How Faye works in your browser
When you install Faye's extension, Safari will show you a serious-sounding warning — that Faye “can read and alter webpages you visit” and that this “includes sensitive information… including passwords, phone numbers, and credit cards.”
That warning is real, and it's not unique to Faye. It's the same warning shown for any extension that can display something on a page — 1Password, ad blockers, Grammarly, all of them. It exists because of what browser extensions are technically capable of, not because of what they actually do. We'd rather explain that plainly than pretend the warning isn't there.
Why Faye needs it at all
Faye's little icon appears automatically on shopping pages, so she's already there when you want her — no separate app to open, no button to hunt for first. That's the one thing this broader access buys: showing up on her own.
What Faye actually does — and doesn't, specifically
She never reads what you type.
There are two different things a browser page can do: show you words (a description, an ingredients list) and hold what you type into a box (a password, a card number, your address). Faye's code only ever reads the first kind. It has no code path that reads the second kind at all.
She explicitly skips the risky fields, by name.
Password fields, card number fields, CVV fields, anything sitting inside a checkout form — these are named and excluded in her code before she reads anything else on the page. It's not that she happens not to look; the exclusion is written in.
She sends nothing about you or the page you're on until you tap to open the extension.
Before that, the only contact her extension makes is two small background checks that pull Ovine's own data (like which brands she recognises) — nothing about you, your browsing, or what page you're looking at.
When you ask for an analysis, only the printed product text is sent.
Once you do tap to open the extension and ask for an analysis, that's when the page's product text — descriptions, ingredients, composition — is read and sent to Faye so she can give you an answer. Never a form. Never what you've typed. Just the words already printed on the page.
Steve and Stacey's part in this
We built Ovine because we wanted this kind of honesty for ourselves, as parents, shopping for our own family. We're not going to build something that quietly watches where you shop. If Faye ever needs to change how she works, we'll say so here, plainly, the same way we're saying this.
Want the technical details?
Our full privacy policy and the technical explanation of how Faye analyses products are available here too.
Ready to add Faye to your browser?
She's on the Chrome Web Store now, free to install. Works in Chrome, Edge, Brave and Arc.
Add Faye to Chrome, free