Minutely — Privacy Policy

The short version

Minutely reads the captions your meeting is already showing, keeps the transcript on your own computer, and sends it nowhere unless you press Summarise. There is one optional switch that uses your microphone; it is off until you turn it on, and it is described below.

What It Reads

The text of the live captions displayed by Google Meet, Microsoft Teams or Zoom in your browser, together with the speaker names those clients attach to them, the meeting title and the participant list.

By default it does not listen to anything. Minutely declares no microphone permission and no tab capture permission, and captions are the only source it uses unless you switch on the one below.

The Microphone, If You Switch It On

Settings has a switch called Transcribe my microphone. It is off when you install Minutely and does nothing until you turn it on. Turned on, it does one thing: while the meeting’s captions are unreadable, and only then, it asks Chrome to transcribe your default microphone so your own half of the conversation is not lost. The moment captions come back it stops.

• It is Chrome’s speech recognition, not ours. Minutely asks for on-device recognition where Chrome offers it (Chrome 138 and later, on supported machines). Where it does not, Chrome sends that audio to Google to transcribe. That is Chrome’s own Web Speech API behaviour and it is outside our control, which is why the switch carries the same warning next to it.
• It captures you, not the room. Chrome’s speech recognition listens to the browser’s default input device and cannot be pointed at the tab’s audio, so the other participants are never transcribed this way. Lines it produces are attributed to “You”.
• No new permission is requested. It works because the meeting site you are on already has microphone access, which you granted it in order to be on the call. Minutely uses that grant on that site and cannot obtain one anywhere else.

A microphone glyph appears on the Minutely button in the meeting page for as long as it is listening, so it is never doing this out of sight.

Where It Is Kept

In chrome.storage.local, in this browser profile, on this computer.

Be aware of what that means: extension storage is not encrypted. It sits in your Chrome profile directory like any other extension’s data, and anyone with access to your logged-in computer can read it.

Transcripts are never synced. Not to Google, not between your devices, not anywhere. Chrome’s sync storage caps a single item at 8KB and a half-hour transcript is around 60KB, so this is a hard property rather than a policy.

Transcripts are deleted automatically after your retention period (90 days by default; configurable, including forever). Delete every transcript in Settings removes all of it immediately.

What Leaves Your Computer, and When

Nothing, until you press Summarise on a meeting. Then, depending on which engine is in use:

• On-device (Gemini Nano, the default). Nothing leaves your computer at all. The model runs inside Chrome.
• With your own Gemini API key. The transcript is sent to Google’s Gemini API (generativelanguage.googleapis.com) under your key and your account, governed by Google’s terms for that account, not by ours. It is not routed through any server of ours. We operate none.

Please check Google’s current data-use terms for your key before summarising other people’s meetings. Google has historically treated free-tier and paid API usage differently with respect to using submitted content to improve their products, and a meeting transcript is other people’s speech, not just your own words. This is the one part of Minutely where “it stays on your machine” stops being true, and it is your call to make with the facts in front of you.

What Is Never Sent Anywhere

Your API key (it is stored locally and sent only to Google, as the x-goog-api-key header on your own requests), your identity, any analytics, any telemetry, any crash reports. Minutely has no analytics of any kind.

Google Calendar

Minutely never writes to your calendar and never asks for calendar access. The calendar button opens Google Calendar’s own event page with the fields filled in; you press Save. Nothing is created unless you do.

Recording Other People

Keeping a written record of a meeting is recording it, whatever the source of the text. In most workplaces, and under the law in some places, the people in the room should know. Minutely shows a notice before it captures anything and displays a visible indicator while it is recording, both in the meeting page and in the side panel. Please use it openly. This is a product requirement, not legal advice; if you need legal advice, ask a lawyer.

Permissions

Minutely requests four things, and nothing that could be avoided:

• storage: holds the transcripts, the minutes, your settings and your Gemini API key, all in chrome.storage.local on this computer.
• sidePanel: Minutely’s entire interface is a Chrome side panel, deliberately rather than a panel injected into the meeting page — an injected panel disappears the moment anyone presents, and is captured when the user shares that tab, which would broadcast a private transcript to the room.
• unlimitedStorage: a long call can exceed the default quota mid-meeting, and a quota rejection does not truncate, it rejects silently. This permission adds no warning to the install dialog and prevents silent data loss.
• https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/*: the only network destination Minutely can reach, used solely for the Gemini API call described above. Not contacted at all when the on-device model is used.

Alongside those, Minutely declares content scripts for the three meeting sites it supports — meet.google.com, teams.microsoft.com / teams.live.com, and *.zoom.us/wc/*. Those scripts read caption text and participant names from the page you are already on, and send nothing to any network destination.

Minutely deliberately does not request tabs, activeTab, scripting, downloads, audioCapture, tabCapture, identity, calendar OAuth scopes, or any other host permission.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this privacy policy from time to time. We will notify you of any changes by posting the new policy on this page and updating the “Last Updated” date.

Contact Us

Questions about this policy? Reach us at spark-apps.co.