Privacy Policy

Overview

Simple Capture is a browser extension that captures content from your active browser tab in four modes (audio, video, transcript, screenshot) and saves the result as a file to your computer. It is designed with privacy as a core principle.

Data Collection

Simple Capture does not collect, store, transmit, or share any personal data.

• No personal information is collected.
• No analytics or tracking of any kind inside the extension.
• All capture, encoding, and stitching happens entirely on your device.
• No captured content is sent to any server.

What Each Mode Captures

• Audio uses Chrome’s tabCapture API to access the active tab’s audio stream when you click Start. The stream is encoded to MP3 in real time and saved to your Downloads folder when you click Stop.
• Video uses tabCapture to record the active tab’s video and audio. The stream is encoded to WebM (free) or MP4 (Pro) locally and saved to your Downloads folder.
• Transcript reads existing captions or transcript text from the page (for example, YouTube captions via the public InnerTube endpoint, the captions of a video player on the page, or visible transcript blocks elsewhere). To read a video player’s captions it may re-request the caption file that player already loaded, from the same site. No audio is captured and no speech recognition is performed.
• Screenshot uses chrome.tabs.captureVisibleTab to take pictures of the visible portion of the active tab and stitches them into a full-page PNG locally.

Capture only occurs while you are actively recording or after you explicitly click the capture button. The extension cannot and does not capture in the background or without your explicit action.

Permissions

The extension requests the following permissions, each used solely for its core functionality:

• tabCapture. To access the audio and video stream from the active tab (audio and video modes).
• activeTab. To identify which tab to capture from.
• offscreen. To create a background document for media encoding (required by Chrome’s Manifest V3 architecture).
• downloads. To save the captured file to your Downloads folder.
• storage. To remember whether a capture is in progress (session storage, cleared when the browser closes) and your preferred settings such as quality, how many free full-page screenshots you have used today, and Pro license key (local storage). No personal data is stored.
• sidePanel. To open the extension in Chrome’s side panel when you click the expand icon in the popup.
• scripting. To inject the transcript-extraction script into the active tab (transcript mode), and to scroll the page for a full-page screenshot (screenshot mode).
• host_permissions: <all_urls>. To run the transcript-extraction script on whatever page you are viewing, including video players embedded from another site, and to read the caption file such a player already loaded. The script reads page content only when you click the extension; it does not run in the background.

Pro License Activation

If you purchase the optional Pro upgrade, the following user-initiated network requests are made:

• Clicking “Upgrade to Pro” opens a Stripe checkout page in a new browser tab (outside the extension). Payment data is handled entirely by Stripe and never passes through the extension.
• Entering a license key sends it to simple-capture.com for one-time validation. Only the license key string is transmitted; no other data.
• The “Lost your key?” feature opens the Simple Capture website in a new tab, on a page that says how to get your key back by email. This happens on the website, not within the extension.

Apart from fetching captions in transcript mode, described above, no network requests are made during capture.

Third-Party Services

Encoding is performed locally using open-source libraries bundled with the extension (lamejs for MP3, mp4-muxer for MP4, and standard browser APIs). No third-party analytics, tracking, or advertising SDKs are included in the extension. The only external service interaction is the optional Pro license validation described above and, in transcript mode, requests to YouTube’s public InnerTube endpoint, or to the site hosting a video player’s caption file, to fetch captions for the page you are viewing.

Feedback

The Feedback link in the extension and on this site, and the page that opens if you uninstall the extension, lead to a Google Form. It is optional. Nothing is sent unless you type something and submit it. Google hosts the form, and its own privacy policy applies to what you submit.

This Website

This website, not the extension, uses Google Analytics (placed by Google Site Kit) and Cloudflare Web Analytics to count visits and clicks on the install and buy links. Google Analytics sets cookies in your browser (named _ga and _ga_ followed by an ID) to tell visits apart. Neither service receives anything from the extension.

Changes to This Policy

If this privacy policy is updated, the changes will be reflected on this page.

Contact

If you have questions about this privacy policy, please email support@simple-capture.com.