Why is Da Vinci Tools asking to access data on all sites and other permissions ?

The extension needs some permissions to make its magic. Here is a simple explanation about the various permissions required by Da Vinci Tools.

Remember when you install a Chrome Extension - any extension - you open permissions for this extension to view and alter the pages you visit and the traffic between your browser and the interwebs. Only install browser extensions coming from trusted sources (the Chrome Web Store and published by an author you trust) and those which offer transparency about what they do. Also note whenever a new release is published, the Chrome Web Store automatically runs a vast number of validations to ensure the extension doesn't do any harm.

Read your browsing History / Read and change all your data on the websites you visit

• In order for the GA & GTM "Hide Me" feature to work, Da Vinci Tools needs to be able to detect the presence of specific GA requests matching blocked web properties and/or GTM containers being used by the pages you visit. To do this, it needs to watch & listen for all network requests and block them when appropriate;
• Conversely, the GTM Inject feature also needs to listen to the pages being loaded in order to determine if it needs to block existing containers and load the one you want instead;
• You can limit Da Vinci Tools access to specific sites by managing the extension permissions, as described in this Google support article;
• In the same way, the extension needs access to the pages you visit while using Google Tag Manager Preview mode in order to make the output looks better and do its magic (Tidy Preview option);
• The Da Vinci Tools UI is created by adding HTML, CSS & JavaScript code to specific pages you visit. In order to do this, the extension needs access to modify a page's DOM (if you're not a developer, just know that the DOM represents the structure of a page), but, if it can access everything in the DOM (the data a page contains, the forms you submit or your browsing history on that tab) it doesn't mean it actually does read it or does anything with it. It just needs to access the body of a page and append a new element to it.

Modify data you copy and paste

This permission is in fact only used to "copy" data to the clipboard, not read from it. For example, this permission is required when creating the GA API Request or when copying code from GTM Preview.

Access to your Google Analytics Data

If you use the Cancel Transaction or Cancel Item feature, Da Vinci Tools will use the Reporting API to retrieve details about the transaction and build the required measurement protocol request which you can either send automatically or copy to your clipboard.

Know your email address

This was required because many features of Da Vinci Tools were free, while some others were available to subscribers only. In order to validate if a user had a valid subscription, the email address of the user connected to Chrome was necessary. This information was used to securely validate your subscription status (or the absence of a valid license). Your email address is not shared with anyone (besides Supermetrics, who now owns Da Vinci Tools) and it might be used for marketing purposes in the future.

Last update: 2020-02-28