Local Reader privacy policy

For Local Reader 0.2.1 and later · Last updated 30 October 2026

Local Reader is a Chrome extension that turns text into speech on your own computer. The text you have it read (webpages, PDFs, scanned pages and pasted text) is never sent to anyone. Local Reader has no accounts, advertising, analytics, telemetry or crash reporting, and it collects nothing.

What connects to the internet, and why

Local Reader makes only these connections:

Downloading the speech model and voices from Hugging Face (huggingface.co and its download hosts under hf.co).
- When: the first time speech is needed, and again if Chrome's stored copy is cleared.
- What is downloaded: the Kokoro-82M model, its configuration and tokenizer, and voice files. They are pinned to one fixed published version of the model repository.
- What Hugging Face can see: your IP address, the time, and which files were fetched. The model variant shows whether your graphics card or your processor is used, and the voice files show which voices you used. Hugging Face never receives any text.
- The side panel prepares a short preview of every voice. It may therefore download all 28 English voice files (about 15 MB in total), even if you only use one.
Re-fetching a PDF that is open in a browser tab, when you ask Local Reader to open that PDF. The PDF is downloaded again from its own web address, without your cookies, as a browser would download it. Local PDF files that you open or drag in are never uploaded.

Nothing else connects to the internet. Each Local Reader page declares a Content Security Policy that enforces this:

the speech engine may connect only to Hugging Face;
the side panel and the pasted-text page may not connect anywhere.

What is stored on your computer

Everything below is stored in Chrome, on this computer only, in storage that belongs to the extension.

What	Why	How long
Your settings (voice, speed, engine, floating player on/off)	To remember your choices	Until you remove Local Reader
Bookmarks: page title, web address, the bookmarked sentence	So you can carry on reading later	Until you delete the bookmark or remove Local Reader
Pasted texts (the newest 30, plus any you have bookmarked)	So a bookmark in a pasted text keeps working	Until you remove Local Reader
The speech model, voices and voice previews	So the download happens only once	Until Chrome clears its cache, or you remove Local Reader
The current reading session (recent sentences, titles)	To show what is being read	Until Chrome closes
A finished audio export waiting to be saved	To hand it to Chrome's download	Until it is saved. If the panel was closed before saving, the export is deleted the next time Local Reader starts, once it is 30 minutes old.

Websites cannot read any of this. Since version 0.2.0, the extension's storage is closed even to Local Reader's own scripts running inside web pages.

To delete it without removing Local Reader, open the side panel, then choose Saved data → Clear saved data…. This deletes your bookmarks, pasted texts, settings, the current reading session, voice previews and any unsaved audio export. Tick the box to delete the downloaded voice model as well; it downloads again the next time you listen.

Removing Local Reader at chrome://extensions deletes all of it.

What Local Reader can see

Local Reader runs a small script on every website (http and https pages), so that you can start reading wherever you Alt+click. That script:

reads the page's text only when you ask it to read;
never sends that text outside your computer.

Local Reader can also read PDF files on your computer, but only if you turn on Chrome's "Allow access to file URLs" for the extension.

The extension also knows the title and address of the tab in front, so that it can show the right controls. This stays in memory and is not recorded.

Sometimes you look at one tab while Local Reader reads another. The floating player on the tab in front then says only "Reading in another tab": it is not given the other document's title. Error messages stay inside the player, where the page cannot read them.

Changes

If a future version changes any of this, this policy and the release notes will say so before it ships.

Contact

Questions about privacy: hello@danielkloosterboer.com