Privacy policy

What Shortless does

Shortless is a Safari extension for iPhone and iPad, with desktop extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari, that hides YouTube Shorts and Playables on youtube.com, with optional community-post filtering. These filters run in your browser. Slop patrol is a separate, optional feature that uses Jev to assess video metadata in the cloud.

Data stored on your device

Your settings (which surfaces to hide), your dodge counters, and your streak are stored locally on your device. They never leave it. Deleting the app or uninstalling the desktop extension removes its local data. Desktop browser profiles do not sync with the iOS app or other browsers.

Optional anonymous reports on iPhone and iPad

YouTube changes its page markup from time to time, and occasionally a Short slips through. If, and only if, you opt in, Shortless can send an anonymous report to help fix it. A report contains:

• the YouTube surface where hiding failed,
• the HTML tag, class names and attribute names of the item that slipped through, never their values or text,
• a hash of that structure to deduplicate reports,
• the selector, app and iOS versions, and the detection time.

A report never contains what you watched or searched, video titles or IDs, page URLs, or account information. Reports go to Apple’s CloudKit public database to help repair the filters. If you don’t opt in to automatic reporting, you can review the exact payload of each report before deciding to send or discard it.

Optional Slop patrol

Slop patrol is off by default. No account or extra setup is needed. After you opt in with Enable patrol, the following visible video metadata goes to Shortless’s hosted service:

• video IDs and titles,
• channel names and description snippets,
• the page language.

Our Cloudflare-hosted service forwards the metadata text to TypeSafe’s Jev model. This can reveal videos you encounter, even without playing them. Patrol assesses low-value signals in metadata; it does not watch videos or verify AI authorship.

Assessments remain review-only until you enable Auto-hide. That option hides only strong low-value matches with enough evidence; uncertain videos remain visible. Review bounced videos on Home in the iOS app, or Recent checks in the desktop extension, and select Always show to restore any video when you return to YouTube.

No cookies, account details, search queries, full pages, transcripts, audio or video are sent. Turning patrol off stops new requests; a request already sent may finish. Cloudflare, our hosting provider, receives the network information needed to serve requests, including the source IP address. The classifier converts IP addresses to keyed rate-limit values that change every minute. These values are never stored with video metadata, verdicts or telemetry. Cached assessments are shared by video metadata, without an account or device association. Neither IP addresses nor limiter keys are written to the verdict cache or shared capacity counter. When the daily inference cap is reached, new videos remain visible.

Patrol storage and your choices

If a visible card has no description snippet, Patrol requests its description from YouTube using the video ID, without cookies, account credentials or a referrer. YouTube receives the network information needed to serve this request. Only the bounded description and channel metadata are used; no playback is requested. If a description is still unavailable, Patrol records a local skip without sending a classifier request. The latest 200 device timing samples contain only durations and result categories. They stay on-device and are deleted when recent checks are cleared.

Our hosted service caches verdicts, video IDs and input hashes for up to seven days, without retaining titles or snippets in that cache. It requests that the inference gateway not collect request/response logs. Our hosting provider and TypeSafe process requests under their own policies; this is not a promise of zero provider retention.

On iPhone and iPad, the latest 150 assessments, confirmed hide times and your review labels stay on your device. Always show choices also stay on-device and persist when assessment history is cleared. In version 2.0, reviews are also local-only. Clear assessments in Settings → Slop patrol. Deleting the app removes its local settings and review data.

On iPhone and iPad, starting in version 2.1, tapping Useful, Low value or Unsure while Patrol is enabled sends that rating, the assessed video metadata, app version and a signed assessment receipt to our service. No additional switch is required. Earlier saved ratings are not automatically uploaded. Always show choices remain local. Feedback is queued and reviewed automatically to build a private evaluation set; it does not immediately change filtering or train the live model. Unverified or uncertain examples are quarantined rather than treated as correct labels.

Feedback records and automated reviews expire after 30 days and are removed by a daily cleanup. Pending queue deliveries expire after four days. Database recovery backups can retain deleted records for up to another 30 days. The device retries unsent ratings for up to seven days while the app is active, keeping at most 150 pending ratings. Turning Patrol off or clearing assessments deletes unsent ratings; requests already sent may finish and server records expire on the schedule above. Feedback contains no account or device identifier, and no source IP or rate-limit key is stored with it. Our hosting and inference providers still process network requests under their own policies.

You can turn patrol off independently of Shorts filtering. Turning Auto-hide off restores hidden videos when you return to YouTube. If you used an earlier private pilot, upgrading removes its saved endpoint and token automatically.

Desktop extensions

Desktop Shortless has no rating or feedback uploads, layout-drift reports or usage analytics. It stores up to 150 recent checks and 200 timing samples in the browser profile. Clear history in Recent checks deletes checks and timings while preserving Always show choices. Pending ratings and saved labels from earlier test builds are deleted on upgrade; feedback already submitted follows the retention schedule above.

Patrol is always off in private windows. If you allow the extension in private browsing, local Shorts, Playables and community-post filters still work, but private activity does not create saved checks, timing samples or counters.

Public service statistics

Our hosted service keeps aggregate request counts, completed AI-check counts, cache-hit counts, skipped and failed check counts, and total classification time. These totals are retained over time. It also keeps the latest 256 numeric timing samples per outcome (model, cache, skipped or failed), replacing older samples, to calculate median and p95 server response times. Samples contain only durations and an outcome category: no video IDs, titles, snippets, IP addresses or user identifiers. Only counts and timing summaries are published on the website. Counts include repeated checks of the same video, not unique videos or people. Average classification time covers completed AI checks, excluding cached results.

These service totals are separate from the Shorts counters and review history stored on your device. The website periodically fetches the public totals without sending video metadata. Cloudflare, our hosting provider, receives the network information needed to serve these requests.

Third parties

Optional drift reports use Apple's CloudKit. The optional Slop patrol feature uses Cloudflare and TypeSafe. Shortless does not sell your data and has no analytics SDKs or ad networks in the app.

Changes

When this policy changes, the date at the top will be updated.

Contact

Questions? Email [email protected] or find me on Twitter at @tatoalo.