arbitrary page HTML into its own interface.

Privilege is intentionally narrow: activeTab is temporary, no request interception permission is needed, no cookie access is requested, and the sample size is bounded. This reduces both the amount of accessible data and the potential impact of malformed or unusually large pages.

Third parties and analytics

No third-party analytics, advertising, cloud database, crash-reporting SDK, customer-tracking platform, or external visual-analysis service is integrated into version 1.0.0. No third party receives the sampled design data as a normal consequence of running the extension.

The website being inspected remains a separate third party. Its own scripts, fonts, images, analytics, accounts, and network behavior are governed by that site’s policies, not by Design Residue.

Sensitive pages and professional use

You may choose to invoke Design Residue on private dashboards, internal tools, drafts, or other sensitive pages. The extension’s local-only design is intended to minimize disclosure, but users and organizations should still follow their own confidentiality and access-control rules when inspecting such material.

Design Residue is an exploratory visual-inspection aid. It does not certify brand compliance, accessibility, security, intellectual-property status, or source-code ownership. Pattern labels and outlier highlights are heuristic observations rather than authoritative judgments.

Children

Design Residue is a general design and browser utility and is not directed to children as an online service. It has no account system, behavioral advertising, social profile, or intentional collection of names, email addresses, or persistent identifiers from children or adults.

If used in an educational environment, the supervising organization or adult remains responsible for deciding which websites may be inspected and how any on-screen content is handled.

Changes to this policy

This policy may be revised when the extension’s permissions, inspected data, processing, storage, or network behavior changes, or when legal and platform requirements require clarification. Material product changes should be reflected in the policy published with the Chrome Web Store listing.

Editorial improvements that do not change the extension’s actual data practices may be made without changing the extension version. The effective date at the top identifies the current text.

Questions and deletion requests

Because Design Residue has no account, cloud database, or persistent analysis history in version 1.0.0, there is normally no developer-held inspection record to retrieve or erase. To end a current inspection, close the overlay, reload, navigate away, or uninstall the extension.

For privacy questions, permission questions, or reports that the installed build behaves differently from this policy, use the developer support contact listed on the Chrome Web Store page. Avoid including confidential page text or screenshots unless necessary for the support request.