Hearald

Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2 September 2026

What Hearald does with the pages you read

To read a page aloud, Hearald reads the text of that page inside your browser and converts it to speech using a voice model that is bundled with the extension and runs locally. The page text is held in memory for as long as it is being read and is never written to a server, never logged, and never sent anywhere.

What Hearald stores on your device

Two things are saved locally so the extension behaves the way you left it:

• Your settings — chosen voice, reading speed, button position, highlight and auto-scroll preferences, and the sample sentence on the settings page. These are saved with Chrome's own settings storage, which means Chrome may sync them between your signed-in Chrome profiles. That syncing is performed by Chrome, not by us, and we cannot see it.
• Your place in a page — when you read a page, Hearald records the address of that page and which sentence you had reached, so it can offer to resume next time. This is written to Chrome's local storage on your machine only. It is never synced and never transmitted. It is deleted when you finish a page, and you can clear all of it at any time by removing the extension.
• Your Hearald Pro licence key — only if you have bought Pro and entered one. It is kept in Chrome's local storage on your machine, is never synced, and can be removed at any time from the settings page.

What Hearald never does

Practice	Hearald
Collect or transmit the content of pages you read	Never
Collect or transmit your browsing history	Never
Require an account, email address, or sign-in	Never
Use analytics, telemetry, or crash reporting	Never
Use cookies or advertising identifiers	Never
Sell or share data with third parties	Never
Use your data for creditworthiness or lending	Never
Use your data to train any model	Never

Network activity

The voice model and all 28 voices ship inside the extension package, so ordinary use of Hearald requires no network connection at all — it works on a plane. Hearald makes no requests to any server we operate, and there is no server to make them to.

Hearald Pro and payment

Hearald Pro is a one-time purchase. It is sold through Gumroad, which handles the payment. We never see or store your card details, and Hearald contains no payment code of any kind.

When you buy Pro, Gumroad issues you a licence key. Entering that key in Hearald's settings sends the key alone to api.gumroad.com so it can confirm the purchase is real. That request contains no page content, no browsing history, no email address and nothing about what you read. It is repeated roughly once a month to notice refunds. If that check cannot be completed — you are offline, or Gumroad is down — Pro stays switched on; it is never used as a reason to lock you out of something you paid for.

Reading never touches any of this. The licence code is not part of the reader, and a free user's copy of Hearald makes no network requests at all. Your purchase is governed by Gumroad's own privacy policy for anything that happens on their side.

Permissions, and why each one exists

Since version 0.4.0, Hearald asks for no access to any website when you install it. It reads a page only when you ask it to — by clicking the Hearald icon, pressing Alt+R, or choosing Hearald from the right-click menu. At that moment Chrome grants access to that one tab, and the access ends when you leave the page. Hearald reads the text of the page you’re on so it can speak it. Nothing you read is stored or sent anywhere.

• Active tab and scripting — to read the text of the page you asked Hearald to read, and to place the play button, highlight and reading controls on it.
• Access to all sites (optional, off by default) — the setting “Show the Hearald button on every page” asks Chrome for access to all websites, so the play button and hover-to-play appear on pages before you click, and Hearald Pro’s Play All can move through your reading list on its own. Chrome asks you before granting it. It is used only to read page text for speech, and you can turn it off again at any time from Hearald’s settings.
• Storage — to save your settings and your place in a page, as described above.
• Offscreen — to generate and play the audio in a background document, so that reading continues smoothly while you scroll or switch tabs.
• Context menus — to add the "read this" and "read this PDF" entries to the right-click menu.

Reading a PDF happens the same way as reading a page: the file is opened inside the extension, its text is rebuilt in your browser, and it is read with the same local voice. The PDF is not uploaded anywhere.

Reading a Google Doc or Google Slides deck works the same way. Because Google draws those documents as pictures rather than text, Hearald fetches the document’s plain-text copy from Google using your own signed-in session, inside your browser, and reads it in Hearald’s own view. Only documents you already have permission to open can be read. The text is held briefly in Chrome’s session storage (memory only, cleared when Chrome closes) while the reading view opens, then deleted. It is never sent to us or to anyone else.

Children

Hearald is a general-purpose reading tool and is not directed at children under 13. Because it collects no data whatsoever, it holds no information about any user, of any age.

Changes to this policy

If Hearald ever changes what it stores or begins transmitting anything, this page will be updated before that version ships, and the change will be described in the extension's release notes. The date at the top of this page shows the current version.

Contact

Questions about privacy in Hearald can be sent to fatherearth2011@gmail.com.