Record a workflow and turn it into a step-by-step guide. Everything stays in your browser.
Last updated: 23 September 2026 · Applies to version 0.12.0
Tracepaper has no server. There is no account to create, no sign-in, and nowhere for your guides to go. Everything you record stays in your own browser, on your own computer, until you export it yourself.
We cannot see your guides. Not because we promise not to look — because there is no copy anywhere we could look at.
Only while you are recording, and only in the tab you chose:
Click "Save". Labels are cut off at 60 characters.workspace.google.com, so your guide list can
show it. Never the full page address, and never the page title. The site appears
in an export only if you tick Include the site address in exports in the
editor; it is off for every guide until you do.Because a screenshot photographs whatever is on the screen, text you typed earlier could otherwise appear in the picture. So Tracepaper blurs it automatically, before the picture is saved, and you decide which ones to un-blur later.
Blurred automatically: every text box, number, email, phone, date and search field, every large text area, every password field, and any area of a page you can type into directly.
Hidden before anything is captured: any area you marked yourself. Open the Tracepaper popup on a page, choose “Hide areas on this site”, and click the things that should never appear — a patient banner, a student name column, a sidebar. Those regions are destroyed on the way out of the camera, so unlike a blur you add afterwards, the pixels never reach your disk at all. The choice is remembered for that site.
Fields you chose to leave visible: open the Tracepaper popup on a page, choose “Hide areas on this site”, and switch to the Fields tab. It lists every field on the screen, each marked blurred, readable, or password. Click one to leave it readable — useful when the value is the instruction, such as “enter 20-49”. The choice is remembered for that site.
Two things about that, both deliberate. The default is always to blur, so anyone who never opens that screen is safe. And a password field can never be exempted — there is no checkbox for it, whatever else you change.
The popup tells you how many fields are set to stay readable before you press Record, because a choice made on a student system in September is still in force in March.
Not blurred automatically: what a dropdown is currently showing. A dropdown choice is usually the instruction itself — “select United States” — so hiding it would empty out the guide. If a dropdown on your system shows a person’s name or anything else private, blur it by hand in the editor before you share the guide.
You can also blur anything yourself afterwards: open a guide, press the blur button on a step, and drag boxes over whatever should be hidden — a name in a heading, a record number in a table. That blur is permanent in exactly the same way. The pixels are averaged away and the new image replaces the old, so there is nothing underneath to recover and no setting that brings it back.
The blur is permanent and it happens first. The screenshot is scaled down, every field region is averaged into blocks, and only then is anything written to disk. The full-size original exists for a few milliseconds inside the extension and is discarded. There is no pristine copy underneath for anyone to recover, and no setting that brings one back.
Screenshots are saved at 1920 pixels wide, which is about 44 KB each — roughly 1.3 MB for a guide of thirty steps. Wider captures are scaled down to that; narrower ones are left alone and never enlarged.
In your browser’s own storage (IndexedDB), on your computer. That means:
Tracepaper asks Chrome to treat its storage as persistent, which asks the browser not to discard it when disk space runs low. That is a request, not a guarantee, and it does nothing to protect against clearing browsing data on purpose. Every guide that has never been exported is labelled as such, in the guide list and on the guide itself.
When you stop a recording it is saved on this computer straight away, as an unnamed draft, so closing Chrome before you decide does not lose it. You then name it to keep it, or discard it. A discarded recording is deleted along with its screenshots straight away.
Nothing, unless you ask for it:
Exporting a guide writes a file to your Downloads folder. It does not pass through us. That is the complete list today. Two more are planned, and neither exists in the version named at the top of this page:
When either arrives, this page, Where your data goes and the version number above will change together.
There are none. No usage counts, no crash reports, no “anonymous” statistics, no advertising identifiers, no cookies. We do not know how many guides you have made or whether you have opened the extension today.
Tracepaper supports FERPA and HIPAA compliance because we never receive your data. Since no student records or health information ever reach us, there is no vendor agreement to sign, no Business Associate Agreement needed, and nothing for your privacy office to review about us.
Tracepaper is not “certified” and is not “HIPAA compliant” — those words describe organizations and programs, not tools. Your own handling of what you record is still your responsibility.
Tracepaper is a workplace tool and is not directed to children under 13. It collects nothing from anyone, including children.
See Where your data goes for a diagram, Permissions for why the extension asks for each thing it asks for, and Verify our claims for step-by-step instructions on checking all of it yourself. The code is structured so that a reviewer can verify these claims without taking our word for it:
scripts/check-network.sh fails the build if any networking code appears outside
the payments module.support@gettracepaper.com