Background Capture

Continuously and privately mine how work actually gets done across the tools you use, straight from the Chrome extension.

What Background Capture Is

Background Capture is a long-running mode of the Linc Chrome extension. Once you allowlist the apps you want to study, the extension quietly records a plain-English trail of how you work in those tools over days and weeks. That activity syncs into the Miner, where Linc builds a picture of how a process is really performed, not just how someone describes it once.

How it differs from a Scout recording

A Scout screen recording is a single, deliberate session: you start it, narrate one workflow end to end, and stop. Background Capture is the opposite. It is passive and continuous. There is nothing to start for each task and nothing to narrate. It runs in the background across the apps you allowlist and accumulates many real runs of a process over time, which is what surfaces the variants, exceptions, and workarounds a one-off recording can miss.

  • Scout recording: one session, one workflow, video plus narration, captured on demand.
  • Background Capture: always-on, no narration, a plain-English event trail mined across many sessions.

The two are complementary. Background Capture shows how often and how many ways a process runs in the wild, while Scout interviews capture the intent and reasoning behind it.

The Privacy Model

Background Capture is built to be safe to leave on. It records intent, never content. The extension synthesizes a short human sentence for each action, such as "Clicked Approve" or "Navigated to Requisitions".

  • Plain-English only. No pixels, no screenshots, no raw page content or HTML.
  • No keystrokes. The extension attaches no keyboard listeners, so nothing you type is recorded.
  • No field values. Anything you type into an input, text area, or editable field is ignored. Control labels (a button caption, a menu name) are treated as intent, not data.
  • You choose the apps. Capture only runs on the exact sites you add to your allowlist. Every other site is ignored entirely.
  • Query strings are stripped. Captured URLs keep only the origin and path, so identifiers carried in a query string are dropped.

The same privacy line shown in the extension reads: Plain-English only, never pixels, never DOM, never keystrokes. You can review everything captured at any time from the extension and export it to CSV.

Your events are private to you
Captured events are private to the person who recorded them. When events sync to Linc, they are stored under your user account, and the Miner only ever returns your own captured events back to you. An administrator or teammate cannot browse another person's raw captured activity. Background Capture is meant to be enabled with each user's knowledge and consent. Use the on-page pill and the extension to confirm what is being captured, and pause or remove a site whenever you want.

Enabling Background Capture

1
Install and open the extension. If you have not added the Linc extension yet, follow the Chrome Extension page first. Click the Linc icon in your browser toolbar to open the Linc Process Mining popup.
2
Log in to Linc. The extension is cookie-first, so if you are already signed in to Linc in the browser it connects automatically and shows your name and organization under Connection. If it shows "Not syncing", click "Log in to Linc" and sign in. Capture keeps running locally while you are logged out, and the queued events sync as soon as you connect.
3
Add the sites to capture. Under Domain allowlist, type a site such as meridian.coupahost.com and click Add. Adding your first site turns capture on. The extension validates what you enter and shows an inline error like "Enter a valid site, e.g. example.com" for an invalid entry, or "That site is already in your list" for a duplicate.
4
Let it run. Capture now runs in the background on your allowlisted sites. There is nothing to start per task. Use your apps as you normally would, and events sync to the Miner on their own.
Tip
You can fine-tune the allowlist at any time. Toggle an individual site off without removing it, remove a site entirely, or use Pause to stop all capture temporarily. A timed pause resumes itself; an open-ended pause stays paused until you resume it.

Attributing capture to a project

If your organization uses projects, the Connection section includes a "Capturing under" picker. Choose a project to attribute new events to it, or leave it on Organization (no project). You can only attribute to a project you belong to or a default project, so the picker only lists projects you have access to.

The On-Page Pill

Whenever capture is enabled and you are on an allowlisted site, a small pill appears in the bottom-left corner so you always know the page is being process-mined. It is interactive and non-destructive.

  • Click the pill to expand a list of the recent actions captured on the current site, with a button to open the Miner.
  • Pause or Resume capture directly from the pill.
  • Minimize collapses the pill to a small Linc logo icon. It is never removed, so you can always see that capture is active and restore the full pill with a click.
  • If you are not signed in, the pill flags "Not syncing" and offers a "Log in to Linc" action so queued events can sync.

How Captured Events Reach the Miner

Events are captured locally first and then flushed to Linc in the background, so a brief network drop or a logged-out moment never loses data. Once they sync, they appear in the Miner under Browser Capture as a live, plain-English activity feed, alongside counts of total events, busiest apps, top actions, and the most recent 24 hours.

Syncing is safe to retry and never produces duplicates, and only events the server accepts are marked as synced. Each event is attributed to you and, when you have chosen one, to the right project.

Captured events in the Miner
Captured events synced into the Miner, shown as a plain-English Browser Capture feed.

AI Mentor on Browser Capture

Inside the Browser Capture dashboard, the AI Mentor reads your top apps and recurring actions and suggests what you could hand off to an AI assistant today, with no engineering required. Click "Suggest AI assists" and Mentor returns concrete, copyable suggestions based on what you actually do, each with setup steps and an estimate of time saved.

What It Produces

Background Capture feeds the same process intelligence that powers the rest of Linc. The accumulated event trail gives the Miner real-world evidence of how a process runs, which variants exist, and where exceptions appear. That evidence complements Scout interviews, which capture the reasoning behind each step, and flows into Architect, where Linc turns the combined picture into SOPs, diagrams, and improvement opportunities.

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