I don’t feel comfortable giving the Paperpile extension permission to read and change data for EVERY site that I visit. Instead, I limited access to specific sites, specifically paperpile.com and Google Scholar. This initially worked, and I was able to add papers and annotate PDFs. However, I am now unable to annotate PDFs unless I give the Paperpile extension permission to view my entire browsing history, which IMO is unreasonable. It seems to me that I should be able to annotate PDFs by adding the following to the Specific Sites setting: ://bomfdkbfpdhijjbeoicnfhjbdhncfhig/ However, this is not accepted as a valid website.
We agree, @b00kgrrl, and did try to make the permissions optional upon developing the extension, but we could not make it work. The gist is that we can’t do it without removing functionality, and we don’t support restricted permissions at this point.
You can visit this information page for more details (scroll down to the section Chrome extension), which is part of our Privacy Policy and public commitment to users. We will always respect and enforce user privacy.
Our mobile apps do not require these permissions to use the annotator, in case that’s an option for you.