Privacy Policy

VideoKidnapper is a desktop application that runs entirely on your own machine. It does not collect, store, or transmit any personal data, usage analytics, telemetry, or crash reports to the project maintainer or to any third party.

What stays local

Every piece of data the app touches stays on your computer:

• Videos you open, trim, or export.
• URLs you paste and the corresponding downloaded files (saved wherever you configure — defaults to your Downloads folder).
• Text captions, image overlays, crops, and every other edit you make inside the app.
• Your settings file at ~/.videokidnapper_settings.json (output folder, theme, recent-export history).
• Cookie data the app reads from your browser to download private / age-gated videos you have access to. This is read locally by yt-dlp and is never transmitted anywhere except to the video host you are downloading from, using your existing session.

Nothing on this list leaves your computer at any point.

Network activity

VideoKidnapper makes outbound connections only to servers you direct it to, or to well-known public services required for a core feature:

• User-initiated downloads. When you paste a URL and click Download, the app (via yt-dlp) contacts the host of that URL directly. No VideoKidnapper server sits in the middle — none exists.
• Update check. Once per launch, the app makes an anonymous query to the public GitHub API to see whether a newer version exists. No identifying information is sent, and the check can be disabled in the Setup dialog.
• Optional AI captions (opt-in, off by default). If you install the optional faster-whisper extra, the speech model is downloaded from Hugging Face on first use and cached. Your audio never leaves your computer — transcription runs entirely offline.

No other network activity exists in the codebase — it's open source, so you can audit this yourself.

No account system, no logins, no cloud

VideoKidnapper has no user accounts, no registration, no data sync, and no backend server that processes user data.

Third-party software

The app bundles or optionally depends on open-source projects — ffmpeg, yt-dlp, customtkinter, Pillow, and others — each with its own upstream license. None of them phone home in the way VideoKidnapper uses them.

Changes to this policy

If the app's data-handling posture ever changes (for example, opt-in crash reporting in some future release), this page and the repository copy of this policy will be updated in the same release, with a changelog entry calling it out.

Contact

Questions or concerns can be filed as a GitHub issue.