Privacy Policy — Flag of Convenience

Last updated: 22 August 2026

What this extension does

Flag of Convenience tells you which country your outbound internet traffic appears to come from. To do that it asks a small set of public “what is my IP” services what address and country they see, and shows the resulting country’s flag on the toolbar icon. Those checks run on your chosen interval, at browser start, when you press Refresh, and when you open a new tab (at most once every 30 seconds).

What data is involved

  1. Your public IP address and its country. These are returned to the extension by the third-party services listed below. Because any HTTP request necessarily reveals the requesting IP address, those services observe your IP address in the ordinary course of answering. The extension sends them nothing else.
  2. Your two settings — check interval and the notification toggle.
  3. A capped list of the last 20 country changes — timestamp, previous country, new country. IP addresses are deliberately not stored in this list.

Where the data goes

All of the above is stored only in chrome.storage.local, on your own device. None of it is transmitted to the developer or to any analytics, advertising, or telemetry service. The developer operates no server and receives no data from this extension. There is no account, no identifier, and no tracking.

Third-party services

Each check contacts these endpoints:

Requests are GET only, are sent with credentials: 'omit', and carry no cookies, no page content, and no browsing history. Each service’s own privacy policy governs what it does with the request it receives.

One of them, ip-api.com, is reached over plain http: its free tier offers no https, and http is also what keeps that connection on HTTP/1.1, which the extension needs in order to close it after every check (the README explains why). That request and its answer travel unencrypted, so anyone on the network path can see it was made, and can read or alter the reply. What it carries is your own IP address and a two-letter country code — an address every hop on the path can see anyway — and the extension treats an answer received in the clear as the weaker witness: it can never move the displayed country unless an https source agrees. If you would rather that request were not made at all, the source can be dropped from lib/sources.js in a local build.

What this extension never does

It requests no access to any website — it holds no host permissions at all. It cannot read, modify, or observe the pages you visit, your browsing history, your bookmarks, your downloads, your form data, or your credentials. It has no content scripts. Opening a new tab starts a check, but the extension is told only that a tab was created: it holds no tabs permission, so the tab’s URL, title and favicon are not part of the event it receives, and nothing about the tab is stored or sent anywhere.

Data retention and deletion

Nothing is retained off-device. To delete everything stored locally, use the “Clear” button next to the country-change history in the popup, or remove the extension from chrome://extensions.

Limited Use

The use of information received from this extension adheres to the Chrome Web Store User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Data is used solely to provide the single user-facing feature described above. It is never sold, never transferred to third parties except as needed to provide that feature, never used for advertising or personalization, and never subjected to human review.

Changes

If data practices change, this page will be updated and the change described in the extension’s Chrome Web Store listing before the update ships.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or about the extension, go to the issue tracker of the project’s public repository: https://github.com/defann/flag-of-convenience/issues.