Why We Don't Sell Your YouTube History

A few months after I started logging my own YouTube sessions, a friend asked whether I was worried about storing that data in the cloud. It was a fair question. Watch history is not neutral. It surfaces the topics you are anxious about, the things you search at 11 pm, the channels you visit when you are bored versus the ones you visit when you are genuinely curious. Handing that to a third party is a real act of trust, and most people do not read far enough into a privacy policy to know what they are agreeing to.

So let me say it plainly: the data you generate using the extension stays in your account. We do not sell it. We do not anonymise it and sell the anonymised version. We do not use it for ad targeting, pass it to data brokers, or train models on it.

How the business actually works

Gazenest is subscription-funded. Solo, Plus, Family, and Pro plans, ranging from a few euros per month up to the Pro tier. That is the entire revenue model. No advertising layer, no data partnerships, no affiliate arrangements with anyone who would benefit from knowing what you watch.

This matters for a structural reason, not just a moral one. Companies that make money from data are rewarded when you spend more time in their product, because more time means more data to sell. The incentive is to make the product sticky, not helpful. A subscription flips that: I get paid when the product is worth paying for, which means when it actually changes something about how you use YouTube.

What the extension collects, and why

The extension records which sessions were intentional (you opened Intent Mode and declared a purpose before watching) and which were not. From that, it computes a Self-Control score, a Clarity score reflecting how well you followed through on your stated intention, and a Diversity score based on content variety. None of that is useful to anyone except you. There is no profile to sell, no inference to monetise.

Personally identifiable fields, your email address and IP, are encrypted with AES-256-GCM at rest. Behavioural scores are computed server-side and displayed on your dashboard. If you delete your account, everything goes: sessions, scores, devices, sync logs, encryption keys. After a 30-day grace period, there is nothing left to recover.

One honest caveat: Gazenest does not solve the question of whether you trust any cloud service at all. If your threat model requires that your viewing history never leave your own machine, a self-hosted solution or no solution is the right answer, and that is a legitimate choice.

Exporting before you go

Before deleting, you can export everything from the dashboard settings page. The export includes the full session history, scores, and device records. I built that because I would want it myself, not because any regulation required it.

The practical upshot: the business model and the privacy story are the same story. Subscriptions fund the product. Your data funds nothing.