TrustScope

Privacy Policy

TrustScope – Browser Extension  ·  Version 3.0.0  ·  Effective date: October 27, 2026

Overview

TrustScope is a browser extension that adds a TrustScope button to the Google Maps page currently open in your tab. When you click it, the extension analyses the venue's public reviews and shows the result — a trust score, review-quality signals, the rating distribution and a review timeline — directly on the page.

Without an account, the extension collects no personal data about you, and nothing about you is ever sold. The analysis itself runs in two places: in your browser, and on the TrustScope analysis service, which is asked about the venue you are looking at. What is sent there is described below.

An account is optional and only needed for the AI summary, for the AI aspect radar (the aspects reviewers talk about) and for Insights. If you sign in, we do process data about you: your Google account details, which AI summaries you ask us to write (also with an AI aspect radar you run), which AI aspect radars you reveal or run, and which ones are prepared for your comparisons with venues nearby. That is described in “Account, AI summary, AI aspect radar and Insights” below.

Reviews are, however, personal data about the people who wrote them, and a venue's trust score can be personal data about a sole trader. Those two are covered in their own sections below (“Reviews and their authors” and “Venue trust scores and Insights”), because the law that applies to them is not the same as the law that applies to you as a user.

What the extension reads

To run the analysis, the extension reads the Google Maps page that is already open in your browser tab and the public review data Google serves for that venue. Specifically, it looks for:

This data is used solely for the in-page analysis. To avoid re-fetching the same information when you re-open a venue, the extension caches it on your own device:

Both are strictly necessary to provide the function you installed the extension for, so they are covered by § 25(2) no. 2 TDDDG (the German rule on storing information on your device) and no consent banner is required. Nothing is stored on your device for advertising, analytics or recognition purposes, and you can clear either store at any time through your browser.

The reviews themselves and everything derived from them stay on your device. The extension never uploads review text, reviewer profiles or photos to us — see the next section for the small amount of information that does leave your browser.

What is sent to the TrustScope service

Part of the analysis is produced by our own service at api.trustscope.app, which analyses venues — not users. When you open a venue's analysis or view a results list, the extension asks that service about the venue(s) on screen. The request contains only:

Two of these are worth being precise about. The full analysis of a venue is sent only when you ask for it, by clicking the button. The score lookup is different: it runs automatically, without a click, whenever a venue is on screen — a venue panel you open, a map pin you hover, or a results list — and sends the feature ids of those venues so the already-known scores can be drawn on their buttons.

No account information, no cookies, no Google session data and no identifier for you or your device is sent with these requests. (The exceptions are the AI summary, the AI aspect radar and Insights, which you can only use signed in — see the next section.) We do not receive your browsing history. What we do receive is the venue on screen when you request an analysis, and the ids of the venues a score lookup covers — carrying no identifier for you, not linked to one another, and not stored against any user record. We do not build a profile of you and do not link requests to a person.

Our service fetches the venue's publicly available reviews from Google itself and stores the resulting venue analysis, so the next person looking at that venue gets an answer immediately. That stored analysis is about the venue and its public reviews — it is not about you.

Account, AI summary, AI aspect radar and Insights

Under its TrustScope button in a venue's panel, and at the top of the analysis window, the extension shows the AI summary: a short summary of the venue, written by a language model from the 50 most credible of up to 500 of its latest reviews that contain text, with up to three practical tips for a visit. It is free for every signed-in user. The AI aspect radar, with the summary in the venue's panel and in the analysis window, scores the aspects reviewers talk about from a language model re-reading up to 100 of the venue's most credible reviews among up to 500 of its latest reviews that contain text. Insights, under the analysis, show the venue against the analysed venues nearest to it or against an analysed venue you pick yourself, what reviewers praise and criticise, rating and aspect trends, owner replies, visit details and the languages of the reviews. The AI aspect radar and Insights come with the Pro and Max plans, and on the free plan for one venue a day, which you reveal. All three need a TrustScope account; everything else in the extension works without one. The account itself is shown in the analysis window's head and in the extension's toolbar popup.

The full details — including what we exchange with Stripe and Link, and the transfers to the USA, the emails, and the record of what you accepted — are in sections 8, 11 and 12 of the website's privacy policy, which covers the same account. The terms of use are in the Terms of Service.

Reviews and their authors (Art. 14 GDPR)

A review is personal data about the person who wrote it. Our service obtains reviews from Google Maps rather than from their authors, which is the situation Art. 14 GDPR addresses, so this section is the notice that provision requires.

The retained identifiers are pseudonymous rather than anonymous: the extension resolves them against the live Google Maps page when you open a drill-down. We therefore treat them as personal data.

We hold no contact channel for review authors — deliberately, since keeping their names or profile links would mean storing more personal data than the analysis needs. Individual notification is therefore impossible, and we rely on the exemption in Art. 14(5)(b) GDPR, with this publicly accessible notice as the required alternative measure. If you wrote a review and want it left out, the route for that is in “Your rights, and how to exercise them” below.

Venue trust scores and Insights (profiling)

A trust score is computed for a venue. Where the venue is a company, no personal data is involved. Where the venue is a natural person — a sole trader, or an individual professional such as a doctor or a lawyer — the score is profiling within the meaning of Art. 4(4) GDPR, and we treat it as such.

The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR. The score summarises the venue's own publicly visible reviews and introduces no new fact about anyone, and each of the score's metrics can be opened to show the reviews behind it.

No automated decision within the meaning of Art. 22 GDPR is made. Nothing is granted, refused or decided on the basis of a score — it is information shown to a reader who draws their own conclusion.

The flag labelled “Unusual patterns” reports a statistical property of a set of reviews. It is not a finding that any particular review is fake, and not a statement about the person who wrote it.

AI aspect radar and Insights. To signed-in users on the Pro and Max plans, and on the free plan for the venue whose AI aspect radar they revealed, the analysis window also shows a venue's AI aspect radar — a score for each of the aspects reviewers talk about, from an AI's reading of the reviews — and its Insights: how often its owner replies to reviews, overall and to critical ones; how its rating and its aspects have changed over time; where it stands among the analysed venues nearest to it or beside an analysed venue you pick yourself; and short texts, written by an AI, on what reviewers praise and criticise (see “Where data is processed, and for how long” below). Where the venue is a natural person, this too is profiling, and the same applies as to the score. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR: the radar and Insights are derived only from the venue's public Google Maps listing and reviews and, for the comparison, from the analyses of the venues nearby or of the venue you picked. The model is instructed to put what the reviews say in its own words, without quoting a review or naming anyone. No automated decision within the meaning of Art. 22 GDPR is made on their basis. An objection under Art. 21 GDPR (see “Your rights, and how to exercise them” below) withdraws them together with the venue's analysis, and the venue then no longer appears in other venues' comparisons either.

Your rights, and how to exercise them

Under the GDPR you have the rights of access (Art. 15), rectification (Art. 16), erasure (Art. 17), restriction (Art. 18), data portability (Art. 20) and objection (Art. 21), and the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority (Art. 77).

You have the right to object at any time, on grounds relating to your particular situation, to processing based on Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR — including the profiling described above (Art. 21(1) GDPR). Apart from your account (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR) and the accounting records we are required to keep (Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR), all processing described in this policy rests on that legal basis, so the right to object covers all of it. The two routes below are how to use it.

If you are the owner of a venue and object to its analysis, write to support@trustscope.app with the subject line:

GDPR: Objection (Art. 21) — <venue name>, <Google Maps URL>

Please include the venue's Google Maps link and your relationship to it. We answer within one month (Art. 12(3) GDPR). Where an objection is upheld, the stored analysis is deleted and the venue is excluded from any future analysis — the exclusion is enforced in our database, so it cannot be undone by a later re-scrape, and the extension then shows a short notice instead of a score. Its Insights go with the analysis, and the venue no longer appears in other venues' comparisons either.

To correct something rather than remove it, use the subject line GDPR: Correction — <venue name>, <Google Maps URL>. For an access request, use GDPR: Access request (Art. 15).

If you wrote a review and want it left out, write to the same address, support@trustscope.app, with the subject line:

GDPR: Review exclusion (Art. 17/21) — <link to the review>

Include the Google Maps link to the specific review. That review is then removed from the analysis it appears in, and every other review by the same author is excluded from future analyses as well — enforced in our database, so a later re-collection cannot bring them back.

The link is needed because of how little we keep: as described above, we store no names, no profile links and no review text, only Google's own review identifiers. That means we cannot find you from a name or an email address alone, and under Art. 11(2) GDPR the rights in Art. 15 to 20 do not apply where we cannot identify the data subject — unless you provide information that makes identification possible. The review link is exactly that information, and once you supply it we treat the request as any other and answer within one month (Art. 12(3) GDPR).

Permissions

The extension declares content-script host permissions for Google Maps domains (google.com/maps, google.de/maps, and equivalent regional domains). This permission is the minimum required to add the TrustScope button and its result panel to the Maps page.

It declares one host permission outside Google, api.trustscope.app, which is the TrustScope analysis service described above. It is the only non-Google host the extension can contact.

It requests two browser permissions, both for the optional account: identity, to open Google's sign-in window, and storage, to keep your session, and the venue you pick to compare with, in the extension's own storage. Neither is used unless you sign in. The extension asks for no tabs, history or similar permission and has no access to your browsing history, passwords, or any other personal information.

On Firefox, the add-on listing additionally declares the data-collection category “website activity”. Mozilla requires that declaration from any extension that reads content from the sites you visit, and TrustScope does read the Google Maps page in order to analyse it. The declaration is therefore required and correct. It does not mean that your browsing is sent to us: the reading happens on your device, and what leaves it is only the venue information listed above.

Network requests

The extension makes requests to these destinations only:

Choosing a paid plan, or managing your subscription, opens Stripe's page as an ordinary browser tab; the extension sends nothing to Stripe itself.

Requests to our API server (api.trustscope.app) pass through Caddy, a reverse proxy we run ourselves on the same server. Caddy keeps no access log; the error log it writes when a request fails contains neither the IP address nor the request headers. The API logs, for each request, the method, the address requested with its parameters (coordinates, map tile numbers and the key in an unsubscribe link masked), the status and how long it took, but neither the IP address nor the browser user agent. With your account's ID it also logs which AI summaries and AI aspect radars your account requests (a summary requested with an AI aspect radar included), reveals or has prepared for a comparison, the fresh analyses Insights ask for (on Pro and Max on their own when a venue's Insights open), and your sign-ins, acceptances of the terms, consents to news emails and their withdrawal (also through an unsubscribe link), checkouts, plan changes and contract confirmations, refunds and chargebacks, cancellations and withdrawals. We use these logs to find errors and detect abuse (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR: our legitimate interest in a secure, working service). In our log database the API's logs are kept for 14 days and then deleted; its log file on the server itself holds at most 100 MB and is overwritten continuously by size, oldest entries first, so when there is little traffic it can keep entries for longer than 14 days. Apart from these logs, what is kept is the venue information listed above.

No data is sent to any other third party. No analytics or advertising service is contacted. The one link to a third party the extension shows, the booking link for accommodation, sends nothing until you click it — see the next section.

Booking links for accommodation (Stay22)

For hotels and other accommodation, the extension shows a “Book now” button marked as an ad, under the TrustScope score and in the analysis. It is an affiliate link of our partner Stay22 Technologies Inc. (Québec, Canada; “Stay22”): only when you click it does your browser open a Stay22 page, which forwards you to a booking site such as Booking.com, Hotels.com or Expedia. The link carries only details of the accommodation (name and coordinates), the page language, where the link sits (place panel, results list, map card or analysis) and our partner ID — nothing about you; no referrer is sent. Until you click, nothing is loaded from Stay22 and nothing is stored on your device.

After the click, Stay22 and the booking site process your connection data (in particular IP address and browser information) and may set cookies to attribute a booking to our link. They do so under their own responsibility; we have no influence on this processing. If a booking is made, Stay22 pays us a commission; we receive no information about you in the process. The extension does not record the click. The commission has no influence on a venue's trust score. More information: stay22.com/privacy.

Where data is processed, and for how long

The TrustScope service runs on servers rented from Hetzner Online GmbH in Nuremberg, Germany. Everything it stores, including account data, is stored there. Hetzner acts as a processor on our behalf, and a data processing agreement under Art. 28 GDPR is in place with them. They host the data; they do not use it for their own purposes.

AI aspect radar (TypeSafe). When an AI aspect radar of a venue is run — on a paid plan, by the free plan's daily reveal of a venue that has no current one, or for the comparison with venues nearby, for one of the two venues nearest to a venue whose Insights a signed-in user opens, when it has no current one — up to 100 of its reviews, the most credible ones (by the same per-review measure the trust score is built from) among up to 500 of its latest reviews that contain text, up to 50 from each of the two periods the trends of the aspects compare (as a rule the last 90 days and the months before them, up to a year back) and, where these hold fewer, the most credible of the rest, are also classified by the language model Jev of TypeSafe AI, Inc., San Francisco, USA, acting as our processor under its Data Processing Addendum. TypeSafe receives the venue's category and, for each of those reviews, its star rating and text — no author name, no profile picture, no review identifier and nothing about the person who asked for the radar. TypeSafe processes the data in the USA and uses sub-processors (listed at trust.typesafe.ai/subprocessors). It is not certified under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, so the transfer is based on the EU standard contractual clauses (Module 2, Art. 46(2)(c) GDPR), which its Data Processing Addendum incorporates; you can get a copy from us free of charge on request. Under its terms TypeSafe does not train or fine-tune AI models on the data, keeps it for as long as necessary for the purpose and under the law, must delete or return it when the contract ends, and may derive technical usage data (telemetry) from it. Nothing is sent to TypeSafe for an AI summary, or for a venue whose AI aspect radar nobody has run and no comparison has needed, and the standard analysis involves no processor other than Hetzner.

AI summary (gpt-oss-120b through OpenRouter and Crusoe). The AI summary is a short written summary of the venue — at most 100 words in English, plus a German translation written with it in the same request — with up to three practical tips for a visit, stored with the venue's analysis and shown, under the TrustScope button and on the website, to every signed-in user. It is written when a signed-in user asks for one, and, as a rule, also with an AI aspect radar a signed-in user runs for a venue whose AI summary is missing or more than 21 days old (a radar the comparison with venues nearby prepares on its own asks for none). It is written by the language model gpt-oss-120b, an openly available model published by OpenAI and run by Crusoe (Crusoe Technologies LLC, USA). Our requests go to OpenRouter, Inc., 169 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, USA, acting as our processor under its Data Processing Agreement, which passes them on to Crusoe and returns the reply; for its own operation OpenRouter uses further service providers, for instance for hosting and networking, some of them named at trust.openrouter.ai. OpenRouter receives the venue's category, its star distribution and, for up to 50 of its reviews — the most credible ones (by the same per-review measure the trust score is built from) among up to 500 of its latest reviews that contain text — the star rating and the text, cut to 600 characters: no aspect scores, no author name, no profile picture and no review identifier, though a review's text can itself contain personal details, such as a name mentioned in it. The model is instructed to write in its own words, without quoting the reviews or naming anyone. In a second request with the same reviews, under the same instructions, the model writes the tips, in English and in German. The summary and the tips are shown for 21 days, and after that for as long as the venue has gained fewer than 50 Google reviews since they were written; then they are no longer shown. They are kept with the venue's analysis — a new analysis of the venue does not remove them — until a new summary replaces them, and are deleted with the analysis. For an AI aspect radar, the model also writes, in English and in German, a short text per aspect on what reviewers praise and what they criticise, under the same instructions, from a request with the venue's category, the aspect figures (each aspect's score and how many reviews mention, praise and criticise it) and, for up to 50 of the reviews Jev read, picked per aspect among those that praise and those that criticise it, the star rating and the text, cut to 600 characters. These texts are shown, as part of Insights, to signed-in users who may see the AI aspect radar, and like the radar they are no longer shown after 21 days, and are deleted at the venue's next analysis after that or replaced by a new AI aspect radar. OpenRouter processes the data in the USA; Crusoe in its own data centres, which it does not name for this service (Crusoe is based in the USA). The transfer is based on the EU standard contractual clauses (Module 2, Art. 46(2)(c) GDPR) incorporated in OpenRouter's Data Processing Agreement, not on the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, and you can get a copy from us free of charge on request. Under its terms OpenRouter does not store the requests and replies while prompt logging is switched off for the account — it is by default, we do not switch it on for ours, and we do not allow OpenRouter to use the requests to improve its products — deletes them promptly after the reply has been generated, keeps only details about a request without its content (such as the number of tokens and the duration), and does not use the data to train AI models. At Crusoe: we have every request routed only to Crusoe's endpoint, which by OpenRouter's classification stores no data (zero data retention) and collects no data for training. According to Crusoe's terms, it writes the requests and replies to no disk, keeps them only temporarily in memory (cache), and does not use them for training. OpenAI receives no data. Nothing is sent to OpenRouter for a venue for which nobody has asked for an AI summary or run an AI aspect radar, and for which no comparison has needed an AI aspect radar.

A stored venue analysis is kept for as long as the venue is publicly listed on Google Maps and no objection or erasure request has been made — that is the retention criterion under Art. 5(1)(e) GDPR. An analysis older than 21 days is regenerated from fresh data the next time someone requests it, and the previous one is replaced. What the analysis retains of the underlying reviews is described in the Art. 14 section above; review text, names and profile pictures are not among it.

Remote code

The extension does not load, execute, or evaluate any code from external servers. All logic is bundled in the extension package itself. The background script opens the extension's about page in a new tab when the extension is first installed or updated, and handles signing in and the requests to the TrustScope service described above.

Third parties

No analytics, tracking, or advertising services are used, and no data is ever sold. Google (sign-in) and Stripe and Link (payment) are involved only if you sign in or buy a plan, and OpenRouter (with Crusoe) and TypeSafe only as our processors for the AI summary and the AI aspect radar, as described above. The booking link for accommodation is a plain link to Stay22, described above, that sends nothing unless you click it.

Children's privacy

The extension is not directed at children, and an account requires you to be at least 16 years old. Without an account, the extension collects no information about its users. Where the author of a review, or the owner of a venue, is a minor, the rights and the objection route set out above apply in exactly the same way.

Changes to this policy

If the extension is updated in a way that changes its data practices, this page will be updated before the new version is published to the Chrome Web Store or to Firefox Add-ons.

Contact

Questions about this privacy policy, and any request under the GDPR, can be sent to support@trustscope.app. The controller is Edem Devlet, Leopoldstraße 35, 10317 Berlin, Germany — see also the Impressum. The subject lines above help us route a request and start the one-month clock.