Tildew privacy policy

Summary in plain words

Tildew turns the public YouTube video you are watching into a transcript and typed, timestamped notes in Chrome's side panel. To do that we need to know who you are (you sign in with Google, so we hold your Google user id, email address and display name), which video you asked about, and whether your subscription is active. The video's audio is transcribed and summarised by Google Cloud Vertex AI on our servers; Google does not use that content to train its models, and neither do we. We keep transcripts and notes against the video, so the next person who asks about the same video gets a cached answer instead of a fresh transcription. We do not read your browsing history, we run no ads inside Tildew and no third-party analytics (our own pages send a few named events to our own server, described in section 13), we never see your card details, and we do not sell your personal data. If you arrive from one of our Google ads and press Allow, we tell Google Ads when that visit leads to a Chrome Web Store click or a purchase (section 13). You can delete your account yourself at tildew.com/account/delete, or email privacy@tildew.com and we will do it.

1. Who we are

Tildew is a product of MZEUS LABS LLP, a limited liability partnership registered in India. MZEUS LABS LLP is the data controller (under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, the "data fiduciary") for the personal data described here.

For anything in this policy, write to privacy@tildew.com. That address reaches the people who can actually act on your request.

2. What Tildew does

Tildew has a single purpose: it takes the public YouTube video you are currently watching and produces a transcript and typed, timestamped notes in Chrome's side panel.

Tildew acts only on the video you explicitly ask about. It does not watch your tabs in the background, does not build a history of what you browse, and does not read the captions or transcript panel on the YouTube page. It works on public YouTube videos.

New accounts may claim a one-time allowance of free starter credits; everything beyond it is a paid subscription, billed monthly or yearly.

3. Data we collect and why

The table below is the complete list. If a kind of data is not in this table, we do not collect it.

Data	Why we have it	Legal basis (GDPR / UK GDPR)	How long we keep it
Google account identity — your Google user id, your email address, and your display name if your Google profile provides one. Collected when you sign in with Google; exchanged for a Tildew sign-in session.	To create and recognise your account, tie your subscription and usage limits to you, and let you sign in on another machine.	Your consent when you choose to sign in, and performance of our contract with you (we cannot run a paid account without an account).	While your account exists. When you delete your account we delete the name, email and picture; a record that the Google account was deleted, and when, stays (section 7).
The public video you ask about — its YouTube video id, title, channel, duration and YouTube category. The title, channel, duration and category are fetched from the YouTube Data API using the video id.	To fetch and transcribe the right video, to choose sensible note formatting for the kind of video it is, and to cache results so the same video is not processed twice.	Performance of our contract with you.	See section 7. The video-metadata cache has no automatic expiry today.
Your choices — the mode you picked and the language you asked for.	To produce the notes you actually asked for.	Performance of our contract with you.	With the job record, and in your account settings while your account exists.
Credit balance — how many credits your plan granted this period, how many are in use, and when the period renews.	To enforce your plan's limits fairly and to spot abuse.	Performance of our contract with you, and our legitimate interest in preventing abuse of the service.	While your account exists.
Subscription record — status, plan, and the end of the current billing period, received from Paddle.	To know whether your subscription is active and which plan you are on.	Performance of our contract with you, and our legal obligation to keep accounting records.	While your account exists, and afterwards where we need it for accounting and tax records.
Ad click id — only if you arrive from our Google ad and press Allow.	To tell Google Ads when an ad visit leads to a Chrome Web Store click or a purchase, so we can measure our ads.	Your consent (the Allow button). You can withdraw it at any time (section 13).	Kept in your browser up to 89 days; sent to us when you click through to the Chrome Web Store or open checkout; we keep it up to 100 days. A Web Store click record is not linked to any account. A purchase record is linked to your account through the Paddle transaction id, and is deleted when you delete your account. “Off” (section 13) stops every upload that has not happened yet and forgets the id in your browser; clearing tildew.com’s site data only forgets it in your browser. To have a record erased sooner, email privacy@tildew.com.
Server request logs — IP address, user agent and timestamps, recorded by Google Cloud Run when your browser or the extension calls our API (including the usage events tildew.com sends).	Operations and debugging, security, and rate limiting.	Our legitimate interest in keeping the service running, secure and not abused.	Under Google Cloud's logging retention for our project; these are operational logs, not a profile of you.
Transcripts and notes — produced from the video's audio.	To give you the output you asked for, and to serve the same video from cache next time.	Performance of our contract with you.	See section 7.
Extension-side data — your session and recent results, held in Chrome's session storage, keyed to your account.	To keep the side panel working while you use it, without re-fetching everything.	Performance of our contract with you.	Cleared when you sign out.
Usage events on tildew.com — the event name (for example `card_open`), the page template (for example `/library`), and at most: view (grid/list), notes mode, language, video type, filter, sort, tab, a bucketed count, purchase kind, plan, whether the browser is desktop Chrome, and whether the visit holds an allowed ad click id (a yes/no, never the id; sent with the `landing_view` and `store_click` events). Never a video, a title, what you typed, an id, your IP address or your browser details.	To see which pages and buttons are used and fix what is confusing.	Our legitimate interest in understanding and improving how the site is used.	90 days.
Free starter credits. When you claim free starter credits, we store a one-way keyed hash of your Google account identifier, the date of the claim, and whether you completed your first two summaries, so the free credits can be claimed only once per Google account. The hash contains no name or email and cannot be linked back to you without a secret key only Tildew holds. We keep it after you delete your account, for this purpose only. To limit misuse we also count claims per network for one day, using a keyed hash of your IP address that changes every day; it is deleted after two days and the IP address itself is never stored. The extension also creates a random browser ID when you claim; we keep only a keyed hash of it, so free credits can be claimed once per browser. It is used for nothing else.	To limit free starter credits to one claim per Google account, per network per day, and per browser.	Our legitimate interest in preventing abuse of a promotional offer.	See section 7.

We do not collect your browsing history, the contents of other tabs, your location, your contacts, or any special category data. We do not ask for your age, and we do not serve age-gated content.

4. How the notes are made (AI processing)

When you ask for notes, our servers fetch the public video's audio and send it to Google Cloud Vertex AI (Gemini models) to be transcribed and summarised. This happens under Google Cloud's data-processing terms. Google does not use customer data submitted to Vertex AI to train its models. We do not train any model on your content either.

Transcripts, notes and the video-type classification are stored keyed to the video, not to you. That is why a video someone has already processed comes back quickly. A separate, per-user record links your account to the job you requested, so we can show you your own history and count your usage.

There is no automated decision-making that produces legal effects or similarly significant effects on you. The AI writes notes; it does not decide anything about you.

5. Sharing and sub-processors

We do not sell personal data. We share it for advertising in one case only: ad measurement, described after the table. We do not hand it to data brokers. Apart from that, the only third parties that touch it are the service providers below, each acting on our instructions.

Provider	What it does for Tildew	What it sees
Google — Google sign-in	Verifies who you are when you sign in	Your Google user id, email address and display name
Google — Cloud Run	Runs the Tildew API	Request logs: IP address, user agent, timestamps
Google — Firestore	Stores accounts, jobs, notes, counters and subscription records	Everything in the table in section 3, except card data
Google — Cloud Storage	Stores audio and transcript artefacts during and after processing	Audio and transcript chunks
Google — Cloud Tasks	Queues the transcription and summarisation work	Job identifiers
Google — Vertex AI (Gemini)	Transcribes and summarises the video	The video's audio and the resulting text
Google — YouTube Data API	Returns the video's title, channel, duration and category	The video id we ask about
Google — YouTube image server (i.ytimg.com)	Shows the video's thumbnail on a PDF you export, and the still frame on the demo video on tildew.com. Your browser fetches it directly, the same way the YouTube page does; Tildew's servers are not involved	The video id, as part of the image address
Google — YouTube player (youtube-nocookie.com)	Plays the Tildew demo video on tildew.com. It loads only when you press play on it; before that, nothing from the player has reached your browser	That you played that video, and what YouTube's player normally records: your IP address, your browser, and storage it sets in your browser for playback
Paddle	Merchant of record: takes payment and manages your subscription	Your billing details and card data, which it collects directly. Card data never reaches Tildew. Paddle tells us your subscription status, plan and period end.
Chrome Web Store (Google)	Distributes and updates the extension	Whatever the Web Store records about installs; we do not receive your identity from it

We may also disclose data if the law requires it, or to establish or defend legal claims, or if the business is sold or merged — in which case this policy travels with the data and we will tell you.

Google Ads (ad measurement). If you arrive from one of our Google ads and press Allow, Google Ads receives, as an independent controller under Google’s own controller–controller terms, the ad click id, the time, and for a purchase its amount, currency and Paddle transaction id. It does not receive your name, email address or account id. Section 13 explains how to turn this off.

There are no advertising SDKs and no third-party trackers inside the extension.

6. International transfers

MZEUS LABS LLP is in India. Tildew runs on Google Cloud in the project tildew-prod. Our own servers and stored data sit in the asia-south1 region (Mumbai, India). Two things are not pinned to that region: the Vertex AI model that listens to the video runs on Google's global endpoint, and the YouTube Data API and Google Sign-In are global Google services.

If you are outside India, your data will be processed in India and, for the two global services above, potentially elsewhere in Google's infrastructure. Those transfers rely on Google's standard contractual terms for its cloud services, including the standard contractual clauses where they apply.

7. Retention

Here is what is true today. Some of these numbers are operational settings and may change as the product changes; when they do, we will update this page.

Your library (the transcripts and notes you paid for): kept until you delete them or delete your account.
Job records: expire automatically 30 days after the job is created.
Transcript chunks (the pieces a transcript is assembled from): expire after 7 days.
The stored transcript file itself: deleted by the storage bucket's own 180-day lifecycle.
Cached transcript versions and video-type classifications: expire after 175 days.
The finished notes cache and the video-metadata cache: no automatic expiry today. These are keyed to the video rather than to you. We may add an expiry later; if we do, this page will say so.
Spend and accounting ledgers (what a job cost us to run): 30 days.
Usage counters: kept while your account exists.
Usage events (which page, which button): 90 days. The daily copies we analyse are rebuilt from those events and deleted within three days, so no copy outlives an event by more than three days.
Subscription record: kept while your account exists, and afterwards where accounting and tax rules require it.
Purchase and refund records: eight years after the transaction, as required by Indian company and tax law.
Ad measurement records (adConversions): 100 days. A purchase record is also deleted when you delete your account. Withdrawal records (adRevocations): 100 days.
Extension-side data in Chrome's session storage: cleared when you sign out.
Server request logs: kept under Google Cloud's logging retention for our project, for operations, security and rate limiting.
Free starter-credit claim hashes (section 3): the Google-account hash and the claim date are kept even after you delete your account, for this purpose only; the daily network hash is deleted after two days; the browser-ID hash is kept for as long as it is used for this purpose.

When you delete your account (at tildew.com/account/delete, or by email):

Deleted, usually within a few minutes: your profile (name, picture, email), your library and every notes document, your transcript copies, sessions, listen windows, unused credits (including credits you bought; they are not refunded), and job records.
Kept without any link to you: the shared transcripts and notes for the videos themselves (they carry no user identity and other customers may be using them), and the spend ledgers of your past jobs with your account id removed, until their normal 30-day expiry.
Kept as financial records: purchase and refund records, for eight years as Indian company and tax law requires, used for nothing else.
Kept as a record of the deletion: that this Google account was deleted, and when — no name, email or picture — so a late payment notice for the old account can be recognised and never grants anything.

8. Security

All traffic between the extension, our API and our providers runs over TLS.
Our services run under least-privilege service accounts: each one can reach only what it needs.
No client — including the extension in your browser — can read or write our database directly. Everything goes through our API, which checks your session first.
Secrets and API keys live in Google Secret Manager, not in code or in the extension.

No system is perfectly secure, and we will not pretend otherwise. If a breach affects your personal data, we will notify you and the relevant authorities as the law requires.

9. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you have some or all of the rights below. We apply them to everyone as far as we practically can, whether or not your local law grants them.

Access — ask what we hold about you. Email privacy@tildew.com.
Rectification — ask us to correct data that is wrong. Your name and email come from your Google account, so correcting them there is usually fastest; email us if something is still wrong.
Erasure — delete your account and the data tied to it: do it yourself at tildew.com/account/delete (it asks you to sign in with Google once more), or email privacy@tildew.com from the address you signed in with. Either way we confirm when it is done.
Restriction — ask us to stop processing while a dispute is sorted out. Email us.
Portability — you can export your notes yourself using the export buttons in the extension. For anything else, email us.
Objection — object to processing we base on legitimate interests (security, abuse prevention). Email us and tell us why.
Withdraw consent — sign out in the extension. Signing out clears the local data for your account on that machine. Ad measurement is withdrawn separately, with the On/Off control in section 13 on tildew.com (signing out of the extension cannot clear the website’s storage). Withdrawing consent does not undo processing that already happened.
Complain — you can complain to your data protection supervisory authority. In the UK that is the Information Commissioner's Office; in the EU it is your national authority; in India it is the Data Protection Board of India.

We will respond to a request within the time your law allows, and within one month where GDPR or UK GDPR applies. We may need to confirm that the request really comes from you.

California (CCPA/CPRA): we do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We have not done so in the past twelve months. There is nothing to opt out of, and we will not discriminate against you for exercising any privacy right.

10. Children

Tildew is not directed at children and is not intended for anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children. Tildew is a paid product behind a Google sign-in. If you believe a child has given us personal data, email privacy@tildew.com and we will delete it.

11. Chrome permissions and the Web Store policies

Tildew's use of the data it collects complies with the Chrome Web Store User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements for data from your Google account (sign-in). Website purchase data is not Google user data. In plain terms: we collect only what the stated single purpose needs, we use it only to provide and improve that single purpose for you, we do not transfer it except to the providers listed in section 5 and where the law requires, we do not sell it, and we do not use it for advertising, creditworthiness or lending.

Tildew's single purpose is stated in section 2: turning the public YouTube video you are watching into a transcript and timestamped notes in the side panel.

The extension asks only for the permissions that purpose needs:

sidePanel — to show the notes in Chrome's side panel, which is where the product lives.
storage — to hold your session and current results in Chrome's session storage, keyed to your account, cleared on sign-out.
identity — to run the Google sign-in that creates your account.
scripting — to read the id of the video you are on so we know which video you are asking about.
Host permission for youtube.com — so the extension can work on the YouTube page you are watching, and nowhere else.
Host permission for the Tildew API — so the extension can talk to our own servers.

We do not request permissions for other sites, and the extension does not act on pages outside YouTube.

12. Payments

Paddle is the merchant of record for Tildew subscriptions. When you subscribe, Paddle collects your payment details and handles the transaction, refunds and any tax. Your card number never reaches Tildew's servers and we could not retrieve it if we wanted to.

What we receive back from Paddle is limited: whether your subscription is active, which plan you are on, and when the current period ends. Paddle processes your payment data as its own controller under its own privacy policy, so please read that too.

If you delete your Tildew account, Paddle keeps its own customer record (your email and invoices) under Paddle's policy; we keep the purchase and refund records described in section 7.

13. Cookies and tracking

The extension sets no cookies. We use no third-party analytics and load no analytics script. Our own pages send a few named events (which page, which button) to our own server so we can see what is used; they contain nothing that identifies you, and section 3 lists every field. The tildew.com website sets one cookie, __session, only after you sign in there: it keeps you signed in to your library and account pages and is used for nothing else. It is not a tracking cookie and no third party can read it. The extension keeps its own sign-in in Chrome's storage, not as a cookie. The demo video on tildew.com is a YouTube embed on its privacy-mode host (youtube-nocookie.com): it loads only if you press play, and from that point YouTube may set storage in your browser for playback, under Google's own privacy policy rather than ours.

If your browser sends Global Privacy Control, we treat it as “No”: we show no ad bar, store no ad click id and send none. If an id was already stored, we withdraw it and delete it. Do Not Track changes nothing, because we do not track you across sites.

Ad measurement

When you arrive from one of our Google ads, the address carries an ad click id (gclid, gbraid or wbraid). A small bar asks whether Tildew may tell Google Ads when that visit leads to a Chrome Web Store click or a purchase. The question is the same for every visitor, in every country.

Allow keeps the id in this browser’s own storage (the key is tw_adclick) for up to 89 days. If you click a Chrome Web Store link, or open checkout in this browser, we send the id to our server, which tells Google Ads. A newer ad visit replaces the id. Nothing is sent unless you pressed Allow.
No thanks stores nothing but your answer, and the bar stays away for 90 days.
We never send your name, email address, account id, IP address or browser details to Google Ads.
Global Privacy Control is honoured and treated as Off.

14. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, we will post the new version at this same address and update the effective date at the top. If a change is significant — new categories of data, a new purpose, a new kind of sharing — we will tell you in the extension or by email before it takes effect, where the law requires it. The date at the top always tells you which version you are reading.

15. Contact

MZEUS LABS LLP (a limited liability partnership registered in India)
Privacy contact: privacy@tildew.com

Write to us in plain language. You do not need to cite a law or use a form. Tell us what you want and which email address you signed in with, and we will take it from there.