Privacy Policy

Last updated: 7 May 2026

YouTube TimeWatcher (the "extension") is built around a simple principle: your watch-time statistics are stored locally in your browser and are not sent to our servers. The extension does not require an account, does not use analytics or tracking pixels, and does not sell or monetize user data. The only outbound network request is to YouTube's public oEmbed endpoint to retrieve canonical video titles — described in the Third-party services section below.

What the extension stores

While you watch videos on YouTube, the extension saves the following on your device:

• Per-day and per-channel watch time (in seconds).
• The video ID, title, channel name, and thumbnail URL of videos you watch.
• Channel avatar URLs, hourly distribution, and category breakdown (shorts / longform / ambient).
• Your settings: daily limit, excluded channels, and onboarding state.

All of this is written to chrome.storage.local, which is sandboxed to your browser profile on your computer. The extension uses chrome.storage.local rather than chrome.storage.sync, so the extension does not intentionally sync this data through Chrome Sync, and none of it is sent to servers we control.

What the extension does NOT do

• It does not create an account or require sign-in.
• It does not send your watch-time totals, settings, excluded channels, hourly breakdowns, or stored statistics to any server controlled by us or any third party. The only external request is the YouTube oEmbed title lookup described below.
• It does not use Google Analytics, telemetry, crash reporting, or any tracking pixel.
• It does not read your browsing history outside of YouTube pages you actively view.
• It does not sell user data or use it for advertising, profiling, or monetization.

Limited Use disclosure

YouTube TimeWatcher uses data obtained from YouTube pages only to provide the extension's user-facing watch-time tracking features. Specifically:

• We do not use or transfer this data for advertising, personalized ads, retargeting, creditworthiness, data brokerage, or any unrelated purpose.
• We do not sell user data.
• We do not allow humans to read user watch-time data, because the data is never sent to us.
• All processing happens locally on your device, in service of the single purpose of showing you your own YouTube watch-time statistics, limits, and breakdowns.

Permissions the extension requests

• storage — required to persist watch-time stats and settings on your device between browser sessions.
• Access to youtube.com pages — required to read video metadata (title, channel, duration) from the page so the extension can attribute time to the correct channel and render the panel inside YouTube's header.

Third-party services

The extension may call YouTube's public oEmbed endpoint (https://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=…) to retrieve the canonical title for a YouTube video, so that the title shown in your stats matches the real video. This request includes the relevant YouTube video URL and is sent over HTTPS directly to YouTube. YouTube may receive normal network information associated with the request, such as IP address, user-agent, and request time; we have no control over YouTube's logging practices for this public endpoint. We do not receive this request, and we do not send your watch-time totals, settings, excluded channels, hourly breakdowns, or stored statistics to any server we control.

Deleting your data

You are always in full control. To erase everything:

• Open the YouTube TimeWatcher panel in the YouTube header → Settings → Clear all data.
• Or uninstall the extension. Chrome wipes chrome.storage.local automatically on uninstall.

EU / UK users

YouTube TimeWatcher is designed so that watch-time statistics are processed locally on your device and are not transmitted to us. You can erase the locally stored data at any time using the steps in the "Deleting your data" section above. For privacy questions, contact us at [email protected].

Changes to this policy

If we ever change how the extension handles data, we will update this page and bump the "Last updated" date above. The current source-of-truth is always https://youtubetimewatcher.com/privacy.

Contact

Questions or concerns? Email [email protected] or open an issue on GitHub.