The verdict appears as a colored dot in your toolbar:
What it does
A flashlight on the machinery.
When you open a website, Get Untethered watches which third-party companies that site contacts in the background — the ad networks, behavior trackers, personalization engines, and identity-resolution services that most pages quietly load.
It looks each one up in a curated dictionary, groups them by what they actually do, and shows you a single traffic-light verdict in your toolbar. Click for the plain-language breakdown.
It's designed for the moment before you spend money — so you know what's running before you decide whether to give a company your business.
What it doesn't claim
It can't see the price.
Surveillance pricing — companies charging different people different prices based on their data — is real, and it's spreading. But the actual pricing logic lives on the company's server, not in your browser. No tool running on your computer can prove you were charged more than someone else.
Get Untethered shows you what tracking and personalization software a site uses. It does not, and cannot, tell you that you were charged more. Think of it as a flashlight on the machinery — not a receipt for the overcharge.
That distinction matters. A red verdict means a site has loaded the kind of software used to profile and personalize. It's a warning, not a verdict on any specific transaction.
Install
Early access.
Get Untethered is in early testing. It's not yet on the Chrome Web Store — for now, you install it manually from a small folder of files. It takes about a minute.
- Download the latest version: get-untethered-v1.3.zip
- Unzip the file somewhere you'll remember.
- In Chrome, go to
chrome://extensionsand turn on Developer mode (top right). - Click Load unpacked and select the unzipped folder.
- Pin the extension to your toolbar (puzzle-piece icon → pin Get Untethered) so the verdict dot is always visible.
Chrome will warn you that the extension can "read your browsing history." That permission is what lets it observe which trackers a page loads. It is not used to read, store, or transmit anything — see Privacy.
Privacy
Nothing leaves your browser.
Get Untethered does not collect, store, or transmit any data about you, your browsing, or the sites you visit. It has no server. There is no account. There is no telemetry, analytics, or error reporting.
Everything the extension does happens locally in your browser:
- It observes which third-party domains a page contacts.
- It looks each domain up in a dictionary bundled with the extension.
- It keeps a per-tab count in temporary session storage, which is cleared automatically when you close your browser.
The source is small and readable. If you'd like to verify any of the above, the code is the proof.
About
Turning consumers back into customers.
A customer is someone a business has to earn. A consumer is a unit to be extracted from. Over the last decade, software has quietly converted one into the other — and most of that machinery runs invisibly in the background of websites you use every day.
Get Untethered is a small, independent project. It doesn't try to fix surveillance pricing or compete with the companies that use it. It just turns the lights on, so you can see what's there and decide for yourself.
Built minimally, on purpose. No funding. No tracking. No agenda beyond the one stated here.
Terms
The short version.
Get Untethered is provided as-is, free of charge, for personal use. It's a small tool that classifies third-party domains using a curated dictionary; that dictionary is a best effort, will sometimes be incomplete, and may occasionally be wrong. Use the information it provides as a signal, not as a definitive judgment about any company.
The extension carries no warranty and no guarantee of accuracy. By installing it, you accept that it may be updated, changed, or discontinued at any time.
If you find a tracker we've classified incorrectly, or one we haven't classified at all, corrections are welcome.