Does a Chrome extension reading user-selected text from a webpage count as scraping?

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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:

  1. The user opens a webpage.
  2. The user manually highlights a specific piece of text.
  3. The user clicks the extension button.
  4. The extension reads only the currently selected text.
  5. 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

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