Published: July 1, 2026
The Chrome Web Store is committed to fostering a high-quality, trusted, and secure ecosystem for both developers and users. To align with this ongoing commitment, we are announcing a series of updates to our Developer Program Policies.
These updates will enhance user privacy, provide clearer guidance on data collection transparency requirements, and address emerging product categories.
What's changing?
- Regulated Goods and Services: We are expanding our language to explicitly include predictive markets as prohibited products. Extensions that facilitate or enable real money transactions on predictive outcomes are not allowed.
- Limited Use Policy: We are updating the policies governing user data collection. Any user data collected by an extension must now be strictly necessary to the extension's disclosed single purpose. Collecting data for other purposes is prohibited.
- Disclosure Requirements Policy: We are updating our transparency standards to require that all data collection be prominently disclosed to the user—regardless of whether the data is closely related to the extension's single purpose. Additionally, developers must proactively disclose to users if their data handling practices change at any point after the initial installation.
- Malicious and Prohibited Products Policy: We are introducing a new policy to explicitly disallow extensions designed to circumvent safety guardrails, usage restrictions, or other protective measures implemented by AI-powered services.
Why this matters
Building and maintaining user trust is paramount. By implementing stricter data collection baselines and clarifying boundaries around prediction markets and AI safety, we ensure that the Chrome Web Store remains an honest, useful, and secure platform. Users should always have full visibility into how their data is handled, with the confidence that their extension ecosystem operates responsibly.
What these updates mean for developers
We encourage all developers to review their active extensions against these updated policies as soon as possible.
Enforcement for these updated policies will begin on August 1, 2026. Extensions found out of compliance after this date may face enforcement action from the Chrome Web Store.
Thank you for your continued partnership in keeping the Chrome extension ecosystem safe and innovative!