Aloud collects nothing.

In effect from 17 October 2026, for Aloud 1.0 on Firefox, Firefox for Android and Chromium browsers.

There is no Aloud server, account, analytics, telemetry, advertising or crash reporting. What you read, and everything you keep in Aloud, stays in your browser on your device. Nothing is collected, sold or shared. The developer hears from you only if you choose to send feedback.

What Aloud keeps on your device

Aloud stores these in your browser's extension storage, on your device only:

Your settings, keyboard shortcuts and colours
Highlights and notes you make, with their tags and the address of the page they belong to
Your reading queue, including the text of articles you saved to read later
Your reading history and the sentence you stopped at in each article or PDF
The video speed you chose on each site, if you use the video speed control
Marks you make on PDFs
Listening statistics: how long you listened and how many words, by day, site and language
Which voice reads each language, which languages you removed, and who reads every other language
The voice models you download

They stay until you delete them. Aloud's Library and Settings let you clear your history, statistics, reading positions and site speeds, delete notes, and remove downloaded voices. Uninstalling Aloud removes all of it. You can also export everything to a backup file, which stays wherever you save it.

Private windows. Aloud does not run in private or incognito windows: it keeps where you stopped, your history and your statistics, and a private window should leave nothing behind. Your browser does not offer to allow it there.

When Aloud uses the network

Only in these cases, and only when you start them:

Downloading a voice. Voice models, and the short preview clips of voices you have not downloaded yet, come from Hugging Face (huggingface.co and its download servers). Like any website, Hugging Face receives the technical details of the request, such as your IP address, under its own privacy policy. Aloud sends it nothing about you or what you read.
Fetching a page you asked for. When you add a link to your reading queue, or open a PDF from the web, Aloud downloads it directly from that site, as your browser would.
When you remove Aloud. Your browser opens a page on this website, aloud.souj.dev/feedback.html, asking why. Opening it sends nothing: Aloud's version and your browser's name are added after a # in its address, which browsers keep to themselves, so the page can fill them into a bug report if you write one. If you pick a reason, the website receives that reason alone.
Images in saved articles. A saved article's images, audio and video stay unloaded until you press Load images, and are then loaded from the site they came from.

Speech is made on your device. The text being read is never sent anywhere.

On Chrome and other Chromium browsers, Aloud's use of information complies with the Chrome Web Store User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Access to websites

Aloud runs on a page only when you start it there: with its button, a keyboard shortcut or the right-click menu. Or on sites you add to a list in Settings, each of which your browser asks you to approve. It does not run on every site by default.

Permissions, and why

Permission	What it is for
activeTab, scripting	Reading, highlighting or controlling video speed on the page you started Aloud on.
storage, unlimitedStorage	Keeping your settings, notes and queue, and voice models that are tens to hundreds of megabytes, on your device.
contextMenus	The right-click items: read a selection or from a point, keep a highlight, show your notes, add a page or link to your queue.
file:// (Chromium)	Reading PDFs saved on your computer, once you turn on "Allow access to file URLs".
Optional: one site, when you ask	Opening a PDF from that site, or adding a link from it to your reading queue, so Aloud can fetch it. Your browser asks you for that one site first.
Optional: sites you add	Starting the video speed control or your highlights by themselves on those sites. Asked for one site at a time.
Optional: downloads (Firefox)	Saving a PDF with your marks as a file, where the browser cannot save it in place. Asked the first time you save.

Children

Aloud collects no information from anyone, children included.

Changes

If this policy changes, the new version will be published here with a new date. A change that collects anything would need your agreement first, in Aloud itself.

Contact

Questions about this policy: souj.dev/contact.