Privacy Policy
Effective Date: August 2026
Audister is built on a single core promise: Your reading is your private business.
1. 100% On-Device Processing
All article extraction, page analysis, and text-to-speech generation are performed locally on your computer using on-device deep learning (Kokoro-82M). Your articles, PDFs, and reading history never leave your machine and are never transmitted to any remote servers.
2. No Account & No Tracking
Audister requires no sign-up, no login, and no user account. We collect zero personal identifiers, zero telemetry, and zero reading analytics.
When you remove Audister, Chrome opens a short, optional survey at audister.app/uninstall. That is an ordinary page load of our website, and the only thing the extension adds to the address is its version number. The page also lists a few coarse details from your own install: which voice engine you were using, a rough range for how much natural voice you had used, and roughly how many reads you had started and when. They are kept in the part of the address after the # sign, which browsers never send to a server, and they are shown in the form as items you can remove one by one. What is left goes to us with your answers only when you press Send. Answers are delivered to us by the FormSubmit.co form service, the same one our feedback form uses. Closing the page shares nothing.
3. Payment & Billing Isolation
License verification and payment processing for the one-time $19 Pro upgrade are handled via ExtensionPay (Stripe). ExtensionPay scripts execute strictly on extensionpay.com checkout pages. License checks pass only an anonymous token and do not transmit article text or reading data.
4. Optional Cloud Integration (BYO Keys)
If you choose to enable optional third-party cloud voice providers (OpenAI, Google Cloud, ElevenLabs), text is sent directly from your browser to your selected API provider using your personal API key. Usage is subject to the privacy policy of your selected provider.
5. What Is Stored On Your Device
Everything listed here is written to your browser's local extension storage on your own machine. None of it is transmitted to us, and none of it is synced to your other devices.
- Your settings: chosen engine and voice, playback speed, and reading preferences.
- Your monthly free-tier character count, the day you installed, how many reads you have started and when the last one began, and the cached result of a Pro licence check.
- For a PDF opened in the reader: its title, the address it came from, and when you opened it, so the reader can return you to where you stopped. Only the five most recent are kept.
- Any optional cloud API key you enter, so you do not have to retype it. Keys are stored locally only, are never synced, and are sent only to the provider you selected.
6. Extension Permissions
Audister requests minimal permissions required for operation:
activeTab/scripting: To extract text from the webpage you choose to read.storage: To save your voice and reading preferences locally.offscreen: To execute local WebAssembly/WebGPU speech synthesis off the main UI thread.contextMenus: To add the right-click reading commands.alarms: To refresh the cached licence status, and to release memory after a period of inactivity.file:///*(optional, and not granted when you install): Requested only at the moment you open a local PDF in the reader, so that one file can be read from disk. You can decline, and Chrome additionally requires "Allow access to file URLs" to be switched on by hand.
7. Contact Us
If you have any questions about our privacy practices, email us directly at support@audister.app.