Does a Chrome extension reading user-selected text from a webpage count as scraping?
I'm building a small personal-use browser extension and I'm trying to understand the compliance boundary around reading webpage content.
The intended workflow is very simple:
- The user opens a webpage.
- The user manually highlights a specific piece of text.
- The user clicks the extension button.
- The extension reads only the currently selected text.
- The selected text is sent to the user's own application for personal use.
The extension would NOT:
- crawl or scan the page automatically;
- access browsing history;
- run background collection;
- collect content without user interaction;
- scrape multiple pages;
- periodically synchronize data.
I'm particularly interested in the distinction between:
"a user explicitly selects text and asks an extension to process it"
versus
"an extension programmatically extracts content from a website."
From a Chrome extension policy perspective, would the former generally be considered scraping/data collection? Are there any specific permissions, disclosure, or privacy-policy requirements I should be aware of?
I'm trying to design the extension conservatively from the beginning, so practical experience from extension developers would be very helpful.
Posted Aug 27, 2026, 12:58 PM UTC