Screen Time Tracker Without an Account: Local-Only Options
Your browsing history is a diary you didn't mean to publish: health questions, job searches, relationships, financial worries. If you want to measure your screen time, it's rational to also want that measurement to stay private.
A capable screen time tracker does not need an account, a cloud service, or any connection to a server. This article explains what "local-only" means in practice, what to check before trusting a tool's claims, and how to set one up.
What an account actually costs you
Many tracking tools ask you to sign up because their product is the dashboard in the cloud. That design has real costs:
- Your history lives on someone else's server, under someone else's data-retention rules
- The account ties the data to your identity; if the server is breached, the timeline of your attention is exposed
- If the service shuts down or changes its privacy policy, your history is caught in the middle
A local-only tracker inverts all of it: data is written to your own device's storage, nothing is transmitted, and there is nothing to breach on a server, because there is no server.
The four-point checklist for a private tracker
Before installing anything, verify:
- No account required: the extension should work fully from the first minute, without registration
- Local storage, stated precisely: look for a concrete mechanism (for example, your browser's local storage API), not just the word "private"
- Open source: an MIT or similar license means the storage behavior is verifiable in the code, not just promised in the description
- Export you control: your history should leave in an open format (JSON/CSV) that you own, not a proprietary backup
A local-only setup for Chrome, Edge and Firefox
Time Tracker - Web Habit Builder passes all four checks:
- Zero accounts: install and tracking starts; there is no sign-up flow at all
- Local-only storage: all data is stored in your browser's own local storage (
chrome.storage.localand equivalents) and is never sent anywhere - Fully open source: MIT-licensed, so the storage behavior can be verified in the repository rather than taken on faith
- Your data, your format: export everything as JSON or CSV whenever you want
Beyond export, it also supports syncing through services you control (your own WebDAV server or a private GitHub Gist), so multi-device backup doesn't require introducing a third party (see Data Sync).
Tracking quality without the cloud
The same extension delivers second-level, active-tab based tracking, per-site daily and historical reports, weekly trends, and time-of-day charts (see Analyze Browsing Habits). It can also enforce time limits on any website, entirely offline.
Tracking beyond the browser
If you want tracking beyond the browser (desktop apps, system-wide), ActivityWatch is a well-regarded open-source, local-first desktop application. For browser-focused habits, a pure extension avoids running a background app and covers the same data with less setup. Either way, the measurement does not require giving up local control.
If the checklist above matches what you want, the install page lists the store links for Chrome, Edge and Firefox.