Antechamber

Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2026-06-20

Antechamber is a browser extension that adds a moment of friction before distracting YouTube videos and rewards focused viewing. It is designed to be private by default: all classification of your videos happens on your own device, and the extension has no backend server of its own.

What the extension does on your device

To decide whether a video is "productive," a "distraction," or "neutral," the extension reads the titles and channel names of videos on the YouTube pages you visit (home, search, watch). It compares them — using a small machine-learning model that runs entirely inside your browser — against the topics, example videos, and channels you set during onboarding.

All of this stays on your computer:

Your profile (interests, productive/distraction topics, example ratings)
Your settings and your stats (points, streaks)
Per-video and per-channel classification results (a local cache)
The machine-learning model files

This data is stored locally using the browser's storage and IndexedDB APIs. It is never transmitted to us or to any third party, and we operate no servers that receive your data.

Data we collect

None. Antechamber does not collect, transmit, sell, or share any personal information or browsing activity. There is no analytics, no tracking, and no remote logging.

Network connections the extension makes

One-time model download. The first time it runs, the extension downloads its machine-learning model (~20 MB) from the Hugging Face content-delivery network (huggingface.co). After that it is cached and works offline. This request contains no personal data — it only fetches the public model files.
Optional YouTube Data API (off by default). If — and only if — you choose to paste your own YouTube Data API key into the settings, the extension will send video IDs to Google's YouTube Data API (googleapis.com) to fetch extra public metadata (category, tags, description) that improves classification accuracy. This uses your API key and is governed by Google's Privacy Policy. Leaving the key blank keeps the extension 100% local. You can remove the key at any time.

Permissions and why they are needed

storage / unlimitedStorage — to save your profile, settings, stats, and the cached model on your device.
Host access to youtube.com — to read video titles/channels, show badges, and display the friction gate on YouTube pages.
Host access to googleapis.com — only used for the optional YouTube Data API feature described above.
offscreen — to run the on-device machine-learning model (modern browsers cannot run this type of code in a background service worker).

Your control

All stored data lives on your device. You can erase it at any time by removing the extension or by using your browser's "clear site data" / extension-data controls. Re-running onboarding or "reset stats" clears the corresponding data.

Children's privacy

Antechamber does not knowingly collect any data from anyone, including children.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the "Last updated" date above will change accordingly.

Contact

Questions about this policy: yash.tyagi@bookswagon.in