When I built Weather & Clock Dashboard for Firefox, I made a decision early on: no analytics, no accounts, no external calls except weather data . Here's what I learned about building browser extensions with privacy as a design principle — and why I think more extension developers should take this approach. The Default is Data Collection Most web development assumes you want to know who your users are. Analytics platforms are one npm install away. A/B testing, session recording, funnel analysis — the infrastructure for surveillance capitalism is baked into the default developer tooling. Browser extensions are in a privileged position. They run inside the browser, they can see your tabs (with permission), they load on page visits. An extension with analytics has more access to your behavior than a typical website. What Privacy-First Actually Means For my extension, I set these constraints: 1. No analytics scripts 2. No external requests except weather API (user-configured, optional) 3. No user accounts 4.…