FollowTrace Privacy Policy

1. What FollowTrace reads

The follower and following lists that Instagram has already rendered in your own signed-in browser, on profiles you choose to scan. It reads the same page you are looking at — it does not log in as you, does not use Instagram's private API, and does not run on any other website.

For each account in those lists it reads the username, the display name, and the URL of the profile picture. Nothing else on the page is read: not posts, not stories, not messages, not comments, not likes.

2. What FollowTrace never receives

Your Instagram password. There is no field for one anywhere in the extension, and no request it makes has a place to put one.

Your Instagram session cookie, session token, or CSRF token. The contract between the extension and our server is a set of strict schemas with no field for any of them, so a payload carrying one fails on your machine before it is sent.

The raw HTML of any page, your browsing history, or anything at all from a site other than instagram.com.

3. What is sent to us, and why

FollowTrace requires an account, and each scan is uploaded to it: the usernames, display names and profile-image URLs of the accounts seen, which of the two lists each came from, when each was first and last seen, the grade of the scan and how many accounts it observed, and the derived change events.

This includes information about other people — the accounts that appear in a list you scanned. We store it because the product is the comparison between what a list looked like then and what it looks like now, and that history has to survive the browser it was made in. Your plan and your daily scan count are held here for the same reason: a limit a browser enforces against itself is not a limit.

If that is not a trade you want to make, FollowTrace is not the right tool for you, and the deletion route below removes what we hold.

4. What is stored on your own machine

The extension keeps its own copy in your browser: your settings, the profiles you track, the snapshots and relationships from each scan, and a log of unfollow attempts (the account, the time, and the outcome). Uninstalling the extension removes all of it.

5. Unfollowing

FollowTrace can unfollow accounts. It is the only thing it ever writes to Instagram, and it is bounded: only on your own account, only for accounts you follow who do not follow you back, only one at a time, and only after you press the button on that row.

It presses the same button you would press, in the page, at a human pace. It does not use an API, and it never acts on its own.

6. Accounts and payment

FollowTrace accounts are DailyDog accounts — the same company operates both — so your email address and password (or Google sign-in) are held under DailyDog's account system, and your card statement will read DAILYDOG.

Payment is handled entirely by Stripe. We store an order reference, a payment status and a Stripe customer id. We never see or store card numbers.

7. Who else sees it

Nobody. We do not sell personal data and we do not share it with anyone except the processors that run the service: hosting, the database, payments, and authentication. There is no advertising network, no analytics broker, and no data buyer.

8. Getting it back, and getting rid of it

Export: the extension's Settings screen writes everything it holds about a profile to a file you can read without us — both lists, every account first detected, every scan that ran, and the cross-check.

Delete: “Delete my data” in the same screen removes every snapshot, relationship and change event from your browser. To have what we hold on the server deleted, email the address below and we will remove it.

Uninstalling the extension removes the local copy immediately.

9. Not affiliated with Instagram

FollowTrace is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or connected to Instagram or Meta Platforms, Inc. Instagram is a trademark of Meta Platforms, Inc.