Your Bookmarks Belong to You: Where MyNav Stores Data and Why

A bookmark list gives away more than most people expect: which projects you are on, which companies you are applying to, which symptoms you have been reading about. So when we talk about privacy, we try to skip the adjectives and stick to checkable facts.

One cookie, and it is the necessary kind

MyNav uses a single strictly necessary cookie to keep you signed in. No advertising cookies, no third-party analytics, no session recording.

The result: you will never see a cookie banner here. Not because the banner is hidden, but because there is nothing to ask consent for.

Language choice and your last-used engine in guest mode live only in browser local storage — and contain no bookmark content.

Where the data lives

Purpose	Provider	Location
Database (accounts, bookmarks)	Neon (PostgreSQL)	Ohio, United States
Hosting and functions	Netlify	Functions in Ohio; static content via global CDN
Transactional email	Alibaba Cloud Mail	Mainland China

The legal basis for transfers, retention periods, and the purpose of each data category are all in the privacy policy, including one detail that is easy to miss: password-reset emails pass through servers in mainland China.

What we do not do

• We do not sell or rent your personal information
• No data brokers, and your bookmarks are never used for cross-site advertising
• We do not read your bookmarks for manual review — unless you report a problem and ask us to look
• The extension does not run on pages you did not act on, and never reports where you browse; saving sends only the single URL you clicked

You can take everything with you

Pro includes two export formats:

• HTML — re-importable into any browser, so your collection can move elsewhere
• JSON — a complete backup including notes and metadata

"Can I export this?" is the best test of whether a tool actually belongs to you. Export sits behind Pro (it is one of the paid features), but nothing in the format or permissions stops you from leaving — you get clean standard formats, not a private file only MyNav can open.

If you are on the free plan and just want a safety copy, you can copy cards individually, or upgrade for a month and downgrade afterwards without losing anything.

What deleting your account removes

Settings → Account → Delete account permanently removes bookmarks, folders, and the account. It takes effect immediately — no "deleted in 30 days," nothing kept in a backup waiting for your return.

Per the privacy policy, a few categories are retained briefly or as required by law:

• Reset codes: deleted after 10 minutes
• Billing records: kept 7–10 years for tax purposes, payment metadata only, no bookmarks
• Technical logs: short retention for debugging

What you can verify yourself

Trust should not rest on slogans, so here is what you can check directly:

1. Open dev tools, watch the network panel, reload any page, and look for third-party analytics requests
2. Check the cookie list in your browser settings — there should be exactly one session cookie
3. Read the processor table in the privacy policy and match each provider and region

If something does not add up, or you find a discrepancy with the claims above, the feedback page is open — reports like that go to the front of our queue.