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 the finished report for 24 hours so you can return to it (then it is automatically and permanently deleted — see section 4), an anonymous payment marker described in section 5, and anonymous daily usage totals described in section 8.
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).
The extension also has an optional set of feed controls — marking bait-styled titles, hiding Shorts, the home feed, the sidebar, comments or end screens, and draining thumbnail colour. These change how YouTube looks in your own browser and nothing else. The title scoring runs entirely on your device and is the same code the report uses; no titles, counts, or anything about what you were shown is sent anywhere. Your on/off choices are the only thing kept — in the browser’s synced storage, so they follow your Chrome profile to your other machines. They are preferences, not data about you, and we never see them.
Two of those controls keep a little more, on your own computer, and neither can be switched on until the extension has shown you what it keeps and you have agreed. Track my feed over time stores one pair of numbers per day — how many titles you were shown and how many were bait-styled — with no titles, channels or links, capped at 35 days. Retrain mode stores the action list from your own report, which you send to the extension yourself from the report page, plus which items you have ticked off — and, sent in the same step, the channel names and completion figures from that report, so the blocker can suggest the channels you open and leave. Tell me when the feed has me and the daily time alert keep two durations per day: how long you browsed and how long you watched. Not what you watched, not which pages, not which videos — two numbers, capped at 35 days. Channels you block yourself are kept as a list of names.
All of it lives in your browser’s local storage on that machine, all of it is erasable with one button in the extension’s popup, and none of it is ever transmitted — not to us, not to anyone. We have no way to read any of it. The alerts show you a line and nothing more: the extension will never close a tab, block a video, or stop you watching something. The cooldown and one video at a time prompts keep nothing at all: they count the current sitting in the tab and forget it when you close it, and the answer to “why are you continuing?” is never recorded, never counted, and never sent — the question exists for you, not for us.
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 you send 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 our analysis service. A third-party automated analysis provider in the United States receives only the fields listed in section 2, solely to produce the written insights for your report. The watch data itself is transient: the service receives it, produces the report, and forgets it — your watch history is never written to our 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 hours and 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 passed to our transactional email provider 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 only that 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.
If you reached us through one of our own campaign links, checkout also carries the same fixed source label described in section 8 (for example, “youtube”). Polar returns that label with its signed payment confirmation so we can count completed purchases by campaign. It is not a visitor identifier and contains no raw URL or referrer.
6. Service providers
We rely on a small number of service providers to operate the website. They process data only to perform the function described, on our behalf:
- A cloud infrastructure provider receives the fields listed in section 2, runs the report and email services, and stores the anonymous payment token, anonymous daily usage totals, and the 24-hour report copy.
- An automated analysis provider receives the fields listed in section 2 solely to produce the written insights for your report.
- Polar — processes your payment as Merchant of Record.
- A transactional email provider receives your email address and finished report solely to deliver your report email.
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. Checkout and signed payment-confirmation logs may include the fixed campaign label described in section 8, so we can reconcile paid orders with a campaign.
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 use privacy-friendly web analytics to count visits to public pages. It is cookieless and does not build a profile of you, follow you across other websites, or store a persistent identifier for your browser.
To see where a campaign gets stuck, the website sends our aggregate counter only two fixed labels: the campaign source and the funnel step reached. It stores no individual event. Instead, the database increments one aggregate count for each UTC day, source and step. The public website can increment approved combinations but cannot read or edit the table. No video titles, channel names, timestamps, email addresses, or report content are sent, and there is no field in which they could be stored.
When you arrive through one of our own campaign links, your browser keeps a fixed source label (such as “youtube” or “dataisbeautiful”) and the date it was captured for up to 14 days. It also remembers which fixed steps it has already counted during that window, so a reload does not ordinarily increment the same step again. We use those steps—for example, checker used, upload parsed, checkout started, and report completed—to see whether a campaign led to meaningful use. We never store or send the raw query string or referrer, and the label is not a visitor identifier.
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 not record clicks, scrolling, time-on-page, or screen content on pages that can show your own data—the upload page, the questions, checkout, the processing screen, the report, and shared report links. Those pages may emit only the fixed funnel step and source label described above, plus the fixed operational counts listed earlier in this section. Behavioural observation is excluded by an allowlist, so a new page is silent by default until it has been explicitly judged safe. 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 browser keeps 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.
Finally, if you start a Google Takeout export from our upload page, your browser records a single timestamp noting that you did — nothing else. Its only purpose is that when you come back with the file, possibly days later, the page can open on the right step instead of starting you over. It contains no account name, no export, and no watch data; it is stored on your device only, is never sent to us, logged, or counted, and it is deleted the moment you upload a history or after two weeks, whichever comes first. The optional calendar reminder we offer at that step is likewise built entirely in your browser and contains only a date and a link to our upload page — we never see it, and it is not an email reminder because we do not hold your address.
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.