Privacy
Cutscene records on your machine and keeps the recording on your machine. Nothing is uploaded, and no account exists to upload it to, unless you explicitly create a share link against a server you have configured yourself.
What the extension records
While you are recording a tab, and only then, Cutscene captures:
- The video of the tab you selected, and your microphone if you turned it on.
- Your interactions with that tab: clicks, typing, the Enter key, scrolling, viewport changes and navigation.
- The structure of the elements you interacted with: their role, accessible name, test ids, ranked selectors and on-screen bounds.
- The URL, origin and route of the recorded page.
It does not record other tabs, your browsing history, your bookmarks, your files, or anything at all while no recording is running.
Screen recordings are different. If you choose to record a screen or window instead of a tab, Chrome shows its own share picker and Cutscene captures exactly what you grant there — which can include windows from applications that are not Chrome, and anything on a second monitor. A screen recording has no page structure, so it captures none of the element data or the URL listed above, and the blur-selector field does not apply and is disabled. Everything else on this page still holds: it is captured only while you are recording, and nothing leaves your machine until you choose to share it.
What is deliberately not recorded
- Values typed into inputs are masked when the event is built, before it is written to disk. There is no code path that writes a raw input value and strips it afterwards.
- Password fields and elements marked
[data-sensitive]or[data-private]are masked in the same way. - Network requests and responses are not captured.
What blur does, and does not do
A CSS selector you list in the extension popup is tracked through the recording and
blurred in the editor's preview and in every file it exports: the MP4, the GIF, the
interactive demo and the screenshots. It is not painted onto the
recorded video. media.webm keeps the original pixels, because the blur is
an edit you can move, disable or retarget afterwards.
This matters in one place. Create share link uploads the original recording, not an export, so anyone holding that link sees the unblurred video. If a recording contains something that must not be seen, export the MP4 and share that file, or delete the share link with its owner token.
Where a recording is stored
In two places on your own computer: your browser's local IndexedDB storage, which the extension's editor reads directly, and your Downloads folder. The extension keeps the five most recent recordings and deletes older ones. You can delete any of them from the editor at any time. Uninstalling the extension removes its stored recordings.
What leaves your machine
By default, nothing. The editor renders video, GIFs, documentation and interactive demos locally in your browser.
If you choose Create share link and enter the address of a Cutscene share server, the editor uploads that recording's three files — the video, the event trace and the recording metadata — to the server at that address. A share link is a public, unguessable URL: anyone holding it can view that recording.
What the server does with an upload is fixed by the software, whether you run it yourself or use a hosted instance: a recording is kept for a retention window (30 days by default) and then deleted automatically. The person who created it can delete it at any time with their owner token, and its view count is recorded. Anyone viewing a share page can report it, and an operator can take a reported recording down. Uploads are limited to those three files, checked on the way in and the way out, so a share server cannot be used as general file hosting. Nothing in an upload is sold or used for any purpose other than serving the link you created.
Permissions, and why each exists
| Permission | Why |
|---|---|
tabCapture, audioCapture | Record the video of the tab you chose, and your microphone if you enabled it. |
activeTab | Reach the tab you asked to record, for that recording only. |
offscreen | Encode the recording in a background document, so it survives the popup closing. |
storage | Remember an in-progress recording across a service worker restart. |
downloads | Save the finished recording to your Downloads folder. |
| Content script on http and https pages | Reads the structure of the page you are recording. It cannot know in advance which page you will choose. It reads structure only while a recording is active on that tab. |
Cutscene requests no access to all sites, and no permission to read any tab's URL or title. It makes no cross-origin request of any kind: the editor, its typeface and its video encoder are all served from the extension itself.
Analytics
The extension and the editor contain no analytics, no telemetry, no error reporting and no cookies. A share server has no user accounts and no logins either: access is by unguessable link and per-recording tokens, and the only record it keeps of a viewer is an anonymous view count.
This website
These pages are static files. They set no cookies and run no analytics. They load a typeface from Google Fonts, which means Google receives the request for that file, including your IP address. The hosting provider keeps ordinary server logs.
Children
Cutscene is a developer tool and is not directed at children.
Changes and contact
Material changes to this page will be noted in the repository's history, which is public. Questions and corrections: github.com/macayu17/Cutscene/issues.