privacy

How we handle your stuff.

Last updated: June 2026

The short version

Brief runs on your machine. Your recordings, screenshots, and notes are saved locally to your own Downloads folder and are not uploaded to us. We don't run a server that receives them, and we have no account system. The only data that ever leaves your device is what you choose to hand to your own coding agent. That's the whole story; the rest is detail.

✦ Who this covers

This policy applies to the Brief browser extension (the "Extension") and this website. Brief is an open-source tool that lets you capture a bug or idea, as a screen plus voice recording, an annotated screenshot, or a typed note, and saves it locally as a "brief" for your own coding agent to turn into a tracker ticket.

✦ What Brief does and doesn't collect

We want to be precise, because local first is the entire point of the product.

We do not collect or receive:

  • ✓ Your recordings, screenshots, or typed notes. These are written to your local Downloads folder and never sent to us.
  • ✓ Your microphone audio or screen contents. We operate no server that receives them.
  • ✓ Account information. There are no accounts, logins, or profiles.
  • ✓ Analytics, tracking, advertising identifiers, or behavioral data inside the Extension.
  • ✓ Your browsing history, cookies, passwords, or page contents beyond what a brief you create explicitly captures.

What is stored, and where:

Everything a brief contains, the recording (recording.webm), sampled keyframes, any screenshot, the transcript, and captured console errors, is packaged into a zip and saved locally on your own computer, by default under ~/Downloads/brief/ (Windows: %USERPROFILE%\Downloads\brief\). These files stay on your machine until you or your agent delete them. We never see them.

✦ Speech recognition (important detail)

To turn your voice into a transcript, the Extension uses your browser's built-in speech-recognition feature (webkitSpeechRecognition). When you record with voice, your browser streams microphone audio to your browser vendor's speech-recognition service (for Chrome, this is Google) to produce text. This processing is performed by your browser, not by Brief. We never receive your audio, and we don't control or store it. It is subject to your browser vendor's own privacy policy. If you prefer not to use it, don't use the voice-recording capture (screenshots and typed notes never involve speech recognition).

✦ Console-error capture

For bug reports, Brief can include error messages from the page you're recording. This capture is narrow on purpose:

  • › It runs only while you are actively recording.
  • › It runs only on the single tab you are recording.
  • › It forwards only error messages into your local brief. No DOM contents, no cookies, no storage, no form data.

These errors are written into your local brief file alongside everything else. They are not sent to us.

✦ What leaves your device, and only when you choose

Brief itself never transmits your briefs anywhere. The one time brief data moves is when you decide to act on it: you export, copy a short prompt, and paste it into your own coding agent (for example a local agent on your machine, or a third-party agent you've chosen to use). At that point your agent reads the brief files in order to file a ticket in your tracker. What happens then is governed by the privacy policy and terms of whatever agent and tracker you use. We are not in that loop and receive nothing.

✦ Browser permissions, and why each is needed

The Extension requests only the permissions it needs to capture a brief and save it locally:

activeTabStart tab capture and inject the recording bar on the user-initiated active tab when the toolbar icon is clicked.
tabsTrack the recording tab across navigations so the brief metadata reflects the URL and title of the page the user is describing, and re-deliver messages to the recording bar after navigation.
scriptingInject the in-page recording bar and the console-error listener on the active tab during recording.
storagePersist user settings (language preference, bar position, ticket-filing guidance) and the queue of locally saved briefs awaiting export.
downloadsWrite the brief zip to your Downloads folder (~/Downloads/brief/). This is the entire output of the extension.
downloads.uiSuppress the download bubble for each brief so saving doesn't interrupt the user's flow; the recording UI already shows a save confirmation.
tabCaptureRecord the visible content of the active tab as the screen-side of the brief, together with microphone audio.
offscreenRequired by Manifest V3 to host the MediaRecorder API used to encode the captured tab plus mic stream into a webm file.
Host access (<all_urls>)So the recording bar and console-error capture work on whatever website you happen to be on. Brief never performs background activity on pages; the content script forwards only error message strings while a recording is active on that specific tab (no DOM, cookies, storage, or form data).

✦ Children

Brief is a developer tool intended for adults and is not directed to children under 13 (or the equivalent age in your jurisdiction).

✦ Changes to this policy

If Brief later offers an optional cloud-hosted version that processes briefs on a server, that service will have its own clearly stated privacy terms, and using it will be your explicit choice. It will not change how the local, open-source Extension described here works. If we update this policy, we'll revise the "last updated" date above.

✦ Contact

Questions about privacy? Email razi.fezzani@get-brief.app, or reach out via the project's GitHub: github.com/razi2001/brief.