Privacy Policy — vid-text-select

Last updated: 2026-05-27

Summary

This extension does not collect, store, transmit, or share any personal data, browsing activity, or user content. Everything it does happens locally in your browser. There are no servers, no analytics, no telemetry, no accounts, and no third-party services involved.

The short version: nothing leaves your computer.

What the extension does

When you hold Cmd (Mac) or Ctrl (Windows/Linux) and click on text inside a playing HTML5 video, the extension:

  1. Captures the visible portion of the video frame as an image, held in memory.
  2. Runs optical character recognition (OCR) on the captured image locally, using a bundled Tesseract.js engine that ships inside the extension itself.
  3. Displays a small selectable overlay positioned over the recognized text.
  4. Copies the selected text to your system clipboard when you press Cmd+C / Ctrl+C, using the standard browser copy mechanism.

All of these steps happen entirely on your device, inside your browser. No data is ever sent to a remote server.

What data is collected

None. Specifically:

  • The extension does not collect or log any browsing history, page contents, video URLs, or user activity.
  • Captured video frame images are held briefly in memory for OCR processing and discarded immediately afterward. They are not saved to disk, stored, or transmitted anywhere.
  • Recognized text is held in memory only long enough to render the selectable overlay. If you copy it, it goes to your operating system clipboard through the browser’s standard copy API. The extension does not retain it.
  • The extension does not use cookies, local storage, IndexedDB, or any other persistent storage for user data.
  • The extension does not include any analytics, telemetry, error reporting, crash reporting, or “phone home” functionality.

Third-party services

None. The extension does not connect to any third-party APIs, services, or content delivery networks. The OCR engine (Tesseract.js) and its language model are bundled into the extension package and run entirely locally.

Permissions

The extension requests the following browser permissions, used solely to perform the function described above:

  • tabs / activeTab — to capture the visible video frame for local OCR when you invoke the extension via modifier-click.
  • offscreen — to host the local OCR engine in an offscreen document, since Tesseract.js requires DOM APIs not available in service workers.
  • Host permissions — to inject the content script onto pages with video, so it can detect modifier-click on video elements.

These permissions enable the extension to function on your device. They are not used to access, transmit, or share any data with any party.

Children’s privacy

The extension does not collect data from anyone, including children. It is suitable for users of any age without any data-protection concerns.

Open source

The extension is open source. Anyone can inspect the full source code at github.com/jobrienski/video-text-selector to verify that the behavior described in this policy matches what the code actually does. If the privacy behavior of the extension ever changes, that change would be visible in the public source history.

Changes to this policy

If this privacy policy changes in any way, this page will be updated and the “Last updated” date at the top will be revised.

Contact

For questions about this policy, open an issue at github.com/jobrienski/video-text-selector/issues.