Why Xtrakt needs exactly one permission

Browser extensions have taught everyone to click past scary install warnings. "Read and change all your data on all websites" — accept, because you want the feature. Many extensions ask for far more access than they need, and some quietly phone home with your browsing habits.

Xtrakt was built as the opposite. Its entire permission request is one item: the right to remember a single preference on your computer.

What Xtrakt can and cannot do

When you install Xtrakt, the important guarantees are enforced by your browser itself — not by our promises:

• ✓It only runs on YouTube video pages. On every other website you visit — your bank, your email, your social feeds — Xtrakt simply does not exist. The browser won't load it there.
• ✓It cannot see your other tabs or your browsing. It never asked for that access, so the browser never grants it.
• ✓It stores exactly one thing. The single permission it holds is used to remember whether you minimized its panel. That's the entire inventory: no watch history, no transcripts kept behind your back, no hidden identifiers.

No server, nowhere to send your data

The deeper reason Xtrakt asks for so little is that it has nowhere to send data to. There is no Xtrakt server. The transcript you see is text that YouTube already delivers to your browser to display subtitles — Xtrakt simply catches it there and works with it on the spot.

Searching, reading along, exporting to a file: all of it happens inside your browser tab. When you download a transcript, the file goes straight to your downloads folder. When you close the tab, the transcript is gone from memory. At no point does any of it travel over the internet to us — there is no "us" infrastructure to travel to.

That also means: no account, no sign-up, no analytics, no tracking of any kind. Xtrakt does not know who you are or what you watch, and it has no way to find out.

Don't take our word for it

Xtrakt is free and open source. Its full source code is public, and its permission list is visible to anyone — including your browser, which shows it to you before installing. Independent reviewers can (and do) read exactly what the extension does. A privacy promise you can verify beats one you have to trust.

The honest fine print

• YouTube still sees your activity. Xtrakt reads subtitle text that YouTube was already sending to your browser; it doesn't add to Google's tracking, and it can't protect you from it either. Your relationship with YouTube is unchanged.
• This describes the current version. A privacy posture is only as good as the latest release. The advantage of an open-source tool is that anyone can re-check it, at any time, in minutes.

A transcript tool doesn't need your data. So Xtrakt doesn't take any — and your browser is the one holding it to that.