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, the aspects reviewers talk about, review-quality signals, the rating distribution and a review timeline - directly on the page.
The extension does not collect any personal data about you, and nothing about you is sold or shared with third parties. 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.
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”), 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:
- The venue's name, category and feature id
- Its publicly visible reviews (rating, date, text, attached photos, and the public profile information Google shows for their authors)
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:
- Per-venue place data, collected reviews and analysis results, in the tab's
sessionStorage(cleared automatically when the browser session ends). - A Google Maps request template, in
localStorage, so venue data can be looked up on later visits.
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:
- The Google Maps address of the venue being analysed (or an equivalent link built from the venue's Google feature id), so the service knows which venue you mean.
- The venue's Google category (e.g. "Restaurant"), which selects the aspects the analysis reports on.
- For a score lookup: the Google feature ids of the venues on screen, to look up scores that already exist.
- For a drill-down: the venue's id in our database and which metric you clicked.
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. 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.
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.
- What is processed: the review's rating, timestamp, text, number of attached photos, the author's public review and photo totals, and whether the author uses an uploaded profile picture rather than a default avatar.
- Source: the publicly visible reviews Google Maps serves for the venue. Never a private or purchased source.
- Scope: the reviews from the last 12 months, never fewer than the 500 most recent (or all of them, if the venue has fewer) and never more than 2,000 per venue, and only for venues with at least 50 reviews.
- Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR - our legitimate interest, and that of consumers and of honest businesses, in making review manipulation visible. A documented balancing test underlies this.
- Retention: review text and author records are deleted once the analysis has been computed. What is kept is Google's own review identifiers plus aggregate numbers - no review text, no names, no profile pictures.
- Recipients: none, other than the hosting provider that runs our servers and acts as a processor on our behalf (see “Where data is processed, and for how long” below). The analysis is not sold or passed on.
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 (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; the method is published in full so the number can be checked rather than merely believed; and every metric 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.
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). 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.
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.
No other browser permissions are requested at all - the extension asks for no
storage, tabs, history or similar permission. It
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 exactly two destinations:
- Google Maps - to collect the venue's reviews and place data, using its own endpoints and the Google session already active in your browser. These go to the same service whose page you are already viewing.
api.trustscope.app- the TrustScope analysis service, with the venue information listed above.
Our web server is configured without access logging, and no CDN or reverse proxy sits in front of it. The IP address and the browser user agent of these requests are therefore not written to any log and not retained. 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.
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 is stored there. No data is transferred outside the EU/EEA, so none of the transfer mechanisms in Chapter V of the GDPR are needed.
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. No other processor is involved.
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 only opens the extension's about page in a new tab when the extension is first installed or updated.
Third parties
No analytics, tracking, or advertising services are used. No data is sold or transferred to any third party under any circumstances.
Children's privacy
The extension is not directed at children and 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.