CL Deduplicator

Privacy Policy

Effective August 15, 2026 · Last updated August 15, 2026

This policy explains how Cool Apps LLC ("we," "us") handles information in connection with the CL Deduplicator Chrome extension and the website at cl-dedup.com. It applies to both.

Cool Apps LLC also publishes a company-wide privacy policy covering every product we make. This policy is the specific one for CL Deduplicator, and where the two differ, this one controls.

What the extension does on your computer

CL Deduplicator runs on search results and listing pages at craigslist.org, cars.com, autotrader.com, and cargurus.com. On those pages it does the following, all locally in your browser:

• Reads listing content on the page you are already viewing — titles, prices, photo identifiers, and for housing listings, bedroom count and square footage. This is how it recognizes that two posts are the same item.
• Remembers which listings you hid for the rest of your browsing session, so the hidden ones stay hidden if you open a listing and press Back. This is stored in your browser's own session storage and is cleared when you close the tab.
• Scrolls the page automatically on housing searches. Craigslist loads listing photos only as they come into view, so the extension scrolls through the results once to read them, then returns you to the top. You will see the page move; nothing is clicked or submitted.
• Adds a vehicle history button to used car listing pages.
• Keeps a short list of the searches you have deduplicated — up to six shortened search identifiers — so that it can count your five free uses, and so that returning to a search you already deduplicated is never treated as a new one. This is stored in Chrome's own extension storage on your computer.

The part that reads your pages cannot contact us

We can be exact about this rather than merely reassuring, because it is a fact about how the extension is built rather than a promise about how we behave.

The extension has two parts. The part that runs inside the pages you browse — the part that reads listings and hides the repeats — contains no code capable of making a network request of any kind. No upload, no analytics, no beacon, no connection to us or to anyone else. It is not that we have chosen not to send your browsing somewhere. There is nothing in that part of the extension that could.

The second part is the toolbar popup, which contacts our server for one purpose only — checking that a license is valid, described below. It sends nothing about the pages you have visited.

One qualification, stated plainly because it is the only place any of this leaves your computer — and because it is not what it may sound like at first. The short list in the final bullet above is held in Chrome's own synced extension storage. If you are signed into Chrome with sync switched on, Chrome copies that storage between your own devices, so your count of free searches follows you from one machine to another. The copying is done by Chrome, between computers you own, and we are not a party to it.

To be exact about what that list is and is not: it holds at most six shortened identifiers for search pages you deduplicated. It is not a browsing history. It records nothing about the listings you viewed, nothing about pages you visited anywhere else, and it never reaches Cool Apps LLC in any form. Removing the extension deletes it, on every machine.

Information we collect

When you buy a license

Hiding duplicates is free for five searches. To continue past that, you buy a license. Checkout happens on a payment page in a separate tab, and that page is where your email address comes from — you never type it into the extension.

When a purchase completes, we store:

• Your email address
• Which license you bought, when it was issued, and when it expires
• A one-way hash of your email address, which is what lets us find your license if you ask us to send the key again
• A one-way hash of your license key. We do not store the key itself — see Security below
• Identifiers for the payment, so that a refund can be matched to the right license and so we can answer questions about a specific sale
• Your marketing preference, if you have given one, and when you gave it
• A count of renewals, and if a license is revoked, when and why

We do not ask for or receive your name. The payment page collects a name and a billing address because they are needed to take a payment and calculate tax. Those go to Link, not to us, and the extension never sees them.

This is not an account. There is no password and nothing to sign into.

Your license key and install ID

Two things travel from the extension to our server, and only these two:

• Your license key, when you enter it, and when the extension periodically confirms the license is still valid.
• An install ID — a random identifier your copy of the extension generates for itself the first time it runs. It is never shown to you, never typed by anyone, and is not derived from anything about you or your computer. Its only job is to let a license be used on up to five installations at once. It is not stored in synced storage, so each browser you install into has its own.

The check is infrequent by design — roughly once a week, quietly, when you open the popup — and its purpose is to learn that a license has been refunded or charged back, not to watch you. Your license works offline in between, and a check that fails does not lock you out.

Nothing about which pages you visited, which searches you ran, or which listings you saw is attached to any of this. There is no field for it, because we do not receive it.

Your marketing preference

After you buy, we ask once whether you would like occasional product news. You may be asked on the thank-you page after checkout, or once in the extension popup after you activate your key — whichever comes first. Any answer stops us asking again, including no.

We record your answer, which of those two places it came from, and when. That record is how we prove your preference was honored if it is ever questioned, and it is why we keep it rather than simply acting on it and forgetting.

If you are buying from outside the United States, the box is not pre-checked, because several countries require an affirmative action before marketing email may be sent. For buyers in the United States it is pre-checked and unchecking it opts you out.

A shortened form of your IP address, briefly

The thank-you page shown after checkout contacts our server twice: once to confirm that your purchase completed, and once to record your marketing preference if you set one. The extension contacts it for the license check described above. When any of these happen, our server records a shortened and hashed form of your IP address for a short period.

It exists only to stop one connection flooding the service. It is not stored alongside your email address, it is not used to identify you, and it is not used to work out where you are.

What we do not collect

• No account, login, or password
• No browsing history, search terms, or record of the listings you viewed — none of this is sent to us, and the short list the extension keeps to count free searches stays on your own computer
• No location data
• No analytics or tracking scripts inside the extension
• No card numbers, and no payment details of any kind
• No name or postal address

Payment, and the records Link keeps

Payments for CL Deduplicator are handled by Link (Stripe) as merchant of record. That means Link is the seller for the transaction: it takes your payment, issues your receipt, and handles refunds. Your card statement will read LINK.COM rather than our name.

Checkout happens on Link's own page in a separate tab. No card details pass through the extension or through us, at any point, in any form. What reaches us afterward is the short list of purchase information described above.

This has a consequence worth stating clearly rather than leaving you to discover it:

Link keeps its own separate records of your purchase, which we do not control and cannot delete. Those records exist because Link was the seller, and Link keeps them under obligations of its own that are independent of us. If you want to make a request about them — to see them, or to have them erased — you need to contact Link directly. We can delete what we hold, and we will; we cannot reach into Link's records on your behalf, and we would rather tell you that than imply an erasure is more complete than it is.

How we use your information

There are two kinds of email from us, and we keep them strictly apart.

Messages about the license you bought. These are part of the product, not marketing, and you receive them whether or not you have opted in to anything:

• Your license key, sent when you buy
• Your key again, if you ask us to resend it
• A reminder about 30 days before a 1-year license expires
• Notice of a refund or a change to your license

The expiry reminder is on this list deliberately. Nothing renews automatically, so that reminder is the only thing standing between you and quietly losing access to something you paid for. Making it conditional on accepting marketing would punish exactly the people who declined it.

Product news. Announcements about CL Deduplicator and other Cool Apps LLC products. You get these only if you said yes, every one of them carries an unsubscribe link that works in one click, and unsubscribing has no effect whatsoever on your license or on the messages above.

We use Resend to deliver email and Google Firebase to store license records. Both process this data on our behalf, on servers in the United States, and neither is permitted to use it for their own purposes.

We do not sell your email address, rent it, trade it, or share it with advertisers or data brokers.

Your rights over your information

We extend the rights below to everyone who asks, wherever you live, and whether or not a law obliges us to. We hold very little, and there is no good reason to make anyone prove their residency before we act on a request this small.

• Know what we hold about you and why
• Get a copy of it, in a form you can take elsewhere
• Correct it if it is wrong
• Delete it
• Withdraw your consent to marketing email, at any time

Write to support@coolapps.llc. We will respond within 30 days and usually much sooner. We will not ask you for more information than we need to find your record, which normally means the address you bought with.

Using these rights costs you nothing

We will not withdraw features, degrade the extension, or treat you differently because you exercised one of them. In particular, unsubscribing from product news does not affect your license, and neither does asking us to delete your email address — your key keeps working. We are not willing to hold something you paid for hostage to your staying on a mailing list.

If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland

Cool Apps LLC is the data controller for the information described in this policy. Link, as merchant of record for the sale, acts as a controller in its own right for the purchase records it holds, rather than as our processor — which is why requests about those records go to Link rather than to us.

We rely on three lawful bases, and they cover different things:

• Performance of a contract — for your email address, your license record, and the messages about the license you bought. You bought a license; delivering it and supporting it is the contract.
• Consent — for product news, and for that alone. You give it by checking the box, and you may withdraw it at any time using the unsubscribe link in any such message or by writing to us. Withdrawing it does not make anything we did beforehand unlawful, and it does not affect your license.
• Legitimate interests — for the brief, shortened record of IP addresses used to keep our endpoints from being flooded, and for confirming that a license key is being used within its activation limit. Our interest is keeping the service working and paid-for software paid for; the data involved is minimal and is not used to identify anyone.

You have the right to ask us to restrict processing, to object to it, and to receive your data in a portable form. You also have the right to complain to the supervisory authority in your country. We would rather you told us first, but that right exists regardless of whether you do.

We do not profile you and we make no automated decisions about you.

Where your information is processed

Cool Apps LLC is based in the United States, and both of our processors — Google Firebase and Resend — store and handle this data on servers in the United States. For information transferred from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland, we rely on the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, which are incorporated into our agreements with both of them. Link handles international transfers under its own arrangements, as a controller in its own right.

How long we keep it

We keep a license record for as long as the license exists, because it is what makes the license work. A lifetime license does not expire, so its record does not either.

For a 1-year license, we keep the record for two years after it expires, and then delete the email address from it. Two years rather than immediately, because someone who lets a license lapse and comes back the following season should not have to explain who they are — and not indefinitely, because a record no one will ever need is only a liability.

You can ask us to delete your email address sooner, at any time, and we will. Please read the next section first.

If you are a California resident

Cool Apps LLC is a small company and does not meet the thresholds that make the California Consumer Privacy Act apply to it. We are not claiming to be a "business" as that law defines one. We extend the following anyway, because it is the right way to treat the little we hold, and we would rather be plain about the basis than imply an obligation we do not have.

The categories we collect are identifiers — your email address, and a random install ID that identifies a copy of the extension rather than a person; commercial information — which license you bought and when; and, briefly, a shortened and hashed form of your IP address used only to limit abuse. We collect the email address from the payment page when you buy, and the rest from your own copy of the extension. We keep them as described above and use them only for the purposes described above.

We do not sell or share personal information, as those terms are defined in the CCPA, including for cross-context behavioral advertising. We never have. Because there is nothing here to opt out of, a Global Privacy Control signal has nothing to act on — but if that ever changed, we would honor one.

We do not collect sensitive personal information, and we do not knowingly collect anything from anyone under 18. Your rights to know, delete, correct, and not be treated differently for asking are the ones set out at the top of this section, and the same address reaches us.

Deleting your information

Write to support@coolapps.llc and ask. We will delete your email address, the hash of it, and your marketing preferences from our records, along with the identifiers connecting you to the payment. We will confirm when it is done.

Save your license key somewhere safe before you ask. This is the one part of the request you cannot undo.

Your license itself survives the deletion, deliberately. The key keeps working, the activation allowance keeps working, and a 1-year license runs to its normal expiry date. We designed it this way so that asking us to forget you never costs you the thing you paid for.

But the record we delete is the one we would use to find your license. Once your email address is gone, we can no longer look your key up for you, and we cannot email it to you again. If you lose the key after that, it cannot be recovered — not because we are unwilling, but because we will genuinely no longer know which license was yours.

And as described above, this deletion does not reach Link. Link holds its own separate records of your purchase as merchant of record. We do not control them and cannot delete them. To make a request about those records, contact Link directly.

Affiliate links and third parties

The vehicle history button opens Detailed Vehicle History in a new tab through an affiliate link. If you buy a report, Cool Apps LLC earns a commission and a 10% discount is applied to your purchase. This button is never restricted by the five-search limit, is not affected by whether you hold a license, and never asks you for anything.

Once you follow that link you are on Detailed Vehicle History's website, and their privacy policy governs what happens there. They may set cookies to record that you arrived through our link. Any purchase you make is between you and them — we do not receive your name, payment details, or the contents of any report you buy. We receive only a count of purchases attributed to our link.

We have no relationship with craigslist, Cars.com, AutoTrader, or CarGurus, and this extension is not endorsed by any of them.

Cookies and this website

The extension sets no cookies. This website sets no cookies and runs no analytics.

Two small exceptions, both stated for completeness. If you switch this site between light and dark appearance, your choice is remembered in your own browser's local storage; it is a display preference, it never leaves your computer, and it is not used to recognize you. And the thank-you page shown after checkout reads the identifier for your purchase out of the web address it was opened with, so that it can confirm the purchase completed and record your marketing preference — nothing more.

The payment page itself is operated by Link and is not part of this website. What it sets and stores is covered by Link's own privacy policy.

This website loads its typefaces from Google Fonts, which means Google receives your IP address as part of that request.

Age requirement

CL Deduplicator is intended for adults. You must be 18 or older to use the extension or to buy a license. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you believe a minor has given us an email address, contact us and we will delete it.

Security

License records are stored in Google Firebase. The database refuses every direct connection from a browser or an app, including our own extension: it can only be read or written by our server code, and only Cool Apps LLC can reach that.

Two deliberate choices are worth naming, because they limit what a mistake elsewhere could expose:

• We do not store your license key. We store a one-way hash of it, and each record is filed under that hash rather than under the key. A key can be checked against the stored hash, but the stored hash cannot be turned back into a working key. A screenshot of our database hands no one a license.
• Your email address is also stored with a one-way hash alongside it, and that hash is what lookups use, so addresses do not end up in web addresses, server logs, or support tickets.

Everything the extension and this website send travels over an encrypted connection. The confirmation your extension receives that a license is valid is cryptographically signed, so it cannot be forged or altered.

No system is perfect, and we will not claim otherwise — but the amount of information we hold about you is deliberately small, which is the strongest protection available.

Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle information, we will update this page and change the date at the top. If the change is significant — for example, if we begin collecting something new — we will say so by email to license holders before it takes effect.

Contact

Questions about this policy, requests for access or deletion, or anything else:

support@coolapps.llc

Cool Apps LLC
30 N Gould St, Ste N
Sheridan, Wyoming 82801
United States