Last updated: August 1, 2026
Why Are You Scrolling? is a Chrome extension that asks you to write down why you opened a site, and keeps those notes in a private journal.
Everything it records stays on your own computer. There is no account, no server, and no analytics. Nothing you write is ever transmitted anywhere.
All of the following is saved locally in your browser using Chrome's storage.local, and only on the device where you use the extension.
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| The reflections you type | To show you your journal over time |
| The website address (URL) and page title of the page you were on when you wrote a reflection | So each journal entry shows what you were looking at |
| Which sites you've added to your watched list | To know when to show the prompt |
| How much active time you spend on each watched site, per day | To tell you "you've been here 20 minutes today" |
| Your prompt interval setting | To know how often to interrupt you |
The extension does not record your general browsing history. Time is only counted on the sites you explicitly add to your watched list, and only while that tab is open and in focus. On any other site, the extension records nothing at all.
It also keeps only what it needs: the most recent 500 journal entries, and daily time totals for the last 8 days. Anything older is discarded automatically.
The settings page shows a small site icon (favicon) next to each watched site. These come from Chrome's own local icon cache. If Chrome has no cached icon for a site, the extension falls back to requesting it from the site directly — for example, https://example.com/favicon.ico.
In that fallback case, the site may see an ordinary image request from your browser, the same as if you had visited it. No information about you, your journal, or your other watched sites is included in that request.