USkim lets you view a summary of public YouTube video comments and ask questions about what viewers are saying, using an interactive chat interface. USkim can also be installed to your phone's home screen for an app-like experience.
When you submit a YouTube video URL, we access publicly available data via the YouTube Data API, including comment text, public commenter display names, comment like counts and timestamps, and basic video metadata (title, video ID, and whether the video's creator has allowed embedded playback).
We do not access your YouTube account, login credentials, watch history, or any private data. We do not require you to sign in with a Google account to use this app.
USkim can optionally show the actual YouTube video player directly on the page ("Watch here"), when the video's creator has allowed it. This uses YouTube's own official embedded player.
Important: when you use this feature, you are interacting directly with YouTube's player, which operates under YouTube's own Privacy Policy and Terms of Service — separate from this one. YouTube's embedded player may set its own cookies or collect its own data according to its own policies, independent of anything USkim itself does. We do not control or have visibility into that data collection.
If you install USkim to your phone's home screen, your phone's operating system may offer USkim as a destination when you tap "Share" from within the YouTube app. When you do this, the shared link (and sometimes an accompanying title/text) passes through our server briefly to extract the video link and start a lookup — this is not stored beyond the same temporary handling already described for any other video lookup (Section 3).
USkim remembers a small number of preferences directly on your device (using your browser's local storage), such as whether you've dismissed the "install to home screen" prompt or whether you last chose to show the embedded video player. These preferences stay on your device and are never sent to or stored on our servers.
USkim offers an optional feature: signing in with your Google account to see a quick-pick list of recent videos from channels you're subscribed to, so you don't always need to paste a link manually. You never have to use this — everything else in USkim works fully without signing in at all.
What we access if you choose to sign in: read-only access to your YouTube subscriptions list (which channels you follow) and basic public information about those channels' recent uploads. We request the minimum access needed for this feature and nothing more — we cannot see your Google password, cannot post, comment, or change anything on your YouTube account, and cannot access other Google services (Gmail, Drive, etc.).
How your sign-in is stored: when you sign in, Google gives us a token proving you've granted this permission. That token is stored securely on our server only — it is never sent to or stored in your browser, and never visible to anyone browsing the app. Your browser only holds a random, anonymous session identifier, which is meaningless without our server-side records.
How to revoke access: you can disconnect USkim from your Google account at any time, independent of anything we do on our end, directly through your Google Account's own security settings (myaccount.google.com → Security → Third-party apps with account access). You can also sign out directly within USkim, which removes our stored session, though revoking through Google is the more complete option since it also tells Google to invalidate the underlying permission.
Data retention for sign-in: your session (and the token it relies on) is automatically deleted after 30 days of inactivity, or immediately if you sign out. We do not retain your subscriptions list or feed data beyond what's needed to display it to you in the moment — it is not stored longer-term or used for any purpose beyond showing you that quick-pick list.
To generate thematic summaries and sentiment overviews of a video's comments, and to power the chat feature, which answers your questions using the cached comment data for that video only. We do not use comment data for advertising, profiling, or any purpose beyond the features described above.
We do not sell or share comment data with third parties. We send comment text to a third-party AI provider (Anthropic) solely to generate summaries and chat responses. This data is not used to train third-party models beyond what their own terms permit, and is not retained by us beyond the caching window described above.
You can request that we delete any cached data associated with a video you searched by contacting us at the address below. Because we do not require account creation, we do not retain any data tied to your personal identity — only the video and comment data itself. If you are a commenter whose public YouTube comment appears in our cache and you want it removed, contact us and we will delete it within 7 days.
This app is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect data from children. If a video is flagged by YouTube as "Made for Kids," we do not process its comments through this app.
We may update this policy as the app develops. Continued use after changes means you accept the updated policy.
Questions about this policy or data requests: uskiminfo@gmail.com