Privacy Policy

MUGA: The web, with the noise turned down  ·  Effective date: 2026-05-25  ·  Version 2.6.0  ·  Source code

What data does MUGA handle?

MUGA receives URLs when you click links or right-click to copy a clean link. These URLs are cleaned inside your browser. MUGA never sends your URLs or browsing data anywhere. MUGA makes very few external requests, and every one of them is disclosed on this page. The only one enabled by default is a weekly signed rule list (see "Remote rule updates" below), which you can turn off in Settings.

MUGA's data lives in two places, deliberately separated:

• Per-device, on this machine only (chrome.storage.local): your acceptance of these terms and the version of the policy you agreed to (onboardingDone, consentVersion, consentDate); per-device decisions you made about behaviours your other devices may have enabled (remoteRulesEnabled overrides; see Per-device consent below); usage counters (URLs cleaned, parameters removed, referrals spotted); and short-lived session data (debug logs, per-tab badge counts, recently cleaned URLs).
• Across your own devices, via your browser account (chrome.storage.sync): behavioural preferences you would expect to follow you between devices, namely language, blacklist, whitelist, custom tracking parameters, the affiliate toggle's default value, the remote-rule-updates default value. Sync happens through your browser, never through MUGA.

Neither bucket is ever visible to MUGA. Session data (chrome.storage.session) is automatically cleared when the browser restarts. Usage counters are never transmitted anywhere.

Per-device consent

Acceptance of these terms is recorded per device, not per browser account. If you install MUGA on a second device, you will be asked to read and accept the terms on that device too, even if you already accepted them somewhere else. The reasoning is captured in our architectural decision record ADR-0001: consent is an act between you and the device you are using; inheriting it across devices silently would deny each device's user the chance to read and decide.

Behavioural preferences (toggles like "Enable remote rule updates", "Remove all affiliate tags from other sources", and others) follow your browser account through sync. But on a fresh device, if any of those preferences arrives enabled from another device, MUGA shows you an explicit confirmation prompt during onboarding before acting on them. If you decline a preference on this device, the override is recorded locally and your other devices' settings are left untouched.

If we update these terms in a way that materially changes what you previously agreed to, MUGA will surface a re-acceptance flow on each device the next time the service worker wakes up. If we only add clauses (without changing existing ones), the flow shows you the new clauses and lets you accept or decline; declining keeps you under the previously accepted terms.

Migration on upgrade

If you previously installed MUGA before this version and your acceptance was stored across devices via sync, MUGA will migrate that acceptance to local storage on the first run after upgrade. The migration is one-way (sync → local) and idempotent: you keep your acceptance state without re-onboarding. The migration is implemented in src/lib/sync-migration.js in the source.

Tracking parameters

MUGA strips tracking parameters (UTMs, fbclid, gclid, and others) from URLs automatically. This happens locally. The removed parameters are not logged, transmitted, or stored anywhere.

Additional features

The following features are enabled by default and can be individually toggled in Settings:

• AMP redirect: Redirects AMP pages to the original canonical URL. On Chrome, this happens at the network layer via the browser's built-in declarativeNetRequest engine, before the AMP page is loaded. On Firefox, it happens locally via the content script.
• Ping blocking: Removes <a ping> attributes from links so the browser does not send tracking beacons when you click.
• Link-share unwrapping: Detects link-share wrappers where the destination URL is embedded directly in the redirect URL's query string (Facebook's l.facebook.com/?u=, Instagram's l.instagram.com/?u=, Twitter's t.co in some templates) and navigates straight to the embedded destination. This is not an affiliate-attribution event. These wrappers are share-link tracking, not commission-bearing redirects. Affiliate-redirect networks (Awin, CJ, AliExpress Portals, etc.) are deliberately NOT unwrapped, see "Affiliate networks" below.
• Right-click "Copy clean link": Cleans URLs when you copy them via context menu. On browsers and platforms that support keyboard shortcuts, also available via Alt+Shift+C.

All of these operate entirely within your browser. No external requests are made.

URL cleaning (and the click, copy, page-load self-clean paths) runs as a local computation inside your browser. It does not round-trip through any extension service worker or external server. The cleaning logic ships in the extension package as a small bundled file (src/content/cleaner-bundle.js) generated from the ES module source under src/lib/ via tools/bundle-content.mjs; the bundle is committed to the repository so reviewers can verify it matches the unbundled source.

Affiliate tags

MUGA does not add any affiliate tag of its own. By default, it respects the original referral: if a creator you follow earned an affiliate tag on a link, MUGA leaves it in place, so they keep their credit.

If you enable "Remove all affiliate tags from other sources" in Settings, third-party affiliate tags placed by other creators or networks are removed from the URL, leaving none behind. This is an optional extra, off by default: MUGA never adds its own tag in their place. All of this happens locally, with no external request.

What MUGA never does

• Does not send your URLs, browsing history, or any personal data to any server. The one request MUGA makes on its own is a download of a public, signed rule list (see "Remote rule updates" below); it carries nothing about you and can be turned off in Settings.
• Does not collect your browsing history.
• Does not add any affiliate tag of its own.
• Does not silently replace other people's affiliate tags. The default is always "keep the original".
• Does not strip affiliate-redirect networks (Awin, CJ Affiliate, AliExpress Portals, Impact, Partnerize, Admitad, A8.net, Rakuten, TradeTracker) from URLs. Their redirect IS the attribution event and MUGA respects it. The creator's commission survives.
• Does not collect, store, or transmit any personally identifiable information.
• Does not use analytics, telemetry, or crash reporting services.

Affiliate networks: redirect-tolerant

MUGA recognises both styles of affiliate attribution and respects both. Some programs (Amazon, eBay, Vercel, DigitalOcean, Lemon Squeezy, Apple Performance Partners, Bookshop.org, Steam Curator) carry the creator's referral as a query parameter or path segment on the merchant's own URL. Other programs (Awin, CJ Affiliate, AliExpress Portals, Impact, Partnerize, Admitad, A8.net, Rakuten, TradeTracker) carry it as a redirect through the network's own servers, where the network's 30x sets a first-party cookie on the merchant's domain at landing. MUGA does not pick winners by attribution model.

Practically: when MUGA sees an affiliate-redirect URL, the redirect passes through your browser unchanged. The network's servers see your click (that's the entire point, without it the creator's commission cannot be paid) and the merchant's first-party cookie gets populated normally. MUGA does not interpose, does not log the redirect anywhere outside your device, and does not rewrite the URL beyond removing well-known tracking parameters (utm_*, fbclid, gclid, and the rest) from the merchant's landing page once you arrive. The matrix that drives this is published in docs/affiliate-networks-matrix.md on each release.

Independently of any affiliate model, MUGA offers an optional "Follow shortener redirects" feature that resolves generic URL shorteners (bit.ly, tinyurl.com, t.co, link.medium.com, lnkd.in, fb.me, ebay.to) so you can see where a short link actually leads before clicking. When enabled, the extension itself contacts the shortener host directly with credentials: "omit" (no cookies, no identifying headers) and reads the Location header, no MUGA server is involved. Off by default. Affiliate redirect networks are NEVER followed. See the Permissions section below.

Third-party affiliate programs

When you navigate to a store via a link that already carries a creator's affiliate tag, the store's own analytics may record the visit as originating from an affiliate link. This is standard affiliate behaviour and is governed by the store's own privacy policy, not MUGA's. MUGA does not add any affiliate tag of its own and is not a party to these programs.

Permissions

MUGA requests the following browser permissions:

• storage: to save your preferences, statistics, and session data locally.
• activeTab: to access the current tab's URL when you use the popup, keyboard shortcut, or context menu. Only activates on your explicit action.
• contextMenus: to add the "Copy clean link" and "Copy clean selection" right-click options.
• clipboardWrite: to copy clean URLs to your clipboard (fallback for pages where the Clipboard API is blocked).
• declarativeNetRequestWithHostAccess (Chrome) / declarativeNetRequest (Firefox): to strip tracking parameters from URLs before the page loads, using the browser's built-in rule engine.
• webRequest, webRequestBlocking (Firefox only): Firefox needs a blocking network listener to strip tracking parameters at the network layer before a request is sent, which is how MUGA does on Firefox what declarativeNetRequest does on Chrome. This runs locally in your browser and sends nothing anywhere. These permissions are not requested on Chrome.
• host_permissions: all_urls: required for content scripts to run on every page (URL cleaning, ping blocking, AMP redirect, link-share unwrapping) and for declarativeNetRequest redirect rules to apply on all sites.

Optional host permission (off by default; granted only when you turn on the corresponding feature in Settings, revocable from browser settings at any time):

• bit.ly/*, tinyurl.com/*, t.co/*, link.medium.com/*, lnkd.in/*, fb.me/*, ebay.to/*, "Follow shortener redirects". Granted per-host only when you enable the feature; off by default, revocable any time via browser settings. When enabled for a given host, the extension performs a direct fetch(url, { redirect: "manual", credentials: "omit" }) to that shortener host and reads the destination from the Location header. No cookies are sent, no identifying headers are attached, and no MUGA server is contacted. Affiliate-redirect networks are NEVER followed.

Remote rule updates

This is the one thing MUGA fetches on its own, and it is on by default. You can turn it off in Settings at any time. At most once every 7 days, piggybacked on a natural service-worker wake event, MUGA makes a single HTTPS GET to rules.muga.app for an updated tracking-parameter list. The response is an Ed25519-signed payload verified against a public key shipped inside the extension; an unsigned, tampered, or older payload is rejected and your existing rules are kept.

The request is sent with credentials: "omit" and cache: "no-store": no cookies, no account, no identifiers, and nothing about you or your browsing goes with it. It is a plain download of a public file. Like any request to any website, it does reveal your IP address and the time of the request to whoever serves that file. MUGA neither logs nor stores this, but we would rather say it plainly than imply the request is invisible. The fetch will not happen until you have accepted the onboarding disclosure that describes it, and it never fires while remote rules are turned off.

Open source

MUGA is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3 (GPL v3). The complete source code is public. If you want to verify that this privacy policy accurately describes the extension's behaviour, read the code. It's all there.

Contact

Questions or concerns: open an issue at github.com/yocreoquesi/muga/issues.