I Published an Extension, and My Home Address With It

After the extension went live I opened its store page to look it over. Was the description showing the way I intended? Were the screenshots in the right order? That was the whole errand.

I scrolled down and found an address I recognised. It was my home address.

I had been careful with everyone else's data

The extensions I build under Legacy Tools do not send what you type anywhere. Processing happens inside the browser. No permission is requested beyond what the feature needs. Neither the text you enter nor the results of any check are collected.

I went over that repeatedly while writing the code, and again while filling in the store submission. If you are going to publish a tool that handles someone's privacy, that part cannot stay vague.

What I never checked was the other direction: how much of my own information the store would show. I had been watching the path that user data might take out of the browser, and not the path my address took out of the dashboard.

The trader declaration

When you publish on the Chrome Web Store you declare whether your publisher account is a trader or a non-trader.

Trader here has nothing to do with buying and selling shares. It means a publisher acting for purposes connected to a trade, business or profession. I set the field to trader and worked through the verification.

The address used for that verification then appeared on the listing page of the published extension.

The FAQ says as much: traders provide a legal name, a contact phone number and an address, and the verified details are published at the bottom of the listing. It also says to use an address you are comfortable making public.

So it was documented. But while I was clicking through the form, what I thought I was doing was identity verification. I did not picture those fields as something a user scrolling the page would read.

By the time I noticed, it had already been public once.

Choosing non-trader is not a privacy setting

My first thought was obvious enough: if trader publishes the address, switch to non-trader.

That is the wrong order, though. The field is not a toggle for hiding your address. Changing a declaration because of what it displays, rather than because of what is true, gets the reasoning backwards.

So I went back and read the form properly.

This declares whether your publisher account is considered a trader or a non-trader for the purposes of European Economic Area (EEA) consumer protection law.

The test is whether you are acting for professional purposes in relation to contracts concluded on this marketplace. Not how serious you are as a developer, and not why you built the thing.

Every Legacy Tools extension is currently published free of charge. There is no sale, and no contract concluded on the store. Measured against that test, non-trader was the accurate answer, and trader had been the inaccurate one.

I changed the declaration in the Developer Dashboard settings. The address disappeared from the listing straight away.

Which reframes the problem. It was never really about the address. An inaccurate declaration had put a disclosure on the page that did not need to be there.

Two of those things happened to me — the address being shown, and it going away when I corrected the declaration. The wording of the form is something I read for myself. What follows is what I made of it.

What went away was only the current state

I do not think this is closed.

If I ever charge for something on the store, that looks like a contract concluded for professional purposes, so the trader declaration would apply again — and the address question comes back with it. That is my reading of the form's wording rather than a condition I have verified.

There is also the account itself. Some of what you register a developer account with cannot be reselected later. If charging is a possibility down the road, then at the moment of registration you already need an account whose name, address and contact details you are willing to publish.

When I started building extensions, I was thinking about features. What to detect, which permissions were needed, which screens to run on, how to handle whatever the user typed.

The publishing identity — the name, the address, the phone number, the support contact — felt like paperwork for after the build. It turned out to be part of the design. The things worth settling first:

• who the formal publisher is
• whether to publish under a personal name or set up a business identity
• how to obtain an address that can be public
• whether to separate personal and published phone numbers and email addresses
• whether support enquiries can realistically be answered over time

None of this is a Chrome extension skill. But for the question of whether one person can keep publishing, it mattered earlier than any of the code did.

The address was not the only thing I had not looked at

Localising the extension itself does not localise the store page. Descriptions and screenshots are registered per language.

Five screenshots each in Japanese, English and Chinese is fifteen images. They need to line up in content and order across the three, and then be checked on the live listing to see how they actually render.

Corrections do not necessarily go out the way a website does either. Updated images and listing text can mean waiting on review again.

From inside the submission form, all of this felt like a small amount of work. It got heavier once the extension was live and I was reading my own store page on the same screen a user would.

Publishing is deciding how much to show

Finding my home address on that page was, honestly, frightening.

I also do not think it is a trap peculiar to the Chrome Web Store. Whenever an individual publishes anything, there is a person behind the product name.

What users see. How it is explained, in which languages. How long a correction takes to appear. And who is publishing, carrying which details. Deciding all of that is what preparing to publish turned out to mean.

Even for a small tool, if you plan to keep it up for a while, work out how your own information is handled before you start. That is the part I had not thought about before writing the first line of code — the publisher's side of privacy.