Privacy policy

Vidoumo is a browser extension that adds furigana, an English line and a dictionary to Japanese captions on YouTube. It is made by Stuart Frisby. This page says what it stores, what it sends and to whom.

The short version

• Vidoumo has no accounts, no analytics and no servers of its own. I never receive your data.
• Your saved words and settings stay in your browser.
• Two outside services are used to do the job: Jisho, for dictionary entries, and, only as a last resort, Google Translate. Both are described below.
• Nothing is sold, shared for advertising or used to profile you.

What Vidoumo reads

The extension runs only on youtube.com. On a video page it reads the caption track the player has downloaded, along with the video’s ID and title and the current playback time. It uses these to draw the captions, to make the sentence you save, and to build the link back to the moment in the video. It does not read anything else on the page, and it does not run on other sites.

What is stored on your device

Vidoumo keeps the following in your browser’s extension storage (chrome.storage.local). It is not synced to an account and is not sent anywhere.

• Your settings: whether the extension is on, and whether furigana and translation are shown.
• The words you choose to save: the word, its dictionary form, reading and meaning, the caption sentence it came from, the video’s ID and title, the time in the video, and when you saved it.

You can remove a saved word from the toolbar popup at any time. Removing the extension deletes everything it stored. The CSV export is created in your browser and saved to your own device.

What is sent to other services

YouTube

To show English under the Japanese, the extension asks YouTube for the video’s English caption track, or for YouTube’s English translation of the Japanese one. It does this by repeating the request the YouTube player itself makes, from your browser to YouTube. No one else is involved.

Jisho

When you click a word, that word is sent to Jisho.org to fetch its dictionary entry. Only the word is sent, not the sentence or the video. Jisho sees the request as any website does, including your IP address, and is subject to its own terms.

Google Translate

If a video has no English subtitles and YouTube cannot supply a translation, the extension translates each caption line itself. In that case the line of caption text is sent to Google’s translation service (translate.googleapis.com). Google sees the text and your IP address, and handles them under Google’s privacy policy. This is the only case where caption text leaves your browser for a service other than YouTube. If you turn Translation off in the popup, no caption text is sent to Google.

Everything else stays local

Splitting Japanese into words and working out readings is done inside your browser, by a tokeniser (kuromoji) that ships with the extension.

The JLPT level estimate shown before the video title is worked out the same way, inside your browser, from the captions and word and kanji lists that ship with the extension. Nothing about it is sent anywhere.

What Vidoumo does not do

• It does not collect your name, email address, account details, browsing history or location.
• It does not track you, set cookies or show ads.
• It does not sell or transfer your data to anyone, other than the two requests above, which are needed for the features to work.
• It does not use or transfer data for anything unrelated to the extension’s single purpose of helping you read and learn from Japanese captions, or to decide on credit or lending.

Children

Vidoumo is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect anything from them.

Changes

If the extension changes what it stores or sends, this page will be updated first and the date above will change.

Contact

Questions about this policy: vidoumo@mrfrisby.com.