Privacy Policy

Overview

Simple Transcript Capture is a browser extension that downloads the transcript or captions from your active browser tab and saves them as a text file on your computer. It is designed with privacy as a core principle.

Data Collection

Simple Transcript Capture does not collect, store, transmit, or share any personal data.

• No personal information is collected.
• No analytics or tracking of any kind.
• Transcripts are saved directly to your device.
• No transcript data is sent to our servers.

How transcripts are read

When you open the side panel, the extension reads the active tab for a transcript that already exists. It does this by:

• On YouTube, requesting the video’s caption track from YouTube’s own public endpoint (the same data the YouTube player uses).
• On a page with a video player, reading the captions that player already has, including a player embedded from another site. This can mean re-requesting the caption file the player already loaded, from the same site.
• On other pages, reading transcript text already present in the page via a content script.
• Showing the transcript in the side panel, where you choose to copy it or save it as a file to your local Downloads folder.

The extension only reads a transcript when you open it on a page. It never records audio, never accesses your microphone, and does not run in the background.

Permissions

The extension requests the following permissions, each used solely for its core recording functionality:

• activeTab. Required to identify the currently active tab so that the extension can extract its transcript content via injected content scripts.
• downloads. Required to save the transcript file to the user’s Downloads folder.
• storage. Used to persist transcription state in session storage, and user preferences (export format and Pro license status) in local storage. Session data is cleared when the browser closes. No personal data is stored.
• sidePanel. The extension’s primary UI is a side panel that auto-extracts a transcript from the active tab when opened. chrome.sidePanel.open() (which requires this permission) is called when the user clicks the toolbar icon or the expand button in the compact popup. The side panel is essential to the extension’s core function: there is no full-screen page or large-format alternative for displaying long transcripts.
• scripting. Required to inject a content script into the active tab to read its DOM and extract existing transcript data (e.g. YouTube captions via the InnerTube API, generic page content for other sites). The extension does not perform speech recognition; it only reads existing transcript data already present on the page. The content script runs only when the user opens the side panel on a page they’ve navigated to.

Pro License Activation

If you purchase the optional Pro upgrade, the following user-initiated network requests are made:

• Clicking “Upgrade to Pro” opens a Stripe checkout page in a new browser tab (outside the extension). Payment data is handled entirely by Stripe and never passes through the extension.
• Entering a license key sends it to simple-transcript-capture.com for one-time validation. Only the license key string is transmitted, nothing else.
• The “Lost your key?” feature opens the Simple Transcript Capture website in a new tab where you can look up your key by email. This happens on the website, not within the extension.

No transcript data is sent to our servers. The only request to our domain is the optional one-time Pro license validation.

Third-Party Services

On YouTube, caption tracks are fetched from YouTube’s own public endpoint. For other video players, the caption file the player already loaded may be re-requested from the site that serves it. No analytics, tracking, or advertising SDKs are included. The only other external service interaction is the optional Pro license validation described above.

Feedback

The Feedback link in the extension and on this site, and the page that opens if you uninstall the extension, lead to a Google Form. It is optional. Nothing is sent unless you type something and submit it. Google hosts the form, and its own privacy policy applies to what you submit.

Changes to This Policy

If this privacy policy is updated, the changes will be reflected on this page with an updated date.

Contact

If you have questions about this privacy policy, please visit simple-transcript-capture.com.