Privacy
Privacy Policy
Decode My Feed (“we”, “us”) turns your YouTube watch history into a one-time, paid insight report. You collect your history with our browser extension, which runs entirely on your device, then upload the file it creates to our website. The whole product is built around a single promise: your watch history is analyzed and then it is gone. We do not keep accounts, and we do not retain your file or the data extracted from it. We keep only two things: the finished report, for 24 hours so you can return to it (then it is automatically and permanently deleted — see section 4), and an anonymous payment marker described in section 5.
1. The browser extension
Decode My Feed offers an optional Chrome extension that collects the watch history used by the website. The extension is the only part of the product that reads your YouTube watch history page, and it does so entirely on your own device.
When a scan runs on your YouTube history page, the extension:
- scrolls the page to load your last 90 days of history (up to your 1,000 most recent videos);
- reads, for each video, the title, duration, how much you watched, the completion percentage, and the date watched; and
- hands that information to decodemyfeed.com in a new tab, so you do not have to export and re-upload a file. If that handoff cannot happen, it saves the information as a JSON file to your computer instead, and you can always ask for the file yourself.
That is all it does. The extension has no servers of its own and makes no network requests: it does not send your watch history to us, to anyone else, or anywhere at all — the handoff above passes it between two tabs inside your own browser, and it happens only for a scan you just asked for. It contains no analytics, advertising, or tracking code, and it reads only youtube.com pages (the permission it requests).
Between finishing a scan and handing it over, the extension holds your history in the browser’s session storage: kept in memory, never written to disk, deleted the moment the website collects it, discarded after 30 minutes if it is never collected, and gone entirely when you close your browser. Nothing else is stored. Your history stays on your device and under your control until yousend it to our website — by the handoff or by uploading a file — at which point the rest of this policy applies.
For completeness, our upload page can also talk to the extension in two narrow ways: it can ask whether the extension is installed (so it can skip the install instructions if you already have it), and it can ask it to start a scan, which opens your YouTube history in a new tab. To the first question the extension answers with nothing but yes and its version number. Only decodemyfeed.com can ask, no other website can, and none of it leaves your browser.
Installing and using the extension is free and separate from the paid analysis on the website.
2. What we process
To get a report you send us your watch history — either handed over by the extension above, or as a file you upload (the extension’s youtube-watch-history.json, or a Google Takeout export). Either way it is read and parsed entirely in your browser. The raw file itself never leaves your device.
From the parsed file, we send only the fields needed to generate insights to our analysis service. For each video that means:
- the video title;
- the video’s total duration;
- how much of it you watched; and
- the resulting completion percentage.
We analyze at most your 1,000 most recent videos from the last 90 days. Any other information in your export — including the watch timestamps, URLs, and channel metadata — stays on your device and is never transmitted.
Before the analysis runs we also ask you two optional questions — what you feel you use YouTube for, and what you’re working toward — plus an optional free-text note. Answering is entirely voluntary, you can skip the whole step, and it does not change the price. If you do answer, those answers are sent with the video data above and used only to write the section of your report that compares what you said you wanted with what your feed actually served you. They are processed exactly like the watch data: read once, never written to a database, and never recorded in our logs or usage analytics. Please don’t put anything sensitive in the free-text note — whatever you write there is passed to our analysis provider (section 3) and may be quoted back in your report, which is stored for 24 hours (section 4).
So that we can deliver your report, we also process the email address you enter at checkout and the generated report, solely to send you that one message (see section 4).
3. How the analysis works
The watch data described above is sent over an encrypted (HTTPS) connection to a serverless function we operate on Supabase. That function passes the data to Anthropic’s API, which generates the written insights, and returns the report to your browser. The watch data itself is transient: the function receives it, produces the report, and forgets it — your watch history is never written to a database or to disk.
4. Your report, and its 24-hour lifetime
So that a page refresh doesn’t destroy a report you just paid for, the finished report is stored for 24 hoursand then automatically and permanently deleted. The stored row contains the report text only — no watch history, no email address, and no payment information — and it is retrievable only with a random key held in your browser. After 24 hours the report exists only in the email we send you and any copies you downloaded.
You can delete it sooner, yourself.The report page carries a delete button: pressing it destroys our stored copy immediately and stops the 24-hour link from working, without waiting for the timer and without contacting us. The intended use is to email the report to yourself (or download the PDF) and then delete ours, so that the only remaining copies are the ones you hold. Because the stored row contains no email address or payment information, there is nothing for us to check an identity against — the random key that retrieves a report is also what deletes it, so anyone you give a 24-hour link to can delete that copy as well. Deleting our copy does not affect the report already open in your browser, the email, or anything you have downloaded.
We also email you a copy so you can keep it. The email address you enter at checkout and the generated report are sent to a serverless function, which uses Resend to deliver a single message to you. We do not store your email address after that message is sent.
5. Payment
Generating a report requires a one-time payment, handled by Polar, our reseller and Merchant of Record. You enter your payment details directly with Polar — we never see or handle your card information. Polar processes the billing details and email address you give them under their own privacy policy.
So that we can confirm a payment succeeded without accounts or logins, our checkout attaches a random, single-use token (a “nonce”) to your purchase. When the payment clears, we store onlythat opaque token and a timestamp — never your name, email, watch history, or report. The token is marked used once your report is generated, and it cannot be traced back to your identity.
6. Service providers
We rely on a small number of providers to operate the website. They process data only to perform the function described, on our behalf:
- Supabase— hosts the serverless functions that receive your watch data, send the report email, and store the anonymous payment token and the 24-hour report copy.
- Anthropic— generates the insights from the watch data we send.
- Polar— processes your payment as Merchant of Record.
- Resend— delivers the report email to the address you provide.
The browser extension does not use any of these providers — it runs only on your device. These website providers process data in the United States and other countries. We do not sell your data or share it with anyone for advertising.
7. Logs
Our serverless functions may record basic operational and error information (for example, that a request failed) to keep the service running. These logs do not include your watch history content, the parsed video data, or the contents of your report.
The website also reports its own errors to us — if something breaks in your browser (an upload that won’t parse, a report that fails to generate), we record which step failed and why: a fixed error name, the step of the flow, an HTTP status code, and the page path without its query string. We deliberately do not send the browser’s error message text, because a failure while reading your file can quote part of that file. These reports contain no watch history, no email address, no report content, and nothing that identifies you or your device. They are written to our function logs and are not stored in any database.
8. Cookies and analytics
We do not set advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, we do not require an account or login, and we never sell or share data with advertisers.
We do use privacy-friendly usage analytics (Vercel Web Analytics) to see how many people visit and where they get stuck — for example, how many uploads succeed, or how many people reach the checkout page. It is cookieless and does not build a profile of you, follow you across other websites, or store a persistent identifier for your browser.
The events we record are counts and fixed labels only: which step of the flow was reached, whether the upload came from the extension or Google Takeout, a rough size band for how many videos were in it (for example, “201–500”), whether the optional questions before the analysis were answered or skipped (never whatwas answered), and a broad device class — phone, or desktop with or without a browser that can run our extension — so we can tell who is hitting a step they cannot finish. No video titles, channel names, timestamps, email addresses, or report content are ever sent to our analytics, and there is no field in which they could be.
On our public pages only— the home page, the example report, the guides, and these legal pages — we also record which buttons were pressed, roughly how far down the page you scrolled (in quarters), and roughly how long you stayed (in bands such as “30–120 seconds”). This tells us which parts of our own copy are working. Buttons are recorded as fixed labels we wrote ourselves, never as the text on screen.
We deliberately do notrecord any of this on the pages that can show your own data — the upload page, the questions, checkout, the processing screen, the report, and shared report links. Those pages are excluded by an allowlist, meaning a page records nothing unless it has been explicitly judged safe, so a new page is silent by default rather than watched by default. We do not use session recording, screen replay, or heatmap tools anywhere on the site.
The extension uses no cookies, analytics, or error reporting at all — see section 1.
9. Data retention
We do not retain your watch data, the file you upload, or your answers to the optional questions described in section 2. Your report is kept for 24 hours and then automatically and permanently deleted (section 4). Beyond that, the only things we keep are the anonymous payment token described in section 5 and the operational logs and anonymous usage counts described in sections 7 and 8 — none of which contain personal information. Any copy of the report you saved or received by email is under your control. Your payment records are held by Polar under their own retention policy.
Separately, your own browserkeeps a short summary of each report you generate — the persona name, three headline numbers, and the top few topics and channels — so that if you run another report later it can show you what changed. This is stored on your device only. It is never sent to us, never included in any log or usage count, and there is no copy of it on our servers; we could not read it if we wanted to. Entries are dropped automatically after about a year, and the “Forget my past reports” link in that section of your report deletes all of them immediately.
If your report was built from a Google Takeout export, your browser also holds the voucher for your free second scan for up to 30 days — the one-time token itself, a 24-number summary of which hours of the day you watched, and your answers to the optional questions from section 2, so the rebuilt report keeps the parts of the first one that the second upload cannot supply. Like the summaries above, this is stored on your device only. It is never sent to us except as part of the second analysis you start yourself, never logged, and never included in any usage count. It is deleted as soon as the free scan is used, and expires on its own if it is not.
10. Your rights
Depending on where you live (for example, under the GDPR or CCPA), you may have rights to access, correct, or delete personal data a service holds about you. Because we do not store your watch history — only an anonymous payment token and a report copy that deletes itself within 24 hours — in practice there is little for us to retrieve or erase. For data tied to your purchase (such as your billing details), contact Polar, the Merchant of Record. For anything else, contact us at the address below.
11. Children
Decode My Feed is not directed to children and is not intended for anyone under 16. Please do not use the service if you are under the minimum age in your country.
12. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy as the service evolves. When we do, we will revise the “Last updated” date above. Material changes will be reflected here before they take effect.
13. Contact
Questions about this policy or your privacy? Email us at info@decodemyfeed.com.
See also our Terms & Conditions or contact us.