Privacy Policy

Guardian Shield

Last updated: April 22, 2026 · Version 1.0

1. What data we collect

Guardian collects the following information, all of which remains on your device:

• Session metadata — start time, end time, duration, platform domain (e.g. claude.ai), and number of messages sent in each session.
• Topic and intensity labels — each message you send to a supported AI chatbot is classified locally into a topic category (work, personal, emotional, or creative) and an intensity level (low, medium, or high). Only these labels are retained. The underlying message text is processed in memory and then discarded — it is never written to storage.
• CAIDS-10 assessment responses — your answers to the optional 10-item Conversational AI Dependency screening questionnaire, if you choose to complete it during onboarding.
• Boundary and settings preferences — the session-length threshold, daily-session limit, quiet hours, and per-platform toggles you configure.
• Intervention records — when Guardian shows you a wellness check-in, we record which rule fired, when it fired, and whether you dismissed it, acted on it, or ignored it. This is used to improve future intervention timing.

2. How your data is stored

All of the above is stored exclusively on your device using two browser-native mechanisms:

• IndexedDB — under a database named guardian-db, scoped to the extension's origin. Holds sessions, interventions, assessments, and settings.
• chrome.storage.local — holds the current active session, your boundary configuration, and runtime preferences.

Both storage mechanisms are sandboxed by Chrome to the Guardian extension. No other website, extension, or person can read this data unless they have physical or remote access to your device.

3. How we use your data

Your data is used only to power the features you see in the extension:

• Adaptive wellness check-ins — Guardian's decision engine evaluates your current session against the rules you configured (session duration, daily session count, consecutive emotional turns, rapid-messaging patterns) to decide whether to show a gentle reflection prompt.
• Dashboard display — the Today, This Week, and Assessment views read your locally-stored data to render summaries and charts.
• Data export — when you click "Export all data (JSON)" or "Export Sessions (CSV)" in the dashboard Settings tab, Guardian writes the export file to your own Downloads folder. The export never leaves your device.

4. What we do NOT do

Guardian makes these commitments unconditionally:

• We do not collect personally identifiable information. No account, no login, no email address, no name, no device fingerprint.
• We do not send data to any server. Guardian makes zero outbound network requests. You can verify this in Chrome's DevTools Network tab — Guardian's service worker and content scripts never issue a fetch, XMLHttpRequest, or WebSocket connection to any external endpoint.
• We do not share data with third parties. There are no analytics providers, no advertising networks, no telemetry services, and no parent company receiving your data.
• We do not store the content of your AI conversations. Message text is held in memory only long enough to compute a topic and intensity label, then released for garbage collection. The raw text is never written to disk, never logged, and never transmitted.
• We do not read or modify the AI platform's responses. Guardian observes outbound user messages to count them and classify their topic; it does not intercept, alter, or store anything the AI says in reply.

5. Your rights and controls

Because your data lives only on your device, you have full control:

• Export. Open the dashboard → Settings → "Export all data (JSON)" for a complete, self-describing archive, or "Export Sessions (CSV)" for a spreadsheet-friendly session log.
• Delete. Open the dashboard → Settings → "Reset all data…" to permanently erase every session, intervention, assessment, and setting. This action cannot be undone and requires an explicit confirmation.
• Uninstall. Removing the extension from Chrome automatically clears all Guardian data from the browser.
• Disable per-platform monitoring. In the dashboard → Boundaries, you can toggle any of the six supported AI platforms off to stop Guardian from tracking sessions there.

6. Assessment instrument attribution

Guardian's optional wellness reflection uses a 10-item short form adapted from the Conversational AI Dependence Scale (CAIDS-20), published in Frontiers in Psychology (2025) and released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) license. The original 20-item instrument and its authors are credited in the About section of the extension dashboard. The CAIDS-10 short form used here is a research-informed adaptation and has not been independently validated as a clinical instrument.

7. Clinical disclaimer

Guardian is a wellness reflection tool, not a clinical instrument. It does not diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any condition. It is not a substitute for professional mental health care, psychotherapy, or medical advice. If you are experiencing significant distress, persistent emotional difficulty, or thoughts of harming yourself or others, please contact a qualified mental health professional or, if in immediate crisis, a local emergency service or crisis line.

8. Contact

Questions, concerns, or requests about this privacy policy or Guardian's data handling can be directed to:

Guardian@nextintelligence.ca

9. Changes to this policy

If we materially change how Guardian handles data, we will update this policy and bump the "Last updated" date at the top of this document. Because Guardian has no server-side component, policy updates ship with the extension itself — updating the extension from the Chrome Web Store is the only way material changes reach you.