Privacy Policy

At EARSHOT, we believe privacy is a fundamental human right. Our music recognition extension is engineered from the ground up to respect your privacy with zero tracking, zero audio retention, and zero remote data harvesting.

1. Audio Data & Ephemeral Processing

EARSHOT only captures audio when you explicitly trigger identification (by clicking the "Identify" button or pressing the Spacebar).

• Temporary Memory Only: Captured tab audio snippets (approx. 4 seconds) exist exclusively in temporary browser memory (RAM) and are deleted immediately after fingerprint generation.
• No Server Recordings: Audio is converted into a mathematical acoustic fingerprint directly on your device using client-side WebAssembly. Raw audio recordings are never stored on disk or transmitted to our servers.
• Zero Microphone Access: EARSHOT does not access your microphone or ambient room audio. It only processes audio from the specific browser tab you are playing.

2. Song History & Local Storage

Your identified songs and user preferences are stored strictly inside your browser's local storage (chrome.storage.local) on your own device. We do not maintain any user accounts, databases, or remote tracking profiles. You can clear your entire history at any time with a single click.

3. Third-Party Services

To match acoustic fingerprints and retrieve song metadata (title, artist, album art, streaming links):

• Shazam Discovery API: The anonymous cryptographic signature is submitted to Shazam's public recognition endpoint solely to fetch song metadata.
• External Links: When clicking "Spotify" or "YouTube", you are redirected to third-party streaming services subject to their respective privacy policies.

4. Permissions Justification

• tabCapture: Used solely to capture a temporary 4-second audio snippet from the active browser tab upon user request.
• activeTab: Used to detect which tab is actively playing media so audio can be recognized.
• storage: Used to store identified song history and preferences locally on your computer.
• offscreen: Required by Manifest V3 to process and resample audio without interrupting playback to your speakers.

5. Contact & Questions

If you have any questions or feedback regarding this Privacy Policy, please open an issue on the official project repository or contact the developer.